Take Two Inger Lorre returns from the edge and/or New Jersey
with the finest album of her infamous career
By Steve Appleford (from New Times Los Angeles)

Things fall apart. That's no surprise to Miss Inger Lorre -- the notorious
Inger Lorre -- now sane and sober, closing this decade in a far different
state of mind than she began it. The era of grunge has come and gone,
as has metal, along with her unwelcome title as "the female Axl Rose."
No one needs a label like that, not even as a convenient marketing scheme.
But for a brief moment, she was headed for that kind of infamy as the glorious
banshee of the Nymphs, a band of raw power and reckless swagger, of
horror and hilarity. There are the legends, all true: the incendiary interviews, the onstage sex
acts, the urine-soaked desk at Geffen Records. But it was also a time that saw the overdose of
her fianc?, her own descent into addiction, and the public meltdown of her band before hardly
anyone had heard the brutal roar of its music.

This is the reputation Lorre, just 29 despite it all, carries with her still -- a reputation for
dangerous madness she's unlikely to shake this lifetime. But sit with her today, fresh from
self-imposed exile to the suburbs of New Jersey, and those stories of ultimate
rock-and-roll decadence seem like cartoonish exaggeration, hardly relevant to an artist making
the most sophisticated, penetrating work of her career. She can still laugh, painfully, at the
lingering tales from her past, but ask her about the present and see her come alive. Arriving
here took the better part of seven years; after the Nymphs imploded in 1992, there had been the
occasional appearance at some Manhattan nightclub, even a high-profile gig opening for
the confounding Courtney Love. And yet it wasn't until she was actively encouraged by
such friends as Henry Rollins and the late Jeff Buckley that Lorre began seriously recording
the music that resulted in the release next month of Transcendental Medication, her first album
since abandoning the Nymphs. She has also been drug-free for the last 18 months, an
achievement largely inspired by the sudden deaths of Buckley and her father. The new songs
chart her escape from the edge, set against music true to both her punk lineage and a raw
post-punk energy. The lyrics are mostly autobiographical, struggling with loss ("You
ain't gotta pray for me/I got too many friends on the other side") and grim tales of the drug life
("Angel dust every day..."). One could hardly expect less.

"It was an extremely intense period in my life," Lorre says. "I didn't even know if I should
release this album, because it was so personal. It's a little bit intense. I'm singing about my
fianc? who died. I'm singing a song to my father, and he's dead and not coming back. I'm singing
about my dealer who got killed by the Mexican gang; got his eyes cut out. That's real. My best
friend who hung herself in high school. These things happened to me.

"Chopin's preludes were all dedicated to different women he loved and knew. And these
are dedications to my friends, so people know these people lived and existed. A lot of these
people weren't even buried; they were just cremated, they don't have tombstones. Nobody
even knows they existed. They deserve to be remembered. Not all of my friends were Jeff
Buckleys."

Lorre has been living out of a suitcase, staying in the upstairs apartment of friend Brian Grillo,
the former singer and guitarist of Extra Fancy. It's early March, and she only returned to Los
Angeles a week ago. She's been spending her nights in a small corner room overlooking the
Echo Park lake, where she keeps a framed picture of her father and the small box filled
with his ashes. The skateboard she uses to crisscross movie lots leans against a wall. And
hanging nearby is a vintage painting of a World War II G.I. -- a smiling jarhead with a black
eye.

A neighborhood coffee shop is already a regular hangout. During one recent visit there,
she met an old man named Bill, who appeared to be homeless, dressed in worn shoes and old
clothes. His white beard reminded Lorre of both Abraham Lincoln and her grandfather. In a
few days, Lorre would be tending to him like one of her stray animals back in Jersey, driving
him to Kmart for a pair of sneakers, socks, and a new shirt.

Lorre seems drawn to such elder figures; it was her great-grandmother, a woman who lived to
100, who first recognized young Inger's musical interests as a toddler in Matawan, New Jersey.
In elementary school, she learned saxophone and later viola, violin, and bass -- the latter
because it meant her mother had to drive her and the huge instrument to school every day.
Next door lived the nephew of jazzman Stan Getz, whom Lorre eventually met as a
nine-year-old.

But much of her childhood was marked by bad scenes and endless distractions. As a teen, she
hung out with older stoner kids, who fed her acid, pot, and beer around bonfires deep in the
woods. (She later recounted those days in the Nymphs' "Wasting My Days.") At age 14, she
was drugged and raped by the older brother of one of those friends.

