CA: Your History of Portland Punk Vol. 1 highlights how diverse things were, in the beginning of what we call “punk.” Do you have any take on how things have changed, or the commercialization of the word “punk”?

Greg Sage: Then, it wasn’t commercial at all. Usually when something’s new it takes a long time before people get behind it. When we put out Is This Real? … it definitely did not fit in; none of our records did. Then nine, ten years later people are saying, “Yeah, it’s the punk classic of the ’80s.” And I think in your mind now it is, but when it actually happened, it was far from that. We weren’t even really a punk band. See, we were even farther out in left field than the punk movement because we didn’t even wish to be classified, and that was kind of a new territory.

You’ve said that you never really listen to your older stuff, but I imagine, putting together the box set, that you’ve listened to the old stuff now. Did any of that material particularly resonate for you now?

No. I mean, I don’t take anything I do that seriously. Once I’m finished with a record, I’m finished with it. I look ahead; I never look back.

These box sets coming out, and the CD retrospectives, it seems like this whole new generation’s getting into them.

Well, it’s a good way of presenting something as directly as possible, but that wasn’t my motivation at all. … Is This Real? was basically stolen from me. Hell, that record was in print for over twenty years and we never received a cent for it. And the person who stole it from me laughed in my face and said, “Go ahead and sue me, you’re too poor to.” It was just like having someone kidnap a kid of yours or something, that’s kind of how it felt. I’d always planned that I was going to do those records justice if I could ever get them back—so the box set to me wasn’t [meant] as a collector’s item or anything. It was where I was able to resume where things were taken out of my hands, kind of unfairly, and put the records back in the correct order.