Bootleg Washtenaw: Wipers, July 7, 1987, at The Blind Pig
An occasional series highlighting live recordings made in Washtenaw County.
You may not know the music of cult group Wipers, but you've definitely heard songs by one of the group's biggest fans: Kurt Cobain.
In fact, you may even know two Wipers tunes through Nirvana covers: The 1992 tribute comp Eight Songs for Greg Sage and the Wipers (later expanded to Fourteen Songs ...) featured Cobain & Co. covering "Return of the Rat," while the Nirvana tour EP Hormoaning from the same year featured "D-7." Both songs come from Wipers' 1980 debut, Is This Real, which Sub Pop reissued in 1993.
The Wipers' tour that brought the trio to The Blind Pig on July 7, 1987, was for their fifth album, Follow Blind. The group would record one more record, 1988's The Circle, before calling it quits for six years. With the buzz created by Nirvana, Greg Sage reconvened the band for three more albums in the 1990s before stopping again—still a cult band.
Like Cobain, Sage was a left-handed guitarist who mixed distorted chords and dexterous lead lines. But where Cobain dealt with huge dynamics, Sage tended toward a nervy slow burn, with his hazy guitar sound—achieved through tube amps he built himself—providing a noise bed to support his wailing but distant vocals.
Wipers started in Portland, Oregon, but Sage has lived in Arizona for some time now, where he runs a recording studio and the Zeno Records label, which sells all the Wipers' albums plus two Sage solo LPs.
The Blind Pig recording sounds like an audience tape rather than from the soundboard, but it's pretty good quality.
Setlist and audio:
Bassist and Blue LLama Jazz Club booker Dave Sharp picks five albums that influenced him
When he's not playing bass in his Worlds band—or any number of other jazz and world-music groups in the Southeast Michigan area—Dave Sharp books the talent at Blue LLama Jazz Club on Main Street in Ann Arbor.
Based on his own music and the groups he has play Blue LLama, you can tell Sharp has big ears and catholic tastes.
But if you ever wondered what records influenced his own musical journey, Sharp talked to the Analog Attack vlog out of Japan for its new series, Leaders and Sidemen.
In just under 35 minutes, Sharp picked out five albums from his collection that made a big impact on him and talked about why. But the twist with this process is that Analog Attack's host then has to find LPs from his own collection that feature sidemen from the records his guest picks:
U-M prof wins SMTD award and produces shortened, virtual version of Giacomo Puccini’s opera "La bohème"
There's no doubt the University of Michigan School of Music, Theatre, and Dance's Stephen Lusmann loves opera in its original, unadulterated form.
After all, he's a voice professor who has taught for nearly 20 years at SMTD.
But Lusmann is also cognizant of the time-crunched—and, now, the sequestered, pandemic'd world—we live in. Those are two of the reasons why he created a shortened version of Giacomo Puccini’s 1896 opera La bohème, whose two-hour running time is cut in half.
Plus, the original has eight soloists whereas most young-artists programs only have four, and throwing a student singer—or even an audience member new to the genre—into a two- or three-hour opera performance might be overwhelming.
But the main reason why Lusmann made an abbreviated version of The Bohemians is that his SMTD colleagues gave him the 2020 Harold Haugh Award, which was founded in 1975 and named after the U-M professor and oratorio soloist. The honor is given to an SMTD professor to recognize his or her excellence in studio teaching. Recipients are awarded $5,000 and they're usually honored with a public event that includes a lecture and a performance. Lusmann had to make do with our current situation, so he and his SMTD students staged his version of The Bohemians sans audience and posted the performance to YouTube:
Friday Five: JTC, The Kelseys, Diesel Marine, Lily Milo, and DJ FLP
Friday Five is where we celebrate new and recent music by Washtenaw County artists.
This week we start in the club, head down some dark country lanes, then head back to the dancefloor with new music by Tadd Mullinix's JTC, The Kelseys, Diesel Marine, Lily Milo, and DJ FLP.
Bootleg Washtenaw: Nirvana, April 10, 1990, at The Blind Pig
Someone recently uploaded Nirvana's April 10, 1990, show at The Blind Pig to YouTube for the umpteenth time with the bad audio and wonky video.
Why bother when there's the version above, which has been online since 2012 and it sounds pretty good? It also boasts the following: "New Custom 2-Camera Mix/Deshaked with synced Audio (Aud1 JWB remaster)."
"Deshaked" is a shaky but accurate technical term, and for that alone, I'm entering this version of the video onto the record as the definitive edition of this bootleg.
