by John Chandler
Originally appeared in the first version of 2 Gyrlz Quarterly, an online magazine, on June 13, 2003. It was then printed in 2GQ's print zine-journal, issue #3, in 2005. See www.zenorecords.com if you're trying to find the music. ---Ed.
“The Wipers’ music is so simple, but so cool, it makes you wonder why anybody thinks doing stuff with tricks is a valid approach at all.” — Steve Albini
Greg Sage is an odd, complicated guy. As an interview subject he’s a laconic pain in the ass. As an artist, he’s certainly responsible for some of the best rock music ever produced in Portland, and no one—OK, maybe Elliott Smith—has made music that so perfectly sums up life in the cracks and crannies of our rainy little community.
While Smith wore the mantle of lovely but wounded indie boy and pop poet, serving as a role model for legions of mopey hipsters lounging purposefully at coffee joints and dives all over town, Sage dealt in more primal emotions. He was the first among us to gather the storm clouds to him and let all the rage, frustration and loneliness pour out, pounding the locals with sonic hailstones such as “No One Wants an Alien” and “Pushing the Extreme."
But this was more than 20 years ago, when most casual grazers of rock music didn’t know what to do with Sage’s boundary-pushing band, the Wipers. The band helped create and define Portland’s independent and punk music scenes beginning in the late 1970s. Considered “one of the most important bands to ever emerge from the Northwest” by the Experience Music Project—not to mention thousands of critics, musicians, and fans—they defined a distinctive Northwest sound that would play a substantial part in the emergence of post-punk/alternative rock of the late 1980s and early 1990s, gathering new fans when grunge swept the world.
The Wipers weren’t exactly punk rock. The guitars had a special buzz and glow more akin to Hüsker Dü, who were still a few years down the road. Lyrically, Sage could be personal to the extreme in songs like “Romeo” and “Don’t Know What I Am,” but also capable of writing one of punk’s truly great anthems, “Youth of America.” Yet Sage insists that the band weren’t accepted by the punk rock community.
The Wipers first entered the studio in 1979, releasing their first album, Is This Real?, in 1980. "Is This Real? was not considered cool when it came out,” Sage tells me. “It took off in Europe instantly, but took fifteen years to really get noticed in the States.”
That might be something of an exaggeration, but it does point to frame of mind. Even in his own neck of the woods Sage was an outsider. Even with his own band playing some of the most visceral and urgent music around, Sage never found a comfort zone. This is a good thing. Staying hungry with something to prove always produces superior art.
Still, the energy surrounding the punk movement of the early-to-mid-1980s inspired him. “Punk was a product of its time. Music of the mid-’80s, for the most part, had a special feel to it. I think it was due to a cycle or vortex of the time. It was a period of time that had a powerful sense of magnetism to it. It wasn’t only the music, but people in general... people were experiencing a self-freedom, a lack of the walls that surround everything. It made communication and the need to communicate somewhat fashionable.”
Sage himself had much to communicate. His early forays into music involved his own recordings with a record lathe brought home by his father, who worked in the broadcast industry. Later, he would try to apply this independent ethic to making records and forming a band in Portland. A great introduction to this period can be found on the three-CD compilation of the first three Wipers records, plus 23 bonus tracks, compiled by Sage’s label, Zeno Records.
“There was a small scene starting, and it seemed more was going on in PDX than in Seattle at the time,” Sage remembers. “PDX was the best place to be in the '80s. It was considered a logger’s town back then. It was overlooked by the rest of the world, but that is why so many unique bands came out of there. We were always told by large publications that we should say we were from a larger, cooler city because no one would take us seriously being from Portland. I liked the idea of not being cool back then, and had the last laugh for it.”
