Garbage Days Revisited #85: The Nymphs - "The Nymphs" (1991)

 

"I wanna believe in God but he never seems to show himself around/I wanna believe in people but they always let me down" - The Nymphs - Death of a Scenester

This week on Garbage Days Revisited, we're returning to the dying days of the Sunset Strip scene just before the grunge atom bomb nuked it and another group who ended up royally screwed over by music biz machinations. As we've ascertained in GDR's past about US rock bands who broke through in this era, there were a number of ways things could go wrong for you - record company politics (Rock City Angels, Electric Angels), signing with a label who just didn’t “get” what your band was (The Throbs, Jetboy, Life, Sex & Death), frontpeople who were regarded as just a bit too much of a loose cannon (Hellion) or your band’s self-destructive habits getting so out of control that it pretty much torpedoed your career (The Four Horsemen, Shooting Gallery). The Nymphs though? Those poor buggers pretty much racked up a full house of all the above.

The Nymphs were formed in New Jersey in the mid-'80s under the watchful eye of lead singer Inger Lorre. Inger was definitely a striking character with her red hair and outlandish tribal dress sense - think a much more out-there shamanic version of Linda Perry when she was in 4 Non-Blondes. The Nymphs were basically a death-rock band who owed way more to say the Gun Club or the Birthday Party than anything on Sunset Strip but they still decided to take their chance by moving across country to LA, probably with the aim of finding a home on one of the punk labels there. Instead, they quickly got a reputation as an absolutely killer live band and somehow ended up signed to Geffen - apparently they were very sceptical about whether to do so but in the end the prospect of a major label budget was enough to twist their arms.

The group would record their album in early 1990 and suffice to say it was very different from nearly everything else going on around the Strip at the time. Along with the very different Mother Love Bone, the Nymphs were arguably the other great lost bridge band between glam and grunge. Sure, the guitar solos and overdubs definitely mark it out as a late '80s album but Lorre's scathing vocals and doomy lyrics set The Nymphs a world apart from Poison, Warrant, Winger et al. Listening to it now, you suspect that if it had just got released when it was supposed to, this lot would have been rightly hailed as trailblazers.

Unfortunately, it didn't. Suffice to say the relationship between the Nymphs and Geffen was not a harmonious one and the label were perpetually badgering them to re-record the album to make it more commercial or trying to persuade Inger to ditch her bandmates and go solo with the group stubbornly sticking to their guns. None of which helped Lorre’s somewhat fragile mental state at this time. Matters weren’t helped by the fact that, similar to what happened with the Rock City Angels a couple of years previously, Geffen were also busy promoting a Guns 'n' Roses album (Use Your Illusion in this case) leading to the release of the Nymphs album being pushed back and back and back. And while the group were endlessly clashing heads with their label, a lot of not entirely dissimilar groups like Hole, Bikini Kill, Babes In Toyland etc who’d broken on the scene after Inger and co but had signed with the sort of minor labels who the Nymphs had originally planned to join, had therefore managed to get their albums released without the endless delays caused by major label politics. The Nymphs, on the other hand, managed to finally wear Geffen down enough to get them to release their album as they’d intended it but the price was that they had to wait until the dying days of 1991, nearly two years after they’d recorded it, for it to slip out with hardly any promotional push - their momentum had been killed stone dead.

Lorre, by this point battling a heroin addiction as well as her demons, was so angry at the band’s treatment that she infamously went into their A&R man Tom Zutaut's* office, crushing five poppies which represented her and her bandmates on his desk and then pissing on them in front of him. Zutaut's reaction, instead of being angry, was to burst into tears of shock which made Lorre feel even worse for what she'd done and sent her even further down her psychosis spiral. By mid-1992 the Nymphs had fired Inger and broken up, frustrated with the way the music business had treated with them.

* - Zutaut's also infamous for an incident in The Dirt where it was revealed to him that his girlfriend at the time had had sex with Nikki Sixx from his other charges Motley Crue at a festival in their backstage trailer while Tom was sat outside blissfully unaware and had broken up with him soon afterwards - he never knew the full story until the book's editor told him and got really upset. Proof that sometimes working in A&R isn’t as glamorous as it’s cracked up to be either I guess...

All of which just leaves the Nymphs' debut album and it still sounds like a beautiful, unique and scary thing all these years later. From the doomy Just One Happy Day and Imitating Angels through the scathing Two Cats and Death Of A Scenester to the thunderous closer The Highway, it casts Inger and co as a heavier Concrete Blonde if they'd doubled down on that first album sound or Silverfish's gothy American cousins, treading the line between flashbomb pyrotechnics and the sort of bleak introspection that Kurt and Courtney would bring into vogue a year or two later almost perfectly. I genuinely think that if only they'd been with a label who realised what they were dealing with, it could really have been a game-changer (again, the same way Mother Love Bone's Apple should've been) - it's just a shame that instead it essentially got buried by Geffen so they could concentrate on marketing that spoilt brat Axl and his bloated double album to us instead.

Inger Lorre is still out there, resurfacing with a new band the Chieftains of Infinity about seven or eight years ago who managed a solitary single before mutating back into a new Nymphs line-up. I honestly hope we'll hear some more new music from her some day - the woman is a real under-rated and unique talent and if she feels like doing so then the world definitely deserves to hear more from her.