Tracklist:
Visual Arts Roundup: Catching up with UMMA, Stamps Gallery, Michigan Art Gallery, WSG Gallery, Ann Arbor Art Center, Gutman Gallery, Eat More Tea, Ann Arbor Women Artists, and Riverside Arts Center
For 12 years, going through UMMA's front entrance was the second thing you did when you arrived at the museum. The first thing was to swing on Shang, the giant metal sculpture by Mark di Suvero. But a private collector bought the piece and it was deinstalled in early October. UMMA is encouraging folks to share photos of themselves on the swing with the hashtag #GoodbyeShang. Click here to read a great letter from an anonymous visitor who left a laminated letter attached to Shang with magnets; let's hope your experience on the swing has half as revelatory as it was for this fan.
WCBN's "The Local Show" honored the end of summer with a guest mix by Isaac Levine
Since the pandemic forced WCBN's DJs out of the studio, the station has run a mix of previously aired shows and, as time has progressed, gradually added programs that the hosts record at home. Shelley Salant, who helms The Local Music Show, is one of those folks who has provided home-recorded shows the past few months, but she's also had some friends DJ from their pads. A few weeks ago, Ypsilanti's Isaac Levine—he of numerous bands and the Fish People Birds label—programmed a setlist dubbed "Summer Is Over and I Feel It" for The Local Music Show, and it's an excellent cross section of indie rock, hip-hop, electronica, and general weirdness from Washtenaw County artists.
Not every Local Music Show is posted to the archival Soundcloud page immediately, so the only other pandemic-era program on there right now is from July 22. But it's a prime example on how wide open The Local Music Show is to styles: the show features Dr. Pete Larson—a U-M epidemiologist by day; a nyatiti player and Dagoretti Records chief at night—along with Dr. Tiffany Ng's carillon concert in solidarity with Black Lives Matters.
I've embedded these two Local Music Shows below, but there's a weath of great shows going back years over on the Soundcloud.
No Slowing Down: Ann Arbor cartoonist Dave Coverly celebrates the 25th anniversary of "Speed Bump"
The easy part of compiling a book that celebrates a comic strip’s silver anniversary is, well, you’ve got lots of options.
“I’ll get reviews and comments that say, ‘Not a clunker in the bunch!’—but, you know, I had 10,000 to choose from,” said Ann Arbor-based cartoon artist Dave Coverly, whose book Speed Bump: A 25th Anniversary Collection debuted in September. “If anyone wants to visit my house, you could see a big plastic tub of cartoons that are terrible.”
Perhaps that’s inevitable when your job’s required you to hatch and execute seven new ideas every week throughout two and a half decades. “You can’t wait for the muse to strike when you’re on deadline,” Coverly noted.
But having the National Cartoonists Society award your work with Best in Newspaper Panels (’95, ’03, ’14) in addition to its highest honor, the Reuben Award (’09), might suggest that you’re getting it right far more often than not.
And for Coverly, one of the most appealing things about a single-panel cartoon is its unfettered flexibility.
“I do a lot of cartoons that use aliens and animals, but they’re always really about people and the things we all have in common,” said Coverly. “My daughter, who’s a painter, had a professor who told her, ‘Don’t ask yourself what you’re going to paint. Ask yourself why you’re going to paint it.’ And I love that quote because I’m someone who—I don’t like jokes for the sake of jokes. … I’d rather try for something that’s driven by an idea. Something that’s more subtle.”
Friday Five: Fred Thomas, Isaac Levine, Briaa Dupree, Jib Kidder, Aye Hawk
Friday Five is where we celebrate new and recent music by Washtenaw County artists. This week we feature Fred Thomas, Isaac Levine, Briaa Dupree, Jib Kidder, and Aye Hawk.
WSG Gallery offers virtual exhibitions and one in-person show at Ann Arbor Art Center
WSG Gallery's transformation from a Main Street attraction to an online art house continues apace—with some timely dips into physical spaces, too.
The collective created a small pop-up gallery at 401 N. Ann Arbor St. in Saline (Sept. 25- Oct. 2), which was a warm-up to taking over the second floor of the Ann Arbor Art Center from Oct. 6- Dec. 31. This a multi-artist show and the featured works will rotate at Thanksgiving.
But WSG's two most recent virtual exhibitions focus on single artists.
Painter Sara Adlerstein's Not for Sale: My Private Collection exhibition officially ran Aug. 18 to Sept. 28, but WSG is doing the smart thing and keeping all its virtual exhibitions online permanently. The current exhibition is sculptor Francesc Burgos' Recent Work (Sept. 29 to Nov. 7).