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”.
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.
(March 2015)