"It made me hate men," she says. "I hated my grandfather! This sweet little 70-year-old! Even
my dad, who was like, 'You're changing, you're really getting nasty.' "

An abbreviated stint studying art at the Pratt Institute ultimately led her to Los Angeles in the
late '80s at the invitation of her boyfriend Tony Kinman (the Dils, Rank and File, Blackbird).
Once on the Hollywood club scene, she was inspired to join a band; the result, the Nymphs,
quickly found favor among critics and club crawlers. Back then, her dream was merely to
make an album for notoriously independent labels like SST or Alternative Tentacles.
Instead, the Nymphs somehow became the subject of a label frenzy that eventually landed
the band a $900,000 contract from Geffen.

Unfortunately for its members, the band was made to wait two years before recording an
album. It was during those two years that the Nymphs' luck began to change. Geffen A&R
man Tom Zutaut, who signed the band, discouraged them from playing shows, shows
that tended toward the outrageous and had built the band's following. Then, in the midst of
recording their debut, the producer was abruptly taken off the project. The reason: Axl
Rose needed him. Now. It was then that Lorre entered the darker history of rock by storming
angrily into Zutaut's office, mounting his desk with a bouquet of flowers in her hand, and
urinating on his desk.

"I would never do something like that for shock value," she says. "I don't want that kind of
publicity. I was finally making something of myself. I was just a stupid girl from New
Jersey. I had nothing. I had no hopes of ever becoming anything. I got kicked out of art
school, I got kicked out of four high schools.

"My experience with a major label was so horrible that I just didn't want to do it. It left a
disgusting taste, and it wasn't even fun at home to play music because I just kept thinking about
all the shit I went through."

Given such antagonisms, it's no small wonder The Nymphs came out at all. But by the time it
did, in late 1991, Lorre had bigger problems: her longtime boyfriend, Chris Schlosshardt
(bassist in the Sea Hags), died of a heroin overdose. The two had met at a party in
Hollywood; despite the warnings of then-Circle Jerk Chris Morris ("This guy's gonna do you
wrong, he's gonna fuck you up, he's a heroin addict"), Lorre fell in love. She, too, had begun
using; Schlosshardt's death and the travails surrounding The Nymphs put her over the edge.
In 1992, she broke up the band and moved back to New Jersey, addicted and alone.

"When Chris died, that's when I left," she says. "I know some people can go on and exploit
their music off of a death. We live in an Enquirer society where everyone wants to read
about what really happened. But for me, I stayed in bed for two years and cried, because
that was the love of my life."

Things are quieter now, if not exactly quiet. Lorre is still filled with nervous energy. A
moment ago she rushed into a Silver Lake coffee house, fresh from the Sony Studios lot
across town, where she's spent her first week in L.A. working as a wardrobe stylist for a jeans
commercial. A turquoise bandanna is wrapped around her straight red hair, cut at the jaw,
bangs trimmed precisely along her eyebrows. And when she finally sits down with a cup of
tea, she takes a seat beside her new manager, Mary Guibert -- Jeff Buckley's mother. And so
it's inevitably the subject of Buckley that often dominates the conversation.

Lorre first met Buckley about four years ago at a bar in New York. Buckley was already
enjoying some early acclaim for the epic, emotional rock of his 1994 album Grace; Lorre
was finally beginning to get over Schlosshardt's death and the Nymphs debacle. When Buckley
recognized her, he actually dropped to the floor to kiss her feet, expressing infinite admiration
for the Zutaut desk-pissing incident.

"Do you know how many people want to do that?" Lorre remembers Buckley saying. "That
was so cool!"

Four weeks after their first meeting, the two collaborated on a track for Kerouac -- Kicks
Joy Darkness, a tribute album to the Beat poet and road master released in 1997. Soon
Buckley was encouraging Lorre to record her own solo album and spent a week with her in a
New Jersey studio, playing guitar and singing background vocals. Many of those same
recordings are on Transcendental Medication, though Buckley's label, Columbia Records,
demanded -- incredibly -- that Lorre remove his parts from all but one track on the album. And it
was only Guibert's intervention that allowed Buckley to appear at all.

Lorre wipes away a tear with a paper napkin. They had been close, she says, and Lorre was
staying at his New York apartment when he left for Memphis to work on his next album. A week
later he drowned in the Mississippi.

