"At this feast of ours, I'm the beast of honor"

For a few short years in my teens, I wanted to be a rockstar in a band.

(I was going to put an old photo of myself playing bass in here but it turns out I don’t have any on my computer, so just imagine it)

My brother played guitar, and well, probably still plays. I don’t know if it was entirely his influence, but around 8th or 9th grade, I got a bass guitar and started taking lessons. I tried to be in some bands with other high school friends, but none of them ever made it out of my parents basement, not even the cover band with my brother himself. I took up guitar too, but just never really got good enough with either. I remember my parents cut my lessons off because they decided I wasn’t learning anymore or getting any better. From there, all I ever did was noodle around, usually at night if I couldn’t sleep, and quit altogether at some point during college.

I still have my bass though, and to this day the bass guitar is what I focus on most when listening to music.

Recently, while trying to put together a big playlist of things to listen to at my second job, I remembered an artist whose first album I bought in high school: Melissa Auf der Maur. Former bassist for Hole and Smashing Pumpkins, I read about her first self titled solo album in a magazine and fell in love. And like a lot of other things, I just kind of forgot about her until I was scrambling to make this playlist and remembered her.

Revisiting that album hit like a truck. It’s not anything groundbreaking, her lyrics are fairly simple and her singing isn’t extraordinary, but there’s this interesting balance between wonderful, heavy riffs (she had three guitarists when she played live, and they all used Gibson SG guitars) backing some very effeminate elements. She herself described it as this balance between the masculine and feminine and how she needed both in her music. There’s a primal element there that I love too, which feels a little shaped by her having dudes like Josh Homme contributing. I added songs to multiple playlists, particularly my trans playlist because…I dunno, I guess now that I’ve doubled my Estradiol it clicks with me more.

A week later, I was putting out books at the main job and pulled off the cart a newly released memoir by her called Even the Good Girls Will Cry. What a WILD coincidence, for me to revisit her work just as that’s come out! I don’t know if I’ll read it, in part because I just never listened to Hole or the Smashing Pumpkins and those two bands are what she’s most famous for. I set it back to buy, and may borrow it first just to try and see.

I also remembered she released a second album, which I’d never listened to before this week, called Out of Our Minds. It’s different. I’m not sure I like it as much as the self-titled, but there are still some good sounds and things that resonate with me and I really love and want to dance to the instrumental tracks. A short film directed by her husband Tony Stone was released alongside the album, and it’s free on Vimeo. There’s not a solid narrative there, but the visuals are lovely and the bleeding trees especially feel like they’ve imprinted onto my brain as something I won’t be able to shake any time soon. There’s also apparently a comic that ties in as well? I haven’t found anything about that yet though.

Finally, her Wikipedia article mentions her appearing in an episode of a Paramount+ show called Geddy Lee Asks: Are Bass Players Human? I found it, it’s only four short episodes long, and I watched all of them. The show is simply Geddy Lee from Rush meeting other bassists and hanging out, learning what their lives are like when they’re not playing. It’s a super cute show, and in her episode, Auf der Maur mostly just drives Lee around Hudson, New York and chatting. She’s the only female bassist he visits, and she’s the only one who had practically quit music altogether, having left the industry in 2010 to become a mother along with opening the Basilica Hudson with her husband. Lee gets her to pick the bass back up though, and the two play together in the venue space, if only for a little bit, and it’s wonderful. They discuss art and spirituality together too, and it’s delightful.

The show made me want to pick mine back up too. It probably really needs new strings. I’ll never be in a band, I’ll never record anything (though I did make a little song myself using Soundtrap a few years back for a dance I created for Pouncepunk), and it’s not like I have a lot of free time, but it would be fun to revisit, yeah?

I’ve been telling myself for years that dance was my replacement for making music, a way to still get to be on a stage and perform. Back in my wannabe rockstar phase I was more concerned about trying to dance and impress this girl I liked at the time anyways, but it’s hard to deny how nice it feels to be the one making those sounds on an instrument yourself. It feels like it’s worth revisiting, even if it is only a reminder that oh yeah, no, I should stick to visual arts.

It’s nice to find something you once loved, and to fall in love all over again with and form a deeper connection, isn’t it?