Inger Lorre, who died aged 61 on 4 October, will always be remembered for an outrageous incident in 1991 when she was the singer for LA-based rock band The Nymphs.
At that time, her band’s A&R man at Geffen Records, Tom Zutaut, thought he’d seen it all, having previously signed Mötley Crüe to Elektra and Guns N’ Roses to Geffen. But after Geffen had delayed the release of The Nymphs’ self-titled debut album for more than a year, Inger decided that a dirty protest was the way to go.
As she recalled to LA Weekly: “I drank a lot of beer and got totally inebriated so I would have the guts and a lot of pee in me. So when Zutaut said, ‘Okay, send her in’, I was just like, f*ck this, and I jumped up on his desk and was like, ‘You f*cked me over, you f*cked my band, you're a f*cker, how dare you keep me on hold!’ And I pissed on his Rolodex, his phone, the photo of his wife, everything. But instead of screaming at me, he started to cry.”
Tom Zutaut had described Lorre as possessing “more passion than any female singer I’ve ever heard”. This incident certainly proved it.
When The Nymphs’ album was eventually released in October 1991, the band were hyped as the next big thing in rock. They even had Iggy Pop singing on one track, Supersonic. But within a year of the album’s release, Inger was fired by the band while suffering mental health issues and addiction.
Inger had a close friendship with Jeff Buckley, who dubbed her “the patron saint of f*cked-over musicians”. They recorded a track together, Angel Mine, for the Jack Kerouac tribute album Kicks Joy Darkness, which was released in 1997 just a month before Buckley’s death. Another duet recorded with Buckley, Thief Without The Take, appeared in 1999 on Inger’s debut debut solo album Transcendental Medication.
The latter album also included the song She's Not Your Friend, in which Inger continued a feud with Courtney Love that was first made public in 1991 when Pretty On The Inside, the debut album by Love’s band Hole, included a song named Sassy that featured an answering machine message from Inger.
John Dryland, label manger at Cargo Records, worked with Inger on and off for many years, beginning with Transcendental Medication and ending with her 2023 album Gloryland. “Inger wasn’t always easy to deal with,” Dryland says. “But she was a true artist. And beyond that, she was one of the kindest and most thoughtful people I’ve ever met.
Dryland continues: “Everything she created had a charm and an essential Inger-ness to it. If you want to know what she was all about, just listen to the song More Real from Gloryland. Incredible.”
