said, “Hey, you play that thing?” He goes, “Yeah.” He comes, he sits in, he’s got a perfect ear; you don’t have to show him anything. He’s like [steel guitar player] Bobby Black — perfect ear, knows everything, he just plays it perfectly. So we’ve got a frat band, the bass player gave up the bass [and] decided he was gonna learn how to play the steel guitar. Andy Stein was the guy who arranged stuff, and then [guitarist] Bill Kirchen picked up on that, because Bill had come over to my band.
He had his own band called Seventh Seal, which was like a hippie early heavy-metal band, but he was also a folkie. There was a whole folk scene which developed into some of the heavy-metal scene, so I got him in the band; then I had [vocalist and harmonica player] Billy C. Farlow come in. I found him playing the midway lunch for 50 bucks a night, and he was a songwriter. So I had him sit in, and then we got really stoned and went off and wrote ‘Seeds And Stems’ together, and that’s the first thing we did. Boom. That’s where it went.
And what kicked it off was listening to Bob Wills and me realizing that this is great reefer music that we were playing for all these hippies to get turned on to. This is a beautiful kind of music to play for them. We moved not to San Francisco but to Berkeley. When we first came to San Francisco, all those Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane
Above is the cover of Commander Cody And His Lost Planet Airmen’s 1975 self-titled album, the band’s first recording for Warner Bros. after leaving Paramount.
A rare concert poster offering the details of a Commander Cody And His Lost Planet Airmen show at Armadillo World Headquarters. The Armadillo, in Austin, Texas, was where Commander Cody and his band recorded their classic 1974 live album.
musical discipline.
Frayne: We also started listening to a little Cab Calloway. Then we realized what Bob Wills was; he was the guy that brought jazz to country. Whatever the big swing hit would be, they would be able to play that in their live show; there was jazz. And we noticed that it was a lot more simple to learn those tunes that way than to try to cop a Benny
Goodman [song], because he had already simplified it. They made it so it was easy to play, and I wasn’t that good a player at that time, and I’m looking for stuff that’s easy to play, so we fell into that.
Then I’m sitting outside my little apartment in downtown Ann Arbor and here comes this weird-looking guy, Andy Stein, walking by and he’s got a fiddle case, and I
players ... well, the Dead liked us because Jerry [Garcia] was gonna learn how to play steel. The Airplane guys were nice to us, but they weren’t really behind us. The crowd in San Francisco didn’t like us. That whole country-blues thing that went with the East Bay in Berkeley, we fell right into that.
And so the Lost Planet Airmen were born, behind the hazy cloud of their fearless Commander. It was the first hippie-
Commander Cody continued on page 56
By Rush Evans
Like the music of his hero Bob Wills, the music of Commander Cody still lives, breathes and pays the bills thanks to the tenacious dedication of its creator to working on the proverbial rock-and-roll road (and yes, Bob Wills music counts as rock and roll).
But that doesn’t mean that the studio isn’t important to a road hog like Cody. His new album on Blind Pig, Dopers, Drunks, and Everyday Losers, proves that 40 years down that road, the Commander can still write a song, dress it up and bring it to life.
“I hadn’t done a good studio album in almost 30 years, and it is time for a return to high quality,” he says, and Dopers... lives up to his promise, from the first driving steel-guitar notes of “Roll Your Own,” into the road-tripping take
on John Hiatt’s “Tennessee Plates,” and through a dozen more tracks of teardrop country and rocking western swing.
Among the new compositions by Cody himself (originals credited to his real name, George Frayne) is a road ode called “OK Hotel,” which could have easily shown up on 1971’s Lost in the Ozone album, though contemporary references assure that this particular Lost Planet Airman is still living and working in the future (“Mary the maid comes in once a day, when her habit don’t keep her in the bed / And don’t leave anything behind unless you don’t mind seeing your stuff selling on the web / at the OK Hotel you’ll be doing swell, if you can stand the smell and the maniacs”).
Cody’s got plenty of Internet know-how, and the “OK Hotel” came right out of his own musical experimentation on the info superhighway.
“‘OK Hotel’ is from the Deep Toad project 2004 when I was learning how to use garage band,” he says. “Deep Toad is a band I made up. I got a drum machine, I played one take on the bass, one take on the imitation saxophone, like that. It took me three days to make an album. It’s not the hottest thing in the world, but the tunes are funny. I called it Deep Toad and I put it out on the garage band Web site, which is a great way for new bands to get going. [It was] a mock album demo of songs that have been around for decades. ‘OK Hotel’ is the best of these.”
Cody also took the opportunity to work up a new take on an old classic, with a torchy chanteuse taking a guest vocal on the Commander’s signature song, “Down To Seeds And Stems Again Blues.” Cody’s daughter, a New York model, turned him on to her singing friend, Circe Link, whose mournful voice recalled a version
by the late great Nicolette Larson.
The album’s opening number, “Roll Your Own,” had been recorded by Commander Cody And The Lost Planet Airmen some years ago, as produced by the late Hoyt Axton, who had also recorded it himself to great effect. It’s an Axton original that Cody chose as the closer for the album, a song you already know, as most famously sung by a Beatle.
“Hoyt was a good friend of mine,” says Cody. “He tried to give me ‘The No No Song’ in ’75, and I rejected it after listening to my first wife’s advice. He gave it to Ringo, and they made five million bucks, so I thought I’d finally do a version of it.”
Axton would probably be proud to hear his rehab protagonist from “The No No Song” as another great character in the long line of Dopers, Drunks, and Everyday Losers in Commander Cody’s musical universe.
References:
Archives