Glorious Results of a Misspent Youth
By Ed Reynolds
Commander Cody
Adored by hippies and despised by the American establishment, Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen introduced the world to a lethal combination of piano-pounding rock ‘n’ roll, electrified Texas swing, and truck-driving country and western. As the defiant idealism of the ’60s melted into the revolutionary decadence of the ’70s, the band, led by Commander Cody (George Frayne) from behind his piano, scored a Top Ten hit in 1971 with the irrepressible “Hot Rod Lincoln.”A noon phone call to Frayne’s Saratoga Springs, New York, residence was greeted with some reluctance by the Commander. “Give me your first question, and I’ll tell you if I’m going to do this.” He scoffed at the first query regarding the trucker aspect of the band. “I think we ought to straighten something out. I’m not the truck drivin’ guy, that’s [original Lost Planet Airmen guitarist] Bill Kirchen. I do two truckin’ songs per night.” Frayne agreed to field a few more questions, and soon was laughing through anecdotes about Communists, the FBI, and Hunter S. Thompson.
Black & White: Tell me about the first Commander Cody gig, when you were maced by police during a Berkeley riot.
Commander Cody: (Slightly irritated) Where did you get that from?
B&W: Your bio on your web site.
Cody: That was not our first . . . (Long pause) Actually, that is correct (laughs). It was a freebie for Cody’s Bookstore. And the only reason the guy hired us was because he saw my truck that said “Cody” on the side, so he figured he should give us a gig. It was July 4, 1969. They [students] started demonstrating, and moved down the street. The kids were coming with a wall of cops behind them. It was inevitable that the giant cloud of gas got to us sooner or later. It’s nice to know there’s still something correct in the bio.
B&W: I read that the band created quite a stir when you played a country-and-western convention in Nashville in 1973.
Cody: Yeah, we were the first hippies that actually went down there to play. We got a lot of “Get a haircut” stuff. They didn’t like us very much.
B&W: And you played the Communist Party festival in Paris that same year?
Cody: Yeah, it’s funny. The only way to get started was to play free things for everybody. There would be a free concert almost everyday in Berkeley. We did benefits for everybody we could. We did Black Panthers, we did White Panthers, we did Gray Panthers. So the actual Communist Party invited us; we were the only American act. The Communists had read in the Berkeley Barb, this hippie rag, that we were these revolutionary Commies from the United States (laughs). The American Indian Movement–the Russell Means guys–later took over Alcatraz, and they invited us out there. I don’t know why, cowboys and Indians or something. We stayed out there, met all the Indian guys, came back the next day, and the FBI was on my case from that point on.
B&W: Did Castro really invite the band to play Cuba?
Cody: (Surprised) Well, yes they did! The Cubans invited us to come down because they were trying to make contact with some kind of American group. Or anybody. Like the Communists finally got ahold of Jane Fonda to go do their shit for them, but I wasn’t exactly up for that. We were radical in the way that we were different from everything else, but so was everybody different from everything else at that time. And to put us in that quote/unquote “bag,” to use the nomenclature of the time, of being actual card-carrying Commies was a whole other deal.
B&W: Tell me about David Letterman kicking you off his show because you were drunk.
Cody: Yeah, I was drunk on the “Letterman Show.” I was on the show three times because they couldn’t get anybody to be on in 1983 when they were first starting up. So I would go (laughs). The last time, I was supposed to be on Monday but wasn’t. So I went out and found a bunch of friends of mine, and we partied. I was supposed to be there on Tuesday, but they wouldn’t put me on. Finally they put me on Wednesday, and by that time I had been partying for three days. Letterman at that time was a 12-stepper [Alcoholics Anonymous], and 12-steppers and me don’t get along very well.
B&W: What about Hunter S. Thompson throwing bombs at you in a Florida hotel room?
Cody: I was booked with the Rolling Stone Lecture Bureau through a woman who worked for Cox Cable in 1977, when The Lost Planet Airmen Band had broken up, and I didn’t have anything to do. I did lectures for Rolling Stone, and the subject was “The Function of the Subconscious Mind.” It was about creativity, and I lectured at eight or nine colleges around the country. Hunter Thompson saw me on that last “Letterman Show” we were talking about, and at that time everyone wanted to interview him because they saw how wacky and zany he was. He said he’d do an interview with me, so Cox Cable flies me down to Key West, where Bill Murray and Hunter Thompson are holding forth, doing more drugs and alcohol than you can possibly imagine (laughs). The interview started, and Hunter took out a taser [stun gun] and fired it at the camera man, who immediately packed up and flew back to Washington, D.C., leaving me all alone. There was a woman there who had a giant bag of drugs, and she wound up in my room. Hunter and the owner of the hotel didn’t like me because I had on an F-18 T-shirt, and they were Navy guys and they didn’t figure I had been in the service. So they got in their little boat next to the hotel, and Hunter had taped together a bowling ball-sized object made of taped-together M-80s that he fired through the sliding glass door of my room. Sounded like a bunch of shotgun blasts, broke all the glass, and set the room on fire! The chick grabs her bag of dope and heads out the door, and, of course, Hunter was out there waiting on her (laughs).
B&W: Living in Michigan in the ’60s, did you know the MC5?
Cody: Yes, indeed. I was listening to Oscar Peterson, Count Basie, and a lot of those kind of piano players that are really important. But the MC5 I never liked because it reminded me of Ted Nugent and stuff that was too loud and too stupid. I can’t remember what the theme song of the MC5 was.
B&W: “Kick Out the Jams.”
Cody: Yeah! “Kick out the jams, motherf***er!” That describes the Detroit attitude perfectly: Kick out the jams, motherf***er! So I never got along with that kind of music, because we were serious about playing electrified western swing with a beat. We loved it, and tried to play it modern enough so that people could dig it. And I think in the long term we were successful, because we spawned Asleep at the Wheel, and they went on to be very successful.
B&W: Did you spend much time with Janis Joplin?
Cody: I met Janis and hung around her at the same time when Kristofferson met her. She was a wonderful, wonderful person. She had the body of a 14-year-old girl and the face of a 45-year-old woman. And she was, like, 22 at the time. She had a lot of problems with self-confidence and stuff like that. You’d look at her face and go, “Jesus, this is a hardened hag,” but she was not at all. She was actually a sweet kid. She found her own way to get out of it, and blew it.
B &W: Do you miss the hippie days?
Cody: Well, yes and no. They [hippies] have their own built-in minority support group, you know what I mean? They started that whole politically correct crap: You gotta be nice to everyone no matter what. So no, I don’t miss the hippies (laughs). I wasn’t really a hippie. I never grew my hair that long. We were just in it for the “crazy chicks” part of the hippie movement. So was everybody else (laughs). Get some of that free love, baby! A lot of us just quit our jobs and said, “What the f***, let’s see what happens.” And we lucked out