I first heard Seattle punk band The Wipers while searching my local video store for some obscure 1960s British film—I can’t remember which one but it probably had Julie Christie in it, they mostly did. Crouched before a pile of videotapes, I was distracted from my search by a distorted guitar snarl and a classic punk drum beat broadcast through tinny speakers. The song sounded strangely familiar, although it took me a while to place it.

The penny eventually dropped and I realised that it was a song called “Wait a Minute.” British neo-shoegazers My Vitriol had recorded it back in 2001 as a b-side and I hadn’t even realised that it was a cover-version. Hearing the original was a life-changing moment—while I like MV, there is just no comparison with the emotional impact of the way Greg Sage spits out his lyrics as if his life depended on it.

“Wait a Minute” closes the first Wipers album, 1979’s Is This Real?, something of a lost classic of the new wave and the advance guard of what pissed-up British journos later named the “Seattle Sound.”

While the Wipers received the imprimatur of Kurt Cobain, it came a long time after their best work (arguably in the period 1979-82) and didn’t radically increase sales of their back catalogue, although Sub Pop did reissue some out-of-print albums. While the Nirvana frontman championed a number of acts, few of them sounded particularly “grunge” and consequently didn’t profit much from the celebrity endorsement. Only a small portion of the kids who saw “Smells Like Teen Spirit” on MTV was ever likely to appreciate the insane minimalist pop of Daniel Johnston, for example. But the Wiper’s weren’t so far removed from the sound that finally took punk rock to the masses.

The rhythm of early Wipers songs (in particular the snare-roll drumming) tends to be straight up punk in the class of ’77 vein and Sage’s vocals, despite the layers of angst, could almost be mistaken for Joey Ramone at times. However, there are some down-tuned dirges such as “D-7” that are pretty similar to Nirvana album tracks and Sage’s guitar work has clearly had an impact on the grunge template.

It’s not surprising that Cobain loved The Wipers—while Nirvana weren’t the most typical of their hairy Seattle counterparts, they were definitely the most “pop.” And Sage wrote songs that capture both the rage of punk and the memorable choruses of 70s power pop. The Wipers made it clear that the two did not have to be mutually exclusive. You can hear their influence in underground bands like Mission of Burma and Hüsker Dü, which in turn shaped the alterna-rock revolution, finally resulting in Nickleback and Staind. I’m not sure what went wrong in that whole process, but I’m fairly sure it wasn’t Greg Sage’s fault.

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