The bass is the instrument that is unnoticed but no one can live without.

As I was playing a beer bottle smashed against my guitar.

So even though I'm in the crowd choking Bruce to the ground, like this.

The best.

I got back on stage picked up a guitar and finished the song.

That is when you captured my heart.

I remember.

You said, wow. One day maybe you'll play in my band. Okay, here we go. We're gonna get to the tough. I've been waiting 25 years to ask you these questions. And here's your new book. I have lots of... Oh my goodness. Deeply penetrating questions and concerns. Your spirit is squeezed into those pages. It's the origin story of me. It is the origin story. All right. So let's, let's, an origin story. So we'll start with Nick and Linda. Oh, yes. Thank you. Take me to Nick and Linda. My parents. I love that you remember that, yeah, they're without, you know, I always say that you and Courtney were my grunge parents and my parents. I live in omnipresent shadows and my cool, Montreal parents, both music journalists, culture journalists, activists, like everything good, 70s, 60s, counter culture raised me with the idea that the golden thread to a purpose in life is just just know what you, Melissa, loves, needs to do. Never work for the man, never work for anybody else, but your vision of what the world needs. And so they're the best role models. My father died as, you know, like super long ago, but with him, I feel like the baton was further past that I, I really look up to parents, and they were the best role models for what I feel like the 21st century needs more of, which is unique individualism. Talk a bit about though your dad's sort of cult personality. Yeah, okay. Well, that's also what's interesting is because I grew up in the shadow of a larger-than-life person. My father was a journalist, turned politician, but also a man about town ran out of... A bond, a bond than life person. My father was a journalist,

turned politician,

but also a man about town ran out of a- A Von Vivon. A Von Vivon, Bouddhivadye, smoking, drinking, intense lifestyle, not unlike the people of the rock bands that you and I were not, but the people, other people in rock bands. But this might have something to do with us ending up in those- Yes, it's true. or even romantically being involved with this type of piece.

Yes, it is true, actually.

So he was both remarkable and impossible. And I grew up on the campaign trails, election nights. What was his political platform? He was proud, he was an independent, and he found it about 10 different Montreal independent movement parties.

And every time he left a party, and they'd say, Nick, you're so inconsistent, you say, the parties change, I don't change. And his thing was entirely the people have the power. Corporate government don't trust them. So he was just, he was a radical socialist who I didn't for the people. I didn't know this, right? If I did, I forgot. But I saw some illusion in doing the research to interview you about this kind of traveling with your parents, like Gypsy life. That's my mother. Yeah. Can you talk a little bit about that? So my father injected me with all the political public facing stuff and my mother injected me with the no man is ever going to define who you are

She chose to be a she got that one through. Yeah, so she

She had me as a single mother because she didn't tell my father. I was born until I was two

So they had a romantic weekend. She had what she wanted and before I met my father

I had lived in a circus caravan in Wales a a British post office truck in Morocco, and a hut in Kenya, Africa, with chimpanzees. My mother was a radical independent hippie, woman who brought her little girl on that trip. When she and I spent my second birthday, St. Patrick's Day, 1974 in Africa. In a, like, I have the photo of my birthday party in an African tribe of children in me, which is I think where I got injected with the travel nomad came from my mother and my father, public mania. He gave me that ability to walk into the spotlight with you. Um, I met you. I think you were 19 or 18.

19? Yeah, probably. I'm like, yeah, university, I think was still kind of generally in the mix. I was at university. Summer 91. What's that? Tell me about the face school. No one wanted me to go to the face school. So my father didn't love the idea. My mother was determined to go to an experimental art school where they did not have to learn English history or math until later. And the foundation was fine arts core education. And the trick, it was the 70s. It was like the LaGuardia, the fame school of New York. And it was a public school and the idea was if you get kids to do art and performance, they will like education, which was true. Because when I ended up in university, which is what I left to join rock bands, I didn't want to leave because I had been loving school my whole life. So it was an amazing art school and I went straight into university at the Fine Arts Department at Concordia, which was the... And the hope was to be a photographer or just an artist? Art, for me, it was always a multimedia photography in school, base at home in my room. So I always envisioned I'd be able to marry the two together. And I was like, oh, I could maybe be like a rock photographer as a musician, but it was to be a fine arts photographer. Like a conceptual artist with photography as my core. Yes. Yes. How did that work out? Well, I got hijacked by rock bands, and I persevered in that I was actually angry at you for convincing me that I'm planting the seed of destiny, which

was join a rock band. I loved rock music, but I did not like having to compromise my photo passion. So that turned into becoming an obsessive documentarian. Why is by the way? Turns out that of course, century later, a little bit of my photos are in the memoir, but following the memoir is my 90s rock photography museum exhibit and photo book that comes out in

September. So I took a role of film every day in whole in the smashing pumpkins. Wow. And I have 15. Did you notice me taking photos on stage? Every show. Yeah, you were busy, but I especially once I joined the pumpkins and I didn't have to play like sidekick back of vocalist, foot switches, timers. I had three cameras on every stage that we played. And I'm going to deliver you in another time and amazing like for a lot of just my, but so I took a role of film a day and now it's been a quarter century. And now my documentarian photography is actually going to get it light of day because the archive is now deemed as a time capsule, which it is. Yeah, because I know many ways that's that period is under documented. And lost in the analog digital transition. So even the people who documented it, and as you know, we came from Indy Cool and then all of a sudden

we were like, Mark Sylvester, a fancy photography. We didn't have the in-between, so there's actually an under-documented DIY vibe. And that's what I did. I recently ran into back when he was playing with Boston pops at Tanglewood and when I walked backstage, I hadn't seen him since La La and I was delivering him a little Polaroid

from my Lala Polluzif photography.

...