Wipers

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This article is about a rock band. For other uses, see Wiper.
For the town in Belgium which was called 'Wipers' by British soldiers during World War One, See Ypres.
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Wipers

Background information
Origin Portland, Oregon, U.S.
Genre(s) Punk rock
Years active 1977–2001
Label(s) Zeno
Trap
Restless
Tim/Kerr
Jackpot
Members
Greg Sage
Steve Plouf
Former members
Sam Henry
Travis McNabb
Dave Koupal

The Wipers were a punk rock group formed in Portland, Oregon in 1977 by guitarist Greg Sage, drummer Sam Henry and bassist Dave Koupal. The Wipers were one of the earliest American purveyors of the genre, and the group's tight song structure and use of heavy distortion has been hailed as extremely influential by numerous critics and musicians.

Contents

[edit] Origination

The idea behind the Wipers started off as only a recording project. The plan was to record 15 LPs in 10 years without touring or promotion of any type. Sage's thoughts were that the mystic built from the lack of playing the traditional rock & roll promotion game would make people listen to their recordings much deeper with only their imagination to go by. He thought it would be easy to avoid press, shows, pictures, interviews. He looked at music as art rather than entertainment; with that concept in mind he thought music was personal to the listener rather than a commodity.

"I think I got that concept early on as a kid. I was very lucky to have my own professional record cutting lathe when I was in 7th grade due to my father being involved in the broadcast industry. I would cut records for friends at school of songs off the radio and learned the art of record making long before learning to play music. I would spend countless hours studying the grooves I would cut under the microscope that was attached to the lathe and loved the way music looked, moved and modulated within the thin walls. I might have spent too much time studying music through a microscope because it gave me a completely different outlook on what music is and a totally opposite understanding of it as well. There was something very magical and private when I zoomed into the magnified and secret world of sound in motion. I got to the point that I needed to create and paint my own sounds and colors into the walls of these grooves."[1]

Greg Sage's first choice of instrument was bass guitar, because of the low tones that made larger grooves in the vinyl records due to slower modulations. Unfortunately, basses were harder find and much more expensive when Sage was in grade school, so he had to go with guitar instead. After several years of playing and recording guitar he felt he wanted to do something different in music, and being labeled as a band seemed to be the first tradition and standard he should try to avoid. He wanted to make his own recordings, manufacture and run his own label himself without anyone else's financing to keep it as pure and unfiltered as possible.

It was soon found out that it was almost impossible to fulfill this idea: most labels did not want to accept this kind of a game as music was, first of all, business to them. Being such an independent artist was an oddity. Sage says he learned that it is almost impossible to be a true artist in the sense of the meaning he started off with and that survival was to learn to compromise. That was the reason why Sage wanted The Circle album to be the last The Wipers album.

Inspite of original idea The Wipers used to play live shows and even released a live album, called Wipers Live.

[edit] Career

Is This Real?, The Wipers' first album, was self-recorded and first released in 1979 on Sage's own Trap Records. It quietly gained a cult following, although the band was better known for their live shows around the Portland area at the time.

While the Wipers began with Is this Real? by pioneering the tight, catchy punk rock that Nirvana and others would bring to the mainstream a decade later, the band quickly evolved into producing guitar-solo soaked, labyrinthine punk rock epics such as were found on their follow-up albums Youth of America and Over the Edge. Sage became known for not only his do-it-yourself ethic and guitar solos, but also for his domineering approach to the band’s creative process.

Many of the recording techniques and musical equipment was designed by Sage and the band. The band members purposely relied on word-of-mouth advertising for their albums, often rejecting interviews, and played far fewer live shows than many of their punk contemporaries.

In the 1980s, the band found a large fan base in Europe, and many of their releases were bootlegged overseas. Is this Real was re-released under a number of different labels in the 1980s and 1990s, without permission or guidance from the band. Sage remarked, "Hell, that record was in print for over twenty years and we never received a cent for it." [2]

In 1988, then 18 year old drummer Travis McNabb joined the band for the tour for the album "The Circle". He went on to join Better Than Ezra and work with Shawn Mullins, Howie Day and Beggars, members of which later formed Black Rebel Motorcycle Club.

In 1989, the band broke up for a number of years as Sage relocated to Arizona. The group would reappear for 3 more albums during the 1990s with a number of different musicians in the lineup.

Sam Henry is still an active musician in Portland, Oregon, and continues to play with popular Northwest songwriters like Pete Krebs and Morgan Grace. Sam also continues to perform with Napalm Beach, the band he formed with Chris Newman in the early '80s. Travis was replaced by Steve Plouf who continues to work with Greg Sage and on other music projects. Steve operates a vintage goods store in Portland Oregon appropriately named 'Zeno'.

[edit] Influence

Sage later remarked on their initial reception: "We weren’t even really a punk band. See, we were even farther out in left field than the punk movement because we didn’t even wish to be classified, and that was kind of a new territory. [...] When we put out Is This Real? … it definitely did not fit in; none of our records did. Then nine, ten years later people are saying: “Yeah, it’s the punk classic of the ’80s.” [2]

The Wipers became better known after the wildly popular grunge band Nirvana covered two songs from Is This Real?. Nirvana’s frontman, Kurt Cobain, spoke of being heavily influenced by the band. The Wipers were a major influence on the grunge music scene in general, with bands such as The Melvins, Mudhoney, and Dinosaur Jr. citing them. Wipers albums like Is This Real? and Over the Edge are now widely considered to be among the greatest and most influential punk albums of all time.

In 1992, a tribute album Eight Songs for Greg Sage and the Wipers (Tim Kerr Records) was released on 4 colored 7-inch records, and included Wipers songs performed by Nirvana, Hole, Napalm Beach, M99, The Dharma Bums, Crackerbash, Poison Idea, and The Whirlees. The CD release of the tribute album was called Fourteen Songs for Greg Sage and the Wipers, and expanded to include covers by Hazel, Calamity Jane, Saliva Tree, Honey, Nation of Ulysses, and Thurston Moore-Keith Nealy.

In 2001, Greg Sage’s Zeno Records [1] released a Wipers Box Set, which included first three Wipers', which by that time had been long out-of-print, with additional before never released material.

Recently Jackpot Records and Greg have reissued Is This Real? and Youth of America on vinyl records, utilizing the original master recordings.

[edit] Discography

[edit] Singles

[edit] Compilations

  • "10-29-29" (1980)
  • "Trap Sampler" (1981)

[edit] References

  1. ^ Greg Sage. The Wipers' history. Zenorecords.com. Retrieved on 2008-06-11.
  2. ^ a b Zeno Records Wipers Interview http://www.zenorecords.com/wipers/interview/page3.htm

[edit] External links