"I was really depressed on the way over here," she says. "I don't have my friend to share it
with. That's why I choked up and was crying. I can't call and say, 'Oh my God, can you believe
we did this thing together?' "

As Lorre speaks, Guibert watches with a smile edged with grief. Her brown hair is cut short
and plastic blue stars dangle from her earlobes. She's not only acting as Lorre's manager (until a
permanent manager is found), but Guibert has also assumed a parental role in Lorre's life, her
career, her sobriety. It was her urging that brought Lorre back to Los Angeles. And the
purple van Lorre is driving was rented by Guibert. Her only experience as a talent
manager, as she readily admits, was once being married to the late Tim Buckley; Lorre and
Guibert met at a New York memorial for Jeff.

"Inger requires some hand-holding," says Guibert, a pack of slender cigarettes and a cell
phone on the table in front of her. "And she deserves to have some special attention right
now."

"Mary and I got to be really really good friends," Lorre says. "I even said jokingly, 'You
should do it.' When she offered, I jumped at the chance. She's my friend, too. It's not just about
the money. If I'm going to pay someone, I want it to be someone who really loves and cares about
me."

Things fall apart. Not 10 days after they sat together in the coffee shop, Lorre and Guibert
had an ugly falling out. Lorre has also moved out of Grillo's apartment. She accepts all this,
and even finds inspiration for new material. But she says she'll likely return to her cat and her
rabbit back in New Jersey soon. Hollywood tension hasn't waned since her last visit. And
tonight she's staying with another friend, strumming an acoustic guitar as Hollywood
Freeway traffic roars past her window. She sings: "The sun will rise and the sun will
fall/You will ask 'Is that all?'/Who's gonna sing my song when I'm gone?" The renewed
commitment to her music hasn't changed. And she's inevitably more prepared for whatever
strange challenges that appear.

"The guy I did an interview with today, he was telling his whole life story: His dad and how he
beat him, and how he didn't know if he was gay or straight, and this or that," she says. "He
actually said to me, 'I've been waiting seven years to talk to you again. I have all these
questions I want to ask you.' That really put me in a weird spot, you know? I want to be honest,
but this guy is looking to me for some answers. A dope like me?"

Transcendental Medication flies in the face of such self-deprecations. Lorre's music has
matured immeasurably in the seven years since the Nymphs, and her solo album is mostly free
from the sludgier arena-rock sound of that first album. Its songs are accomplished, and they're
delivered crisply with finesse -- from the raging two-minute punk nugget "Beautiful Dead" to the
epic torch and terror of "It Could Happen to You." The old gothic rage of the Nymphs can be
heard on "She's Not Your Friend," a cautionary tale clearly based on Cobain's addictions. A
potent four-piece (led by guitarist Keith Hartel) backs Lorre for most of it, though some of its
finest moments -- the sad and wistful "Sweet Release" -- find her picking up her acoustic
guitar. The most notable tie to the past is the label releasing it: Triple XXX, which was
originally set to issue a Nymphs album before Geffen stepped in. But the songs portray Lorre
as she is today: a songwriter and musician who has learned from her past but isn't a slave to it.

And now, tonight, she's been convinced to attend a reunion of sorts, to witness an
impossible shadow from her past. Just after midnight on a recent Wednesday, she arrives at
the home of Lonn Friend, founding editor of the now-defunct RIP magazine and later a frustrated
A&R man for Arista. Back on the night of February 28, 1992, Friend was in the crowd of
an otherwise forgotten club show in Orange County, where the Nymphs faced a crowd heavy
with rednecks shouting at Lorre to remove her shirt. And Friend was there with a video
camera.

The image on the TV is often blurred, but Lorre can be seen calling her boyfriend up to the
stage. His back is to the camera as the singer calmly pulls his black jeans down. In a moment,
she's on her knees giving him a blowjob. Live onstage. A moment that turned out to be too
much even for the rednecks who had been demanding her breasts all night. Friend's
camera is shoved, and he can be heard yelling, "I can't see!" When the camera is steadied
again, mayhem. Fights are breaking out on the floor. The crowd has gone over the edge. But
Lorre sings, as if nothing at all remarkable has just occurred.

Seeing it now, Lorre is laughing and cringing. The image on the screen is somehow distant
from the woman watching it. She offers the only possible explanation for what happened that
night: "I was on heroin!" Those were the drug days -- outrageous and memorable. But the
woman sitting here and her music are the better for their passing.