Wipers /Window Shop For Love (live)

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• published: 25 Jul 2012
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Wipers Live 85 All rights: Greg Sage As for mystique, Sage's predisposition for playing what's not expected has made him a cult legend to some and an anomaly to the rest. When punk meant loud fast rules, he bucked the trend by inserting long, Hendrixian guitar solos and mid-tempos. When punk meant major-chord minimalism, he inserted strange ringing minor chords he'd never seen anyone else play and repeated them over and over again in the course of 10-minute mini-epics. Sage's instinctive irreverence toward punk traditions spawned imitators. You can hear his immediate influence on '80s bands like Hüsker Dü and Dinosaur Jr., while Kurt Cobain acknowledged his spiritual debt by organizing a Greg Sage and the Wipers tribute album, the same year his band broke with Nevermind. People in the neighbourhood assumed the Wipers would be the next big thing after Nirvana broke (Kurt Cobain admitted to being powerfully affected by Sage's style), but they underestimated Sage's tenacity in upholding his ideals. "The record company said, 'You're big business now. We're gonna put out your next record.' I said, 'You're gonna what? No, thank you.' Sage's addictive, mood-altering songs are usually built around catchy guitar riffs that ring and buzz with hypnotic drones and overtones. His lyrical observations of the world around him are delivered with the kind of cool whine Tom Verlaine perfected (although with less contrived strangulation). These imagistic fragments build ideas with repeated listenings, "drilling into a nerve," as he says. "I write lyrics that have dark content, but there's always a light at the end of the tunnel, the essence of hope." Although he does let it rip occasionally, Sage doesn't get caught up in lead-guitar onanism, either, concentrating instead on expanding rhythm into a white-hot melodicism. "The reason I got called the Godfather of Grunge was that during the punk era we had a huge audience, but they would be the people with the black leather coats, the chains and the anarchy symbols, and they were almost prejudiced -- if you weren't punk-looking, you weren't part of the scene. But there were a lot of normal-looking kids who wanted to see the shows, and we had so much power at the time that I would wear flannel shirts even though it was the most uncool thing you could wear. All the punks called me a logger and stuff." "Yeah, I build like guitar preamps, keyboard preamps, vacuum tube stuff with really radical passive EQ. I build stuff that you can basically use as a front end into an amplifier. Whenever I go to Europe, on tour, I usually get stuck with the horrible sounding newer Marshall that has zero tone. So I built my own front preamps that I bring with me so I can pull some tone out of those amps. Or just plug them directly into the power tube section. I'm more into building speciality stuff. I don't build anything that seems to be the trend. There were a lot of pro-audio stores in the Northwest that were really interested in taking some of my stuff, but we get into these arguments because they insisted that the trend was balanced outputs. I work with unbalanced out in a balanced environment. If you are running a small signal like a microphone over 25 ft., yeah, you need to balance it, but I mean, where it's a trend where if you sell something that's unbalanced out it's not considered the flavor of the month. I don't even bother competing because I build all sorts of circuits. I've built a lot of balanced equipment and personally I just use, myself, what I think sounds the best. Unbalanced out is the way to go, all my equipment in the studio has been switched over to unbalanced in and unbalanced out except for microphones. I kept my cable lengths under 12-14ft. and the amount of punch and clarity you gain that way is just unbelievable. You can argue with people all day long about how good this is, but they don't use their ears. They just talk about what they read; I use my ears to design equipment."