On July 23, 1991, Smashing Pumpkins played a small Montreal club called Les Foufounes Électriques ('The Electric Buttocks') as part of a North American tour in support of their recently-released debut album Gish. Although the price of admission on the night was just one Canadian dollar, as per the club's weekly 'Loonie Tuesdays' promotion, there were only around 20 people in attendance for what was the quartet's first gig in the city.
Nineteen-year-old Melissa Auf der Maur, a photography student at Montreal's Concordia University, worked part-time as a ticket girl at the venue, and had noticed a Sub Pop logo on the flyer for the show, the Seattle label having released Smashing Pumpkins' second single Tristessa in December 1990. Although she'd never heard of the Chicago band, she figured that any band on the label who'd released records by Mudhoney, Nirvana and Soundgarden could be worth checking out, particularly since she could get into the show for free. As the gig began, Auf der Maur loved what she heard from the "slick, romantic, magnificent" band on stage, but her room-mate's boyfriend Bruce, who'd tagged along, increasingly hated what he was seeing, and made no secret of his distaste for Billy Corgan and his band.
"Halfway through the show Bruce, who was watching next to me, was like, 'What the fuck is wrong with these guys?'" Auf der Maur recalls in a new interview conducted for Corgan's The Magnificent Others podcast. "He was like, 'They're so full of shit. They're not playing an arena, they're playing a punk club, why are they acting like this?' And I'm like, This is amazing!"
"So then he started heckling you," she reminds Corgan. "He was screaming, 'Drop the fucking attitude asshole! Drop the fucking attitude!' And I was like, Why are you doing this to these people? You had been tuning your guitar, and said, 'I'm just tuning my fucking guitar, asshole'. And then you started a song, and he threw a beer bottle."
"I was looking intently at my guitar, and as I was playing, a beer bottle smashed against my guitar," Corgan remembers. "I don't think it broke, but the beer kind of splattered. And I immediately kind of whirled up to see who threw the bottle. There's only 20 people out there, and usually when that happens, people aren't in a big hurry to let you know who threw the bottle, it just the way the crowds work. But for whatever reason, when I gave the death glare, the people around your room-mate seemed to kinda like [mimes moving away] 'Not me', and as soon as I saw the body language of people going away from Bruce...
"I threw my guitar off mid-strum," Corgan continues, "dove into the crowd, and began strangling him to the ground. And I just remember the look of terror in his eyes, because he didn't seem to want to fight, even though he had just thrown a beer bottle at me. We also had a rule in the band which is, No matter what happens, keep playing, so even though I'm in the crowd choking Bruce to the ground... [and] Bruce sort of submitted to the moment. So I was done choking, I had made my point. So then I got back on stage, picked up my guitar, and finished the song."
"That is when you captured my heart," says Auf der Maur with a smile.
At the end of the show, she recalls walking up to Corgan to say, "On behalf of Montreal, Canada, I apologise, and I promise to follow your band from here ’til the end of time."
Not only that, but having been invited to join Hole on Corgan's recommendation in 1994, Auf der Maur later accepted Corgan's invitation to become Smashing Pumpkins' bassist in 1999.
You can watch the rest of a fascinating conversations between the two old friends below.
Melissa Auf der Maur will release her "90s rock memoir" Even the Good Girls Will Cry via Atlantic Books on March 19.
A synopsis for the book reads: "Thanks to a thrown beer bottle and a fan letter to a P.O. box, Melissa Auf der Maur’s first band scored an opening slot for the Smashing Pumpkins in her bohemian home town, Montreal. Sensing Melissa’s talent, Billy Corgan recommended her to Courtney Love. Whisked from her local scene, Melissa joined Hole just after the deaths of Kurt Cobain and Hole’s prior bassist, Kristen Pfaff, with the just-widowed Courtney Love at the centre of it all.
"That was only the beginning of Melissa’s journey through alternative rock, a trip she undertook alongside 90s luminaries including Rufus Wainwright, Michael Stipe and her former boyfriend, Dave Grohl. Even the Good Girls Will Cry is a vivid dispatch from the last analogue decade, capturing that bygone era in all its messy, angsty glory."
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