Sage
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Sage began around 1990. Guy Davis and Mike Williamson were playing with a guitarist in a band with no name, which Williamson has described as chaos music. They wanted a singer and asked Marc Olsen. Then the guitarist left, Olsen picked up the guitar, and what was left called itself Sage.
The first show was an open mic in Portland, where they knew nobody. Neither Davis nor Williamson had been in a band before. None of them knew anything about the record industry, and Williamson later told Billboard that this was what he liked about the band.
The name is the desert plant. An old description calls the music hillbilly psycho jazz, “sort of like a carnival carousel ride with William Burroughs at the controls.” Williamson calls one side of it cubenzabilly. In 1993 the writer Chris Takino gave up trying to describe it and wrote, “I feel better after I hear it.”
Forked came out in 1993 and 7th Standard Rd. in 1995. After Forked the band toured from North Dakota to Texas, sharing bills with punk bands and playing faster so nobody wandered off. In Minnesota they got lost in farm country and found a drum kit, amplifiers and generators set up in a meadow for a high-school graduation. They stopped and played.
William Burroughs and Brion Gysin turn up all over the place. Forked has a song called aHpooK, and Ah Pook is the Maya death god of a Burroughs book. The band’s old website ran a passage of Naked Lunch down its left edge, lettered by hand and printed backwards.
The band has stopped more than once. Davis explained the system to a reporter in 1993: “We’ve done that a couple of times. If we didn’t, we would’ve broken up.” Sage played Neumos and Bumbershoot in 2008 and Conor Byrne in 2014.
