Phil Gammage’s early years in music are told in a website on the Colorado New Wave/Punk scene called scarletdukes.com. The author on many of these posts on various bands is named Icepick Phil, and there is a good chance that this writer is also Phil Gammage, since Gammage has been in a band called the Scarlet Dukes. The reportage is certainly from someone who was there to see this music happen, that’s for sure.
Joey Vain and Scissors put together a six-song demo and started playing local clubs. An overview of the band by Icepick Phil says this about their live performances:
“Singer Jerry Kunkel cut a dark and menacing stance on stage. Wearing his silk Tokyo jacket and sporting an earring (one of the few men to do so at that time in Boulder), he soon grew adept at working the crowd. With the band playing their churning and sometime droning rock behind him he sang or spoke his lyrics with a satirical tone that was sometimes humorous, sometimes disturbing. Needless to say, this was not your typical music coming out of Boulder, Colorado in 1977.”
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 1979, Jimmy 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”.
(March 2015)
