The Corvairs

Under Appreciated

THE CORVAIRS
 

Phil Gammage clearly has made a lot of friends in what had already been a dozen years in music.  Martin Blazy, who was a fellow bandmember in the Corvairs, serves as the drummer on Cry of the City; and the female vocalist, Wendy Wild had been an artist in the East Village scene when Certain General was starting up.  Bassist D. Lee is from Band of Outsiders, and David Kaufman had been in the Nails the Ravers

 

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After Joey Vain and Scissors broke up, Phil Gammage got another band together called the Corvairs.  He and another student Miles Syken agreed to form a rock band; Syken had been the guitarist in a high-energy cover band called the Mutilators, with the remaining members of that band becoming a punk band called Defex.  Jon Cormany had just returned from playing in New York City with Boulder’s first punk rock band the Ravers (who by then had become the Nails – they are now one of my favorite new wave bands since I picked up their album, Dangerous Dreams), and he was in the audience for their first show at the Moose Club as the opening act for the Nightflames.  He became the band’s bassist by their next concert.  By the spring of 1979Jimmy Frost joined up as their permanent drummer.  Icepick Phil describes their sound in the early years as “a hybrid of a 60’s pop sound, surf, and artsiness”. 

 

In June 1979the Corvairs recorded a demo consisting of five original songs, including a Phil Gammage song, Hands of Time.  A CD released in 2000 includes this music; called Denver Sessions ’79, it is still available from PreFab International Recordings.  Also that summer, the Corvairs played two shows at the Blue Note club, one of them opening for the Cleveland band Pere Ubu

 

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After several dates on the West Coast, with two New Yorkers in the line-up the Corvairs moved East, where they stayed together for nearly a decade.  Over that period of time, Miles Syken left the band before their main recording period, and Martin Blazy joined as the drummer in 1986.  The Corvairs released two EP’s – Temple Fire (1983), which included “Hands of Time”; and Sad Hotel (1985) – and two LP’s – Rio Blanco (1987) and Hitchhiker (1989 – France only).  A planned 22-song retrospective called Unsafe at Any Speed – also the title of Ralph Nader’s famed book Unsafe at Any Speed on the ill-fated Chevrolet car – was to have come out in 2006 on PreFab International Recordings but has not yet been released. 

 

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November’s HeatCertain General’s first full-length album came out in 1984; like much of the Corvairs’ music, it was first released only in France, in 1984 on the L’Invitation au Suicide record label (yes, that means “the invitation to suicide”).  In 1995, the French music magazine Rock & Folk named November’s Heat as one of the best albums released between 1985 and 1995.  The album was finally released in the U.S. in 1999 and has recently been reissued on CD. 

 

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Phil Gammage left Certain General in 1985 and evidently returned to the Corvairs for a time; he then began pursuing a solo career. 

 

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Stephen Graziano, the manager and booking agent for Certain General, put together a label called SourMash Records in order to issue music by Phil Gammage and his associated bands in the US.  As described by Graziano:  “Stressing cooperation, sharing, and interdependence, both Certain General and Band of Outsiders, in partnership, financed, and organized, totally in-house, the first SourMash Records release, Far Away In America.”   Band of Outsiders was a band that was reorganized from a late 1970’s power pop band called The Limit.  Another band released on SourMash Records was Phil Gammage’s earlier band the Corvairs, which was in New York by this point. 

 

In 1995Phil Gammage founded PreFab International Recordings as a way to present his music on the Internet; their site can be found at:  www.scarletdukes.com/prefab/index.shtml .  Many records by Phil Gammagethe CorvairsCertain Generalthe Scarlet DukesVoodoo Martini, and others can be found there.  

 

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Here follows a reprint of the Trouser Press Record Guide (4th Edition) listing for the SourMash family of bands. Though slightly garbled, it presents a fairly accurate overview of our thing in the 1980’s.

Steve G.  

 

THE CORVAIRS  

Temple Fire EP (SourMash1984 

Sad Hotel EP (SourMash1985 

Rio Blanco (Cryptovision1988 

Hitchhiker (Fr. New Rose) 1989

Denver Sessions ’79 (MP3.com2001 

Unsafe at Any Speed (SourMash USA2006

 

(March 2015)

 

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Items:    The Corvairs 

 

Last edited: March 22, 2021