Secret History of Rock. The Most Influential Bands You've Never Heard (59 page)

Mark Robinson, Unrest:

I was impressed with Dischord Records locally, and the guys in Minor Threat. That was definitely a huge label influence on me. It was cool seeing bands around here doing shows and putting out records. It was almost like the country didn’t exist, people were famous just in D.C. and that was okay. I also liked their design elements. The TeenBeat [Robinson’s D.C.-based label] logo is kind of fashioned after it.

Remaining an integral part of the D.C. punk scene, MacKaye and Nelson devoted their energy to Dischord, which continued to release albums by local bands such as Scream (featuring future Nirvana / Foo Fighters member Dave Grohl) and Dag Nasty. MacKaye also continued his role as activist and participated in D.C. punk’s “Good Food October” and “Revolution Summer,” movements that attempted to distance the scene from negative elements and reshape punk aesthetics. In 1985 he formed Embrace, a band that defined a more mature and expressive post-punk sound, “emo-core.” Nelson collaborated with MacKaye on Egghunt, then played in the bands Three and High Back Chairs. In 1987, MacKaye teamed up with another well-known D.C. frontman, Rites of Spring’s Guy Picciotto, to form Fugazi, a band that is in many ways the ideal successor to D.C. hardcore. Both Fugazi and Dischord continue to enjoy success, entirely on their own terms, while MacKaye remains a vital part of a local scene that wouldn’t be the same without him.

DISCOGRAPHY

Bottled Violence
7”
(Dischord, 1981)
; an eight-song debut single.

In My Eyes
7”
(Dischord, 1982)
; a four-song follow-up single.

Out of Step
(Dischord, 1983)
; a mini-album featuring 12 songs.

Salad Days
7”
(Dischord, 1983)
; a final three-song single.

Minor Threat
(Dischord, 1984)
; collects the first two singles together on one album.

Complete Discography
(Dischord, 1988)
; collects all the band’s recordings on one CD.

AVANT PUNK USA

The bands classified here as avant punk fall somewhere between the British post-punk movement, which attempted to explore the outer reaches of punk sounds and structures, and the American hardcore scene, which tried to take punk’s hard-fast-short-loud aesthetic to it’s furthest point and build on punk’s do-it-yourself ethic. American bands like Flipper and Mission of Burma had a definite artistic kinship with the British post-punks, and were too arty (and not enough punk) to be hardcore.

By the late ‘80s, with hardcore bands like
Minor Threat
and
Hüsker Dü
either gone or diminished, younger groups that had descended from their tradition were left in a position to move beyond hardcore. Bands like Slint incorporated other influences into their music to create a more progressive, avant-garde brand of American punk and opened up entirely new possibilities for a style that only a few years earlier seemed to be running out of ideas.

For the most part, the bands in this chapter came out of – or operated within – the punk scene, side by side with hardcore and post-punk bands. And, while it was appropriate to group them together here, it’s important not to overlook the fact that neither the artists nor their fans ever had to choose sides. Despite their pop sensibility, the Wipers could easily share a bill with
Black Flag
and exert an influence on the same group of people.

WIPERS

Greg Sage, Wipers:

I wasn’t aware you had to look a certain way to be accepted in punk. Living in Portland, I wore flannel shirts, which I guess was the most uncool thing you could wear. A lot of people thought it was funny, they’d call me a logger. It’s funny how old photos from that era translated to what was going on in the early ‘80s with the grunge thing. So all of a sudden I became a leader of that.

The first notable punk band from the northwest, the Wipers are the earliest link in a chain that leads directly to Nirvana and the rest of the Seattle bands of the ‘90s. Despite this, and despite the fact their songs have been covered by bands like Nirvana (twice) and Hole, the group has managed to stay out of sight in the United States (they are better known in Europe). Though the Wipers’ relative obscurity may be partly due to their ahead-of-its-time indie approach, in large part it can be attributed to their leader (and only constant member) Greg Sage, a talented songwriter and guitarist whose career has been uncompromising to the point of being self-defeating.

