Country music is easy to do if someone knows the lyrics and the song, you can follow along relatively easily.”īut, comments like that notwithstanding, Frayne was a serious musician, whose foremost influence as a pianist was Fats Domino. What country music afforded for us was there was no rehearsal we listened to the record, we drank a bunch of whiskey and coke, and played. I started listening to Jerry Lee Lewis’ album that had ‘Crazy Arms’ and Buck Owens’ greatest hits. “I’m pretty sure those guys were stoned most of the time. “In about 1966 I found a Bob Wills album and marijuana,” Frayne said in an interview with No Depression in 2018. Why did there have to be a Commander Cody? That’s a long story in itself.īut, of course, there was little sense sci-fi in the music itself… although there was a lot of weed. I had no idea anyone was going to have to be Commander Cody. Then later, this character Commander Cody made three movies, one of which was ‘Lost Planet Airmen.’ I was watching the Lost Planet Airmen movie and I saw the Commander Cody character and I thought it would be a great name for a band.
In 1948, 1949, Flash Gordon like operations would run in theaters in between films. He told the website about the origins of the group’s name, saying they got it from “the same place that George Lucas got it: from Republic Pictures. After the original group’s breakup in 1976, Frayne continued to record and tour under the name Commander Cody until shortly before the pandemic kicked in.
The sounds of rockabilly, Western swing, jump blues, jazz and boogie-woogie piano figured into the band’s free-wheeling style as readily as country, finding enthusiastic fans among followers of rock groups like the Grateful Dead, for whom Commander Cody sometimes opened, as well as devotees of more traditional music forms.Īlthough it took until 1971 for their major-label debut, “Lost in the Ozone,” to be released, the group actually formed in 1967 in Ann Arbor, Michigan, going against the tide of the psychedelia that was peaking along with the flower-power movement in favor of sounds that dipped deep into the supposedly squarer music of decades past, like Western swing pioneer Bob Wills.Ĭommander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen released seven albums on the Paramount and Warner Bros. Although the group’s style was often described in its early days as country-rock, the Bay Area-based band had a harder-driving style - and, as its sci-fi-serial-based name would indicate, more of a sense of humor - than other country-influenced artists coming along at the time down in Los Angeles, like the Eagles or Poco.
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