Wipers

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 but never play live. 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.