Play Wipers Radio

Wipers

1,169,446 plays (69,731 listeners)

205 shouts

Add to my Library Share
Portland’s Wipers were the songwriting outlet for punk virtuoso Greg Sage. Sage originally envisioned the Wipers as a self-contained, DIY studio project that would record 15 albums in 10 years. They ended up following a slightly more conventional path, although never in their music. The Wipers sound exists somewhere outside of genre classifications: it’s punk, pop, garage, psychedelic, and yet none of those things. Sage was a gear-head and rabid experimenter who had gotten into music by playing with a record lathe his father, who worked in the industry, had procured. In 1973 he met Beauregard, an early pioneer of the “bad guy” wrestler character who was cutting an album and insisted that Sage play on it. He happily obliged.

It was a few years later that punk rock opened the door for the first Wipers single, Better Off Dead, which came out on Sage’s own Trap records in 1979. The rough, 3 song four track recording was followed up shortly by the classic debut LP Is This Real?. Sage, bassist Dave Koupal and drummer Sam Henry created 11 songs of strange and terrifying beauty. Even Sage’s most upbeat pop hooks were tempered by his uneven singing style and dark lyrics. Feelings of alienation and fear permeate tracks like the desperate “Potential Suicide” or ominous “D-7.” The original tracks were recorded live on 4-track.
Read more… Edit

Top Albums

See more

Shoutbox

Leave a comment. Log in to Last.fm or sign up (it’s free).
See all 205 shouts

Videos

See more

Listeners

See more

Recent Activity

Related Journals

See more

More Information

Links
Band Members
Labels