#Commander cody movie#

But that devotion is not an easy thing to stick to in the Midwest where, chances are, you associate that type of music with the greasers at the drive-in who love to vamp on longhairs and inevitably wind up becoming cops.

After the Commander Cody band formed, according to a 1970 profile by Ed Ward in Rolling Stone, “Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen have devoted themselves body and soul to country music and old-time rock and roll. “I asked him once how he did it, and he said he just played the left-hand figures nonstop all day for about a year, until it became second nature,” the guitarist said.īorn in Boise, Idaho in 1944, Frayne was raised in the Long Island area before attending the University of Michigan, where he received a master of fine arts degree in painting and sculpture the same year the Lost Planet Airmen assembled.įrayne’s first Ann Arbor band was the Fantastic Surfing Beavers, with a different frontman. Malachowski pointed out the complicated nature of a piano playing style that required different rhythms and even speeds for left-hand and right-hand parts. “The Commander I knew was a music-history buff, fine-arts scholar and one of the sharpest minds I’ve ever encountered,” David Malachowski, a guitarist who joined Commander Cody’s band in the late ’90s, told the Times Union, a newspaper in Frayne’s final hometown, Saratoga Springs. 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.

#Commander cody movie#

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.