Musically, it would be unfair to give the Wipers too much credit for starting the heavy metal/punk amalgamation that was dubbed “grunge” (credit for that goes more to Aberdeen, Washington’s Melvins). The Wipers, though, were a great band with great songs, whose greatest influence lay in the way they cleared a path in independent music for later Northwest bands to follow. From their base in Portland, the Wipers’ sent out a message of “be yourself” and “do-it-yourself” that was heard throughout Oregon and up to the punk rock centers in Olympia and Seattle, Washington.

Van Conner, Screaming Trees:

The Wipers were – still are, actually – an influence for everybody in the Trees. The Wipers were just so far before their time. They were our favorite band for years and years. The idea of us taking everything a little more seriously came from the Wipers. Having fun doing it, but putting a little heart and blood into it. That’s not something that sells records, but it’s something people notice.

From elementary school on, Greg Sage was interested in the recording process. His reason for writing songs as a teenager was more so he’d have something to record than out of a desire to express himself. Around 1977, he started playing music with his friends Dave Koupal (on bass) and Sam Henry (on drums). Though he had little knowledge or experience with punk rock at the time, when his band – which he named the Wipers – got invited to play live, he fell into Portland’s small punk scene. As a distant outpost of the early West Coast punk scene, Portland bands at the time were more of the “dress up” kind, imitating the leather and chains punk styles they saw in magazines. The Wipers, with their flannel shirts and jeans, clearly didn’t fit in, but when the band’s music caught on it sent a powerful message that good music was independent of fashions.

John McEntire, Tortoise / Sea and Cake:

He was kind of the first person to ever do stuff in [Portland, where McEntire grew up]. He was this amazingly enterprising guy who built his own studio in days when nobody did that, and put out his own records. It was before a lot of the hardcore bands were around. There was the same sort of independent idea happening, but before it was formulated and solidified by a larger community. I was a little too young to be fully impacted, but in time I came to understand how it developed on a local level.

Being from Portland proved problematic when the Wipers recorded their first single,
Better off Dead
, and Sage tried to release it on his own label, Trap. “We’d call the distributors on the East Coast, and they’d ask where our label was based. I’d say Portland, Oregon, and they’d laugh and hang up,” Sage remembers. It necessitated a move to New York, though the Wipers eventually returned to Portland. With the release of their debut album
Is This Real?
in 1980, Sage had developed a plan for how he wanted to make music. “My goal was to put out 15 albums in 10 years, and never play live, never do interviews, never put out photos,” he says. “To get people to listen I wanted to create a mystique, because the more that people know, the less they look into what you’re doing for the answers. But working with other people made it impossible. It was just a constant bombardment of ‘You have to do this, you have to do that.’”

Carrie Broumstein, Sleater-Kinney:

Greg Sage and the Wipers are totally legendary here [in the Northwest]. His lyrics really sum up this weird sort of depression of being in the Northwest a lot, without really targeting anything. I know that Corin [Tucker of Sleater-Kinney] totally loved his guitar playing in a way that influenced her.

Though he never achieved his recording goal, Sage was able to maintain a low profile and his independence by not signing multi-album deals with record companies, retaining complete control of the writing and production of Wipers material, and doing as little promotion as possible. Of course, his unwillingness to go along with established record company practices also limited his commercial viability. Still,
Is This Real?
and the 1981 EP
Youth of America
established the Wipers as the leading punk band in the northwest. At a time when
Black Flag
’s hardcore sound was coming to dominate punk scenes on the West Coast, Wipers songs like
Return of the Rat
(covered by Nirvana) were a throwback to the more melodic, hook-laden punk of the Ramones, while
Is this Real?
was reminiscent of Elvis Costello. With
Youth of America
, Sage and a new Wipers lineup moved even further away from the current “short and fast” punk style with a 10-minute epic title track and more new wave / post-punk explorations.

Chris Cornell, Soundgarden:

We played shows with them and they were a really big influence on our band overall. They were an example to me of a band that could have punk aggression and post-punk sensibilities in their instrumental approach, but at the same time write songs that would stick with you and be as important to you as any band you’d grown up listening to. The first time I ever met our drummer Matt [Cameron] he played me a bunch of 4-track demos he’d recorded, and they sounded really cool. And then he played the Wipers, and I asked him, “Is that you, too?” And he just kind of rolled his eyes and said, “I wish.”

