Wipers: The band before Nirvana
When a band like Nirvana come along and smash down on the cultural reset button, it’s hard to remember what came before. They were a fresh interpretation of an antiquated punk voice and helped create the genesis of a healthy grunge era.
With downtown New York playing host to a gritty punk movement in the late 1970s and a broken London of the same decade celebrating the cobbled-tooth emergence of The Sex Pistols and The Clash, the chances of America’s Pacific Northwest being the next hotbed of punk sensibility were pretty slim.
At the forefront of that was Kurt Cobain and his bandit of misfit brothers. Alongside Pearl Jam and Alice in Chains, Seattle became the world’s epicentre of music in 1992 and a hotbed for sonic innovation. But nearly a decade before the distorted downstrokes of Kurt Cobain travelled across the pacific coast and onto the world, a fellow Portland band were laying the foundations of influence.
“The Wipers were a Portland punk band who were started in the late Seventies by Greg Sage and released maybe four or five albums,” recalled Cobain in a feature for Melody Maker. “The first two [albums] were totally classic and influenced the Melvins and all the other punk rock bands. They’re another band I tried to assimilate,” Cobain admitted, who made no bones about wearing other influences on his sleeve. “Their songs were so good.” he added, simply.
But for Cobain, who once told Guitar World, “I was so antisocial that I was almost insane. I felt so different and so crazy that people just left me alone” there were few individual performances that showcased the same emotional complexity he personally harboured. While classic rock acts Aerosmith and Led Zeppelin were credited as influencers, their respective frontmen could outwardly express their musicality with a more charming sense of ease than Cobain.
It wasn’t until The Wipers’ Greg Sage paved the way for a more emotionally nuanced methodology to rock performance that Cobain felt there was a space for him. “[He] was pretty much the romantic, quiet, visionary kind of guy. What more can I say about them? They started Seattle grunge rock in Portland, 1977.”
Something Cobain grappled with until his passing in 1994 was the battle between commercial success and artistic authenticity. At the very beginning of the Seattle grunge scene, he was speaking to his fellow alternatives in the shadows of popularity. It was a safe space for someone whose anti-socialism was described as insanity, and so when it was compromised by widespread success, an inevitable sense of resentment towards the genre crept in.
The Wipers were the antithesis of that sentiment and a continued reminder of the authenticity that sat at the very heart of Nirvana. In 1990, Cobain said, “They’re the most innovative punk rock band that started the ‘Seattle sound’ like 15 years too early. We learned everything from the Wipers. They were playing a mix of punk and hard rock when nobody cared.”
