AADL Talks To Commander Cody

Tue, 04/24/2012 - 5:47pm

George Frayne, aka Commander Cody, formed Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen in 1967 while attending the University of Michigan. We had the opportunity to chat with George backstage at the Ark before the 40th anniversary of the John Sinclair Freedom Rally (Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen performed at the original Rally in 1971). George spoke about the formation of the band, his memories of some of Ann Arbor's musical hot spots, as well as his introduction to boogie-woogie piano, to pot, and to John Sinclair and the White Panther Party.

Transcript

• [00:00:00.27] GEORGE FRAYNE: [SINGING] My pappy said, son, you're going to drive me to drinking, and if you don't stop driving that hot rod Lincoln.
• [00:00:06.29] AMY: Hi, this is Amy.
• [00:00:07.59] ANDREW: And this is Andrew. And in this episode, AADL talks to Commander Cody.
• [00:00:13.47] AMY: George Frayne, also known as Commander Cody, performed with His Lost Planet Airmen at the original John Sinclair Freedom Rally in 1971. While he was at the Ark to perform on the 40th anniversary of the rally, we had the chance to chat with him backstage before the show.
• [00:00:27.26] George talks with us about his introduction to the piano, to pot, and to John Sinclair, his memories of his student years in Ann Arbor, the formation of his band, and some of the memorable musical venues he's played in town. How'd you get started in Ann Arbor?
• [00:00:42.51] GEORGE FRAYNE: Well, I was going to college here. And I was working in the kitchen at Phi Kappa Psi. I was washing pots. They started me off as a waiter. And that didn't last for long. Because I was coming in with paint all over me all the time. So they complained in the main room. So I wound up as the pot washer.
• [00:00:56.38] And the big, giant, 350-pound cook had some kind of episode when she was choking to death. And I saved her life. So everyone loved me there. And they took really good care of me. I could just come at any time I wanted to and wash the pots. I used to come in drunk around 2 o'clock in the morning and do the pots.
• [00:01:14.98] So I ran into John Tichy, who ran the kitchen there. He was the student guy who ran the kitchen. And it turns out he had a frat band called The Amblers with the lead singer Frank Winchester, a local Ann Arbor high school guy, 6'4", bleached his hair blond, wore one black glove, played tambourine with his left hand with a black glove on, blew harmonica.
• [00:01:38.43] He was way ahead of his time. He was like the most outrageous guy in the world. In 1964, the guys from Sigma Chi were on a crusade to find him and tar and feather. They had the tar, the feathers. And they're looking for him. He lived at his mom's house and had a Volkswagen convertible and drove on the street, on the sidewalk, and did all those kind of outrageous stuff you could get away with doing in the '60's.
• [00:02:01.70] He would pull up in front of girls, hi, honey, like one of those little advertisements for the little broadcasting microphone used to have, Mr. Microphone, remember that, hi, honey, I'll come back to pick you up later. He did that. He did that. Anyway, 6'4", bleached blond hair, and he was really obnoxious.
• [00:02:17.58] But he was a good singer. And we almost made a 45 record of You Are My Sunshine. Then he got killed in driving his 409 Chevy on the Pennsylvania Turnpike at extreme speeds and probably alcohol was involved also.
• [00:02:31.02] Because alcohol was involved in everything back then. We used to drink at Mr. Flood's Party until it closed, jump in the car, drive to New York.
• [00:02:37.42] ANDREW: Where did the name or persona, I'm not sure which, Commander Cody came from?
• [00:02:41.95] GEORGE FRAYNE: The Commander Cody thing came from me. In the summertime, when I wasn't at school here, I went back to New York. I was a life guard at a place called Jones Beach, which is a huge, huge area of 13 beaches. Five million people go there on July 4th. There are 450 lifeguards.
• [00:02:54.34] And I had a lifeguard band there, too. It was really a bunch of horrible musicians. I had a Farfisa combo compact. And we played. Gerry Margolis, the famous lawyer for music in L.A., was the lead guitar player then. Later, he went to law school and then moved to L.A. But he was a guitar player. And Howie Havermeyer played bass. And God knows who played drums.
• [00:03:17.35] And we were looking for a band name. And we were sitting at the Jones Beach Hotel guzzling tequila. And there was one of those science fiction Flash Gordon things but from the '40's after the war. And Flash Gordon, of course, all those guys had grown up and quit doing stuff like that.
• [00:03:32.38] But the black and white serials were still being made. And the guy who was doing it was called Commando Cody. And Tristam Coffin was the guy's name. And I loved the look of it. I just look on this guy with the silver helmet on.
