Nymphs- S/T (Geffen, 1991)
Current Gemm price: $3.22- $80.00 (!?)
Price Sleazegrinder paid: $ 2.99, Salem Record Exchange
Price Pepsi paid: He's still paying for it, man.
Worth: All yr Velvet Underground records.
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"The good ones get wiped right off the stage" (-"Gibby Haynes Is Next" by Inger Lorre)

I dunno who first coined that perennial rock critic cliche' about how everyone who actually was there in the old days to witness a Stooges, Velvet Underground, or Sex Pistols show, or who bought those albums when they first came out, were all inspired to form their own rock groups, but it's a shame that ranter ain't earning royalties for being the one to first point that out, as often as I've read it repeated. Ranters are often in the same boat as crowd-pleasers, in that the ones who originally make the stuff up, the trail-blazers, are almost always cast aside by the ones with the money and connections, who live in big penthouses with their families on the coasts, and are better poised to make a buck offa other people's ideas, reducing real writers to mere content-providers, and exalting copy-cat clones as innovators and rewarding them with accolades and high-paying dayjobs. KISS are billionaires while Syl Sylvain drives a truck, and poor Arthur "Killer" Kane, well, all I know is he seems to get hurt alot. INGER LORRE didn't inherit her dead husband's millions after driving him to suicide, she didn't start no touring rock festival allowing her to indulge in surfing and snow-boarding in exotic locales whenever she felt the need to lay off the dope, or sell a trillion derivative, watered down albums, but she was one of the hip true rocknroll characters to leave a vivid and lasting impression upon the people in my age group whose lives she touched with her story, with her songs.

The Nymphs were bad kids from bad homes who fled their tortured childhoods in New Jersey for the palmtrees and syringe-littered gutters of Tinsel-Town, to escape some loathsome, small-town fate. A couple of 'em immediately freaked out, and fled BACK to Jersey, when they learned the hard way how the road to rock'n'roll wasn't gonna be no cake-walk, and initially seemed to mandate alot of telemarketing positions selling copy machine toner over the phone, and living in predominantly Mexican neighborhoods where gringo males with nose-rings (actually rare back then) tend to get menaced alot, and hot redheads in fishnets, are barraged daily with aggressive come-ons, and all too often, end up stripping to support their junkie boyfriends at Jumbo's Clown Room. The Nymphs replaced those yellas who mutinied with local hipsters like Rob Graves and steadily ascended to celebrity status as the dangerous darlings of the psycho-sexual L.A. club scene. Inger and the Nymphs wore bizarre, shamanic, feather headdresses and had green dreadlocks and smeared neon bodypaint on themselves like primitive religious cults; feather boas and elbow length gloves and thigh-high boots; and these elaborate, mardi gras-float-like-dresses, blasting out a swirling, tribal, psychedelic dirge-- influenced by the STOOGES, BLACK SABBATH, GUN CLUB, THE BIRTHDAY PARTY, and all that surreal California death-rock pioneered by sleazy creeps with Charles Manson obsessions like Don Bolles from the Germs, 45 Grave, Vox Pop, Celebrity Skin, and, well, yeah, pretty much every last forgotten surreal California death-rock band I'm not cool enough to remember here. Inger's lyrics all concerned mental illness and addiction and death and spirituality and serial killers and grieving. She was a little touched.
  
Though it's sometimes hard to remember now, there WAS a time when the Red Hot Chili Peppers were actually cool and didn't swan around like Brat Pack actors. Having endured all these years of "Been Caught Stealing" on the radio, it's hard to recall how spooky, dark, and exciting early Jane's Addiction were. Those inspired ten or twenty odd songs Perry Farrell penned for Triple X and "Nothing's Shocking" were revolutionary, in the context of their time, a mystical blend of Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, and..., well, every surreal California death-rock group pioneered by sleazy creeps with Charles Manson obsessions. Early Jane's Addiction seemed to advocate every low-life indulgence from voodoo to pan-sexuality, heroin, opium, madness, crystal meth, dinosaur-rock, and every shade of occultic transcendence from Santeria to garden variety Satanism and L.S.D. AND MOST IMPORTANTLY: THEY STILL WROTE GREAT SONGS.


I saw the recent Jane's reunion on the Carson Daley show and they were embarrassing. They couldn't write ten more great songs in the past ten years with millions of dollars at their disposal? With every advantage comes every distraction, I suppose, but when Perry was peaking, Inger Lorre was undisputedly his female counterpart. That sculpture on the cover of "Nothing's Shocking" could just as easily be a metaphor for Perry and Inger-the twin, flame-headed visionaries of the late eighties American underground music renaissance. 
  
The Nymphs saga's a sad one and there's a zillion great Inger Lorre stories and she's currently putting her memoirs together so you can read 'em all there, but here are the Cliff Notes: the NYMPHS were great, they tapped full into the deep majick, writing beautiful songs, majestic songs, miserable songs about their weird experiences on "The Highway" where friends die, love is lost, and ruthless social-climbing frauds steal your whole persona, consolidate power, and then, try to sabotage your career-talk about identity-theft!

