I also wanted to ask if you’d be willing to share the story of Beauregard theWrestler. [Sage’s first recording gig was playing guitar on a record Beauregard made.]

[Perking right up now] Oh sure! But he was way before punk. He was wrestling back in 1973. I was just a kid flipping through the channels, never watched wrestling before, and here was this guy, with his face in the camera. I think he had a pirate suit or something like that on. He impressed me because he was just so nasty and his insults were hilarious, and I kind of started watching him weekly. He would make his own costumes, and he always took on a different character, but he was brilliant—he was an artist in insults, I guess, and character. About two months later, I met the guy, or he met me, and he demanded that I be on his record. So it just kind of fell together and we recorded this record in like two days. He made a real music video for it, long before videos were ever even an idea. And the odd thing about his record, it had nothing to do with wrestling … he was just going to concerts and he was totally into music. He was a performer, more than a wrestler, and he was real famous during the time. He actually innovated a lot of the things that are taken for granted [in wrestling] now, like using entrance music—no one did that then.

… Back in 1973, Portland, Oregon, was what the WWF is now. It was the training ground. … I thought it would be a good way of bringing out Beauregard’s history, being able to prove, photographically, how he did innovate so much. A lot of the photographers I’ve talked to, they all agree he was the one who started it all. But everyone’s lost all their negatives and all their prints, [and] without the pictures, it’s just words. It was a large project that I’ve been working on for a couple years, and it’s just turned out totally dry. So I’m going to put out the disc [of Beauregard’s record] with this video, but without the book I planned to write on it, it would only be a very limited edition. [Though] actually, I really wanted to do a real historical thing about the Pacific Northwest and what it created.

What Greg Sage doesn’t say, is that his own work has been “a real historical thing about the Pacific Northwest.” Listen to all that it’s created—analog dreams and electric medicine. The future lies straight ahead.