• [00:03:45.15] He's got the black leather jacket. He's got the rocket on the back. He's got the two controls. One says up, down. The other says fast, slow. He puts it on up and fast and it takes off. I'm going, yeah, I like this guy.
• [00:03:57.14] They put a bunch of these serials together. One was Zombies from the Stratosphere, Radar Men from the Moon, and the Lost Planet Airmen. And I thought Lost Planet Airmen, that sounds like a pretty cool name for a blues band. But they didn't like it. Instead, they voted to call it the Lorenzo Lightfoot Athletic Club and Orchestra.
• [00:04:20.39] So I had the title of the band name all ready for me when I came back to Michigan. It turns out the bass player had learned to play steel guitar. West Virginia Creeper never learned how to play steel guitar. The first album's got out of tune steel guitar all over it.
• [00:04:35.13] But he was trying to play steel guitar. And we had found this hillbilly kid named Billy C. Farlow who was actually from Alabama. I thought, wow, an authentic hillbilly. We got to do some country. So we started doing the Hank Williams and Buck Owens stuff.
• [00:04:50.46] At the time, the last band that we had had up here with John Tichy was called The Schwaben Stage Band. And The Schwaben had been condemned at that point. And they were tearing the thing down. So I figured we needed a new band name. So anyways so I broke out that as a country and western blues band title for that. And that's how they came about.
• [00:05:07.35] ANDREW: What were some your favorite venues to play or to go to in '60's Ann Arbor?
• [00:05:12.34] GEORGE FRAYNE: Around here?
• [00:05:12.94] ANDREW: Yeah.
• [00:05:13.16] GEORGE FRAYNE: Well, we started off, once there was that coffee house, the Canterbury House. That's where we played our official first gig in 1960-- actually, it was February 1968 at the Canterbury House. And then we played in Mark's Coffeeshop in the basement there. Those were the two places. We never really played in bars.
• [00:05:37.52] I mean earlier I played at the Heidelberg. And I played at the Schwaben Inn. We all played all those horrible dumpy Ann Arbor trash bins. But the coffee houses were the fun places to play in the '60's.
• [00:05:50.76] And then later on, Mr. Flood's was never fun to play. Because you had to cram up in that little corner up there. And it was very, very uncomfortable.
• [00:05:58.17] AMY: When you were playing at the John Sinclair Freedom Rally, were you aware at the time that this was going to be a pretty historic event?
• [00:06:04.55] GEORGE FRAYNE: Well, if you've got John Lennon driving out from New York, you're pretty much going to figure out that's going to be a pretty big event, especially at that time when he was the hugest thing on the planet and everybody was watching every single thing that he did. Yeah, I was pretty much aware of that, yeah.
• [00:06:16.20] AMY: Did it feel different?
• [00:06:17.72] GEORGE FRAYNE: Oh, yeah, no, it was a momentous event. There was a huge buzz and vibe, a positive brotherly type hippy vibe-type thing, going on there for sure. But that doesn't mean that everyone wasn't stoned out of their gourds.
• [00:06:33.84] AMY: Can you tell us something about John Lennon we maybe don't know?
• [00:06:36.60] GEORGE FRAYNE: Well, I could tell you dirty stories about drugs. But I don't want to do that. Because we're talking about on the anniversary of John Lennon's death, I don't want to besmirch his reputation or anything like that. But he did take a lot of drugs. And of course, so did I.
• [00:06:51.41] And we got along on that level. But I thought that he was a pretty good guy. And he was pretty straightforward. And he was damn sincere. I mean his life was, well, believed in all that stuff. He really did. We were just a bunch crass hippies trying to smoke some pot and get high and have some fun.
• [00:07:07.95] And he's this very, very serious individual. And his whole vibe was like, that's why him being with John Sinclair was so important because the two heavyweight characters, these guys, but good, really serious, serious individuals, but with very good vibes, not negative vibes but uplifting positive energy out of these two different characters. I'm really happy to have been involved with the thing.
• [00:07:30.58] It's too bad that John Sinclair couldn't have been there. They could have let him out that afternoon. That would've been great. The roof would have blown off that place.
• [00:07:39.78] ANDREW: How was the show?
• [00:07:40.52] GEORGE FRAYNE: Oh, it was rocking. It was rocking. You go. You see the movie of it, right? And I was watching the movie the other day. I said, wait a second. We're going way too fast. Somebody sped up this thing. Because we're jumping around. It looks like someone sped up the thing. I got a tuning fork, no, no. That's in the right key. It's not sped up. It's the boy's already amped.
• [00:08:00.89] And the film is pretty hilarious. I don't know if you've seen the film. But I recommend that people do, try to get a hold of the Ten For Two movie. It's a gas and a 1/2. The people who filmed it were just as stoned as the people who are in it.