Sage asserts that the Wipers were always ahead of their time, something said by a lot of bitter artists who never got their mitts on the big money. Yet my own research tends to bear out his claim. Even after the Wipers officially disbanded in 1989, they made a few more records in the ’90s and even one in 2000. One such record is Silver Sail (1996). After its release it was dismissed by Wipers fans (such as myself) looking for Sage’s trademark lighting-in-a-bottle guitar and towering rage. In fact, the record is a top-notch example of moody singer-songwriter rock, easily rivaling anything ever put out by Mark Eitzel. Seven years later and I’ve rediscovered a gem in my own pocket.
“I had always written my own stuff, mostly because I taught myself how to play,” Sage says of his songwriting. “Learning how to play by experimentation can give you a different way of looking at it compared to learning from someone else’s songs.”
Sage considers the band’s peak period to be around 1986, when they began touring Europe. “The audience in Europe was a lot different and more inspiring compared to the States. Europe was not into trends or hype as much as here, so everything felt more natural.” But by the end of the decade, he felt ready to end the Wipers.
“I think it was around 1989 that it started to feel as if the idea might have run its course. Our first LP, Is This Real?, was just starting to get noticed in the States, after being out for nine years. It was starting to get hard to look ahead when you were being pushed back ten years... I liked to look into the future, but felt I was being held in the past.”
America’s nonstop trend machine soon glommed onto the grunge movement, which popularized numerous musicians who had been influenced by the Wipers. Certainly the 1991 tribute album Fourteen Songs for Greg Sage and the Wipers attracted some new, idle listeners. After all, Nirvana was on board, as well as Hole (though for my money, Crackerbash and Hazel cleaned everyone’s clock).
“I didn’t know about the tribute till it was almost done,” Sage claims. In fact, Nirvana covered not one, but two Wipers songs. Supposedly, some hard-to-find European import of “Lithium” has a version of the Wipers’ “D7” on it. I’ve never found it.
Kurt Cobain was a fan and allegedly wanted the Wipers to open some tours. Sage has never liked touring and being in front of that many people could have been extremely unsettling to such an introverted artist. “I knew Kurt a little, saw him a lot in PDX before they were known. I didn’t like how the industry tried to make grunge a mass commodity. I think the industry sterilized it so much that the idea of being original got lost.”
These days, Sage is at work on a biography and a post-Wipers project called Electric Medicine. “I was spoiled by the communication and tightness people expressed in the ‘80s. It gets harder to find ways to communicate in this period of time or cycle we are in now,” he says. “Right now it seems as if it is easier for people to communicate with a cell phone than with a person.”
I reported for The Rocket shortly before its demise in 2000 that Sage had been working for some time on a massive biographical project about Beauregarde, a wrestler from the early days of Portland wrestling (late 1960s/early 1970s). This Louisiana brawler made a very collectable record in 1973 which features 16-year-old Greg Sage on guitar. Always the stubborn iconoclast, Sage has been busting his hump trying to put together everything he can find about Beauregarde. “This is one of the most involved projects I have ever undertaken,” he said.
As for his old project, Sage says nothing has really happened to him that made him think he made a difference to people through music. “If we did, that’s cool,” he says. “The Wipers were more of an idea rather than a band. From the beginning I wanted to do something different with music. I didn’t like the idea (of) how music was looked at as just entertainment or the idea of labels or categories that where put on everything. In that context, the idea of the Wipers means the same as it did then.”
Sage stomped off the stage at La Luna at the North by Northwest music festival in 1996, announcing something to the effect that it was the very last Wipers’ show. Yet he’s an extremely mercurial guy: he may very well get nostalgic one day, and decide a few shows are in order. You can never tell.
As a gangly, insecure youth, Sage strode Portland’s soaking streets incubating furious rock songs that in terms of honest emotion and non-phoney passion haven’t been touched since. Now in his late 40s, he sweats and toils in Phoenix assembling the life story of an adolescent obsession. When asked what he finds culturally stimulating, he answers, “Nothing much.” Draw your own conclusions, but we have a hell of a lot of great music to be thankful for. Even the stuff that’s been overlooked should be re-evaluated in a stronger light. Just don’t expect Sage to step into that light. He works best as an outsider looking in.
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