They put out an EP called, "A Practical Guide To Astral Projection" that I never heard, but apparently, they covered that catchy, McCartney-penned BADFINGER classic, "Come & Get It", which is eerie in retrospect, being as how the Badfinger story's even sadder than the Nymphs'. Their live performances attracted everybody in Hollywood to see what this eccentric temptress, mad-woman Inger was gonna do next, she became a Morrisonesque side-show attraction, and in 1989, they signed to Geffen.

Drugs, deaths, crack-ups, photo-shoots and videos full of gothic imagery ensued, but when it was time to wrap up the big debut record for major release, Geffen's cash-cows, GUNS N ROSES, hijacked the Nymphs producer, Bill Price, to mix their bloated "Use Your Illusion" catastrophe ("What's so civil about war, anyway?") and for two long years, the Nymphs got to sort of fuck around and fret and argue and indulge and think too much about their impending super-stardom, because they were contractually not allowed to perform, and in the meantime, grunge was taking over, Cobain became king, Guns N Roses turned into Emerson, Lake,& Palmer, and a buncha other female vocalists like Courtney Love and Babes In Toyland and L7 kinda slid on in to Inger's space, right? So by the time THE NYMPHS debut full-length finally was mixed and released, it sounded dated, too glam-metallish to the grungesters who all had that two year gap to imitate and assimilate the whole NYMPHS formula, sound, ideas, and stage performance into their acts. Can you imagine? So by the time their record comes out, it seems as if Inger, the architect, Inger, the archetype, is the imitator. In retaliation, an emotional Inger ritualistically crushed five poppies representing her and her band-mates on Geffen exec Tom Zutaut's desk and proceeded to melodramatically urinate all over them, his desk, his phone, his framed picture of his family and his Rolodex, violating the A&R guy who'd signed Guns N Roses like she felt she'd been violated--but the guy actually cried in shock, kinda flooring sensitive Inger- when he was with that response, irrefutably humanized, and the story was widely celebrated and sensationalized by the press, and musicians worldwide rejoiced that tortured Miss Lorre had lashed back out at their common symbolic enemy. Scoring a symbolic blow for all the starving artists and exploited rock'n'rollers everywhere. The karmic problem of lashing out at symbols is that people aren't just symbols, they're people, too. Inger put this together and her guilt or regret or whatever only added to her baggage and confusion.
  
When at last, the album came out, for some of us more straight-forward, burger and fries-kinda rocknrollers, it took some getting used to, cos not everyone's a fan of the druggy effects-wanking grunge style her guitarists helped reinvent, but ultimately, the songs were so brilliant that any complaints about the production became moot upon repeated listenings-it grew on ya, like mold. "Wasting My Days", "Sad & Damned", "Death Of A Scenester", "Heaven", and "Imitating Angels" captured all the ennui and rage and madness and confusion and angst of the day-and the years since have been really kind to this record. Inger was like P.J. Harvey trapped in a model's body, genuinely anguished like her nemesis Courtney Love's husband(s), but they ended up sharing tabloid space with England's MANIC ST. PREACHERS as minor cult-icons, "the chick who peed on her record exec's desk", instead of becoming super-stars. Iggy Pop sang on "Supersonic", they toured with Soul Asylum and Bauhaus crooner Peter Murphy, but when the label dropped the ball, the NYMPHS just never got adequately promoted to the mainstream and Courtney got to be the girl with the most cake. The Nymphs broke-up, of course. Rob Graves died. Inger, too, finally fled back to Jersey, had nervous break-downs, did time in psych-wards, went into recovery, lived for a time with seraph-throated fallen singer, Jeff Buckley, attended artschool, released a killer single on Sympathy with another band called Motel Shoot-Out, released another great but characteristically dark and obsessed solo album on Triple X co-starring Kid Congo Powers- grinding old axes and purging more demons; and nowadays, she writes books and appeared in the cult-film "Down And Out With The Dolls" alongside Lemmy from Motorhead. All the people whose real lives she affected with her tragic testaments and truth-seeking and soul-baring and fucking up and finding grace in it all, eagerly await to hear more music from this proto-grunge goddess casualty of a heartless music industry that exploits all that's holy or true and props cheap charlatans and vapid lap-dancers up to look like poets and libertines, leaving the genuine bohemians and artists to rot in the gutter. I can't hear the NYMPHS album too often cos it makes me wanna do drugs, but Inger was one of the last of the authentic poet souls my generation got to look to for inspiration. People like her, Falling James, Nick Cave, Ian Astbury, Rowland S. Howard, Andy Wood, Ritchie Manic, for some of us, they were the Velvet Underground or Stooges or Sex Pistols of our youth.

And we all started rock groups, got fucked over, went nowhere really, saw our friends die, ended up in psyche wards, went into recovery, are still looking for some kinda grace in all of it...etc., etc.

Visit the patron saint of fucked over musicians at www.ingerlorre.net  

-Pepsi Sheen. Still sad, still damned.
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