• [00:08:14.42] ANDREW: When did you first become acquainted with John Sinclair?
• [00:08:16.53] GEORGE FRAYNE: Well, through the White Panther Party. I was the unofficial minister of misinformation.
• [00:08:22.21] ANDREW: And what did your duties include as the minister of misinformation?
• [00:08:23.91] GEORGE FRAYNE: Lies, lying to everybody about everything.
• [00:08:27.08] AMY: So you never joined, what did you think about them at the time and their political--
• [00:08:31.23] GEORGE FRAYNE: The White Panther Party?
• [00:08:31.98] AMY: Yeah.
• [00:08:33.52] GEORGE FRAYNE: I wasn't a, as they would say in New York, I was no bomb chucker. But I was as far left as you can be without being a bomb chucker. And I agreed with a lot of what they were talking about, which is kind of what we're talking about today, the same thing, the inequality. The rich people got all the power and all the stuff.
• [00:08:51.35] And we got nothing, except they're putting us in jail. They're wasting our taxpayer's money putting us in jail for two joints of marijuana, which could still happen to me. I'm in upstate New York. They can do that to me. I can get thrown in jail for two joints, for five years not 10, for two joints of marijuana.
• [00:09:06.06] They won't do that. Because I would make a big deal of that about what a waste of the taxpayer's money throwing 67-year-old disabled veteran Commander Cody in jail for having two joints of marijuana. I would make that a big deal.
• [00:09:19.44] That would probably the best thing that could happen to me in my career. TSA finally busts me, drag me out for two joints, ah, we got you here. We got you in court on some pot, you hippy. Now that would be great.
• [00:09:30.66] That would revive my career completely, like one of those guys in Hollywood. You want to have your career get rerevived? Go down on the Sunset Strip and get busted. Robert Downey's the biggest star on the planet right now, right? And he came out of that really good and Hugh what's his name.
• [00:09:46.99] ANDREW: Did you spend a lot of time hanging around those guys at concerts in West Park or at the Hill Street houses?
• [00:09:52.37] GEORGE FRAYNE: I went over to the house over by the fraternity house across the street from where, didn't the Ark used to be up there?
• [00:09:59.92] AMY: Yeah.
• [00:10:00.91] GEORGE FRAYNE: Yeah, right in that general vicinity, the Ark was one of those old fraternity houses originally, right?
• [00:10:04.30] AMY: Yep.
• [00:10:04.67] GEORGE FRAYNE: Yeah. I went up there a couple times. They had pretty good weed up there. So I was selling weed, putting myself through undergraduate and graduate school. Graduate school, I had graduated to hashish.
• [00:10:16.97] And I was flying out to Berkeley every weekend. And I would get two shopping bags with those giant huge pies. Today's terrorist is yesterday's freedom fighter, guys with the gold stamp on it, carry through the airport. Nobody knew. And I put myself through graduate school doing that.
• [00:10:31.37] AMY: Congratulations.
• [00:10:33.34] GEORGE FRAYNE: Well, I was on a full ride, too. So it really helped being in a band and selling paintings and smuggling pot. I did pretty good.
• [00:10:38.34] AMY: How'd you learn to play the piano?
• [00:10:39.71] GEORGE FRAYNE: My mom made me take piano lessons when I was a little kid. I really hated it. And I quit. I had a tantrum. She had a piano in the house at all times.
• [00:10:48.99] And later in ninth grade I had a music class with a guy named Mr. O'Reilly. And Mr. O'Reilly would play boogie woogie music. I didn't know what it was. He called it the army boogie. And he's sit down at the piano in the class. And everyone would pay attention to him.
• [00:11:03.55] This is the last class of the day. Everyone wants to go out. It's mostly guys. We're on our way. I was in my track team, as a matter of fact. And we wanted to go out and get outside and stuff like that. And this was in the springtime. And he would just play the army boogie. And everyone would go, oh, right.
• [00:11:16.36] So I went to my mom. I said, well, I just heard this stuff. It's called the army boogie. It was really cool. What's that? She goes, oh, boogie woogie.
• [00:11:22.41] My mother's a beatnik. She used to hang out at Eddie Condon's in New York City. She went to Pratt Institute. She goes, oh, no problem. She gets this old jazz guy named Bob Neidig, who played with Eddie Condon. And he had a place out on the island. This was Long Island. This was [INAUDIBLE] on Long Island.
• [00:11:38.53] He would jump on the train, come out, and meet me at a little place where he would rent. And I took hour-long, it was $50 for an hour back then. And that was a lot of money. But my mom really wanted me to do it.