As the ‘80s progressed, the Wipers settled into a comfortable anonymity. Without much attention from the music press or radio, Sage continued to produce increasingly polished and consistently good albums such as
Over the Edge
– which featured standouts like
Doom Town
and the title track that Hole later covered – as well as
Land of the Lost
. In 1985, Sage also released his first solo album, which he recorded (like all Wipers material) in his own studio. Then, as the ‘80s ended and the Northwest rock scene was teetering on the verge of national prominence, Sage moved away from Portland. Disappointed with the growing metropolitanism of the region, he took refuge in the wide-open desert near Phoenix, where he built a new recording studio, pursued solo work, and produced other groups.

Ryan Adams, Whiskeytown:

Greg Sage is the king songwriter. His solo record, Straight Ahead, is probably the most influential thing I’ve ever heard. It’s all songwriting, no bullshit. And Wipers songs like
Doom Town
, I think that’s where I got my fascination with naming songs with “town” in them, like “Inn Town” and “Mining Town.” Some songs on [Whiskeytown’s] Strangers Almanac, like “Turn Around,” are extremely influenced by Greg Sage.

After a second solo album in 1991, Wipers drummer Steve Plouf joined Sage in Arizona and they began recording the first new Wipers album in nearly five years.
Silver Sail
, released in 1993, coincided with the band’s growing prominence as a result of endorsements by Kurt Cobain (who told Melody Maker in 1992, “The Wipers started grunge in Portland in 1977”) and a Wipers tribute album. Though it easily could have been the Wipers commercial breakthrough, Sage deliberately sabotaged himself. He says, “When Nirvana and Hole and a bunch of other well-known bands were making it fashionable to cover Wipers songs, the record company was calling me up saying, ‘This is your time.’ I had some stuff I was going to record but I got cold feet because I was afraid of jumping on my own bandwagon. So I ended up rewriting
Silver Sail
to be something so off-base, a lot less distorted and mellower. I just didn’t like the feeling, after all the work I’d done before, of just becoming popular because of a fluke.”

Sure enough, the record went nowhere. A second Phoenix-based Wipers record, 1996’s
The Herd
, was a strong return to form that gained widespread critical praise. By the end of the year, though, Sage and Plouf played their final gig as the Wipers and forever retired the band (in name, at least). Sage, meanwhile, continues to record – both his own music and that of others – and design studio equipment. After 20 years, he’s still doing his thing; still independent and still largely unknown.

DISCOGRAPHY

Is This Real?
(Park Avenue, 1980; Sub Pop, 1993)
; the debut album featuring many of the group’s best-known material, reissued with the earlier
Alien Boy
EP.

Youth of America
EP
(Park Avenue, 1981; Restless, 1990)
; a six-song collection, including the adventurous 10-minute title track.

Over the Edge
(Brain Eater, 1983; Restless, 1987)
; though hard to find, this is considered by many a favorite Wipers release.

Wipers Live
(Enigma, 1985)
; a concert recording that fails to capture the band’s real energy or sound, but contains some otherwise unavailable songs.

Land of the Lost
(Restless, 1986)
.

Follow Blind
(Restless, 1987)
.

The Circle
(Restless, 1988)
.

The Best of Wipers and Greg Sage
(Restless, 1990)
; a good but poorly packaged collection of singles and standouts that span the years 1977-1989.

Silver Sail
(Tim/Kerr, 1993)
; just as grunge-fever kicked in, Sage took a softer approach to ensure continued obscurity.

Complete Rarities ‘78-‘90
(True Believer, 1993)
.

The Herd
(Tim/Kerr, 1996)
; a strong return to rocking, just in time to be the band’s final release.

TRIBUTE:
Fourteen Songs for Greg Sage and the Wipers
(Tim/Kerr, 1993)
; a compilation of Wipers songs done by a selection of indie bands, and a few larger ones – Nirvana, Hole, Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore – as well.