• [00:11:49.97] And he gave me 10 lessons over a period of two years. And he told me how to make chords. He told me how to play the boogie woogie left hand, how to practice, how to learn that, and how to play songs, the concept of singing along while you, you know a jazz place, you always hear in the background. They're going [MAKING HORN NOISE]. While they're playing, the guy's mumbling.
• [00:12:09.69] Well, that's what you do. You sing to yourself a couple of seconds before you play it, a couple milliseconds before you play it. So he told me the three valuable things.
• [00:12:18.60] Most important was how to make chords. There's a bunch of stuff he couldn't teach me. And in the last lesson he said, listen kid, because he gave me metronome. And I swore it sped up. He says, listen kid, you'll never make it.
• [00:12:33.74] On his dying bed, I had to do this. He was in bed. He was in all his stuff. I came in. And I gave him a copy of my version of Beat Me Daddy Eight to the Bar, which is the song that he had taught me 20 years earlier and played it for him and said, hey Bob, you were wrong. You blew that one.
• [00:12:52.43] ANDREW: In the 1960's, did Ann Arbor feel like it was people like you who were smoking pot and playing music against all the squares in town?
• [00:13:00.81] GEORGE FRAYNE: We didn't meet any-- we're up on the East Liberty side. We're up by there. John was in mechanical engineering. I'm over in architecture and design. Don't forget we're all downtown. There's only 25,000 people. And architecture and design is over by the Law Quad over there next to Dominick's.
• [00:13:18.74] So we're out there drinking espresso. We're wired to the teeth in 1962 in espresso from Dominick's. Well, my brother stoned me, in 1965 is when I started getting high. I was just a frat drunk pretty much.
• [00:13:35.06] I just came in clean. I was at a quad for a year, one room for six, and then another one. And me and the other guy, roommate from that post-pledge at Sigma Alpha Epsilon, because we were jocks. [INAUDIBLE], my roommate, he was a hockey player. And I was on the track team.
• [00:13:51.18] So we pledged Sigma Alpha Epsilon. We got to move to the frat house, got to move out of there. So that was before I even had the concept of living in an apartment. Kids go right to apartments now. This whole idea was just, it took me a long time to get to them.
• [00:14:05.13] I didn't get into an apartment until I was a junior. And that was after I had met Tichy. And we had been doing the band. And we started doing all that kind of stuff. And all that happened in my third year.
• [00:14:13.61] So the first two years I'm just basically a straight beer drinking frat man. Then my brother stoned, my brother comes to Michigan and gets me stoned. I get out of the frat house, get into my own house. We started playing in the band like that.
• [00:14:28.14] And there were a couple of years there where I didn't paint. I went to Wisconsin, took a job in Wisconsin when I graduated with an MFA in 1968. And I taught at Wisconsin for two semesters before I just said, this is crap.
• [00:14:38.79] And San Francisco is really rocking. It's 1969. I can get out there and get in on it if I jump in my van right now. And I did. I just said, the hell with this. Anybody coming? And Billy C. and the Creeper jumped in the van with me and went out.
• [00:14:50.04] Bill Kirchen was already there. And he was playing around. He knew the basic lay of the land. So it wasn't like we were coming in completely cold.
• [00:14:56.99] And then that summer all the people from Ann Arbor vacations, summer vacation 1969, everybody was in California. Everyone was in the Bay Area. I mean all my friends from grad school to medical school, all these guys were there. Fans were there.
• [00:15:10.60] So we went to an audition at a place called Mandrakes on a Thursday night. And the place was packed. The lady went, whoa. And we got a job right away. And I got out there June 6, 1969. By August 18, we opened for The Dead.
• [00:15:26.17] And then after that we went through a starvation period. And I lived in a closet for six months ago. We had some really, really bad times. But the idea was right. And we never really got rich. The only thing never happened to us is we never got rich, which is actually a good thing. Because I probably would have killed myself.
• [00:15:46.98] ANDREW: For more information on Commander Cody, visit freeingjohnsinclair.org.
• [00:15:51.78] GEORGE FRAYNE: [SINGING] Oh, my dog died just yesterday left me all alone.
• [00:15:57.84] AMY: AADL talks to Commander Cody is a production of the Ann Arbor District Library.
• [00:16:02.23] GEORGE FRAYNE: [SINGING] They repossessed my home. But that's just a drop in the bucket compared to losing you. I'm down to seeds and stems, again, too. Got the down to seeds and stems again blues.
• [00:16:32.19] [APPLAUSE]
• [00:16:36.15] GEORGE FRAYNE: Thank you very much.