Commander Cody & His Lost Planet Airmen - Strange Adventures On Planet Earth

When they sang “I ain’t never had too much fun,” Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen weren’t joking. Boy, were they ever fun! And like the song said, there was never too much of it. Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen were a freakin’ blast!

Here was a band—eight members strong—that did it all: rockabilly, Western swing, jump blues, boogie-woogie, honky-tonk country, vintage R&B, straight-up rock ’n’ roll, sometimes all rolled up into one irresistible Cody-ized hodge-podge. If it was real, it was in their mix, the very definition of Americana long before there was a name for it. And they made it all sound like a great big party!

This collection of live-in-concert, vintage recordings by CC and His LPA, dating from their peak performance years of 1973-75, bears that out. While their studio recordings were outstanding, the Cody crew’s true brilliance was best experienced in a sweaty club or concert hall. They fed off one another single-mindedly, the way a seasoned jazz combo would, each player and vocalist an essential component that brought a unique stamp to the total sound.

That they were virtuosos is evident—these guys could play! But don’t let all that talent fool ya: They were also more than a little nuts and proud of it. As a unit, the LPA shared an aversion to the staid excess and pretension that was saturating so much rock music during that period. When this band hit the stage, all bets were off and only one thing was guaranteed: You were gonna have a grand old time!

The core of the band—whose hybrid moniker was derived from patching together a 1950s serial character named Commando Cody with the title of a sci-fi film, Lost Planet Airmen—came together in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in 1967. It wasn’t until they relocated to Berkeley, California, a couple of years later that folks really started to get what they were up to. Signed to Paramount Records, Cody and company released their debut album in late 1971, and by the following year they were attracting devoted audiences throughout the country.

The classic lineup—George “Commander Cody” Frayne IV (piano, vocals), Bill Kirchen (electric guitar, vocals), Andy Stein (fiddle, saxophone), Billy C. Farlow (lead vocals, harmonica), Bobby Black (steel guitar, dobro), John Tichy (rhythm electric guitar, vocals), “Buffalo” Bruce Barlow (electric bass) and Lance Dickerson (drums)—was in place by their sophomore album, and it’s that aggregation that you hear on the earliest tracks collected on this stunning live anthology. Their musical backgrounds, and interests, were all over the place, but it all jelled in a miraculously singular manner.

They weren’t the only ones trying to mine this territory. Plenty of other bands in the early ’70s were taking retro elements and attempting to fashion something new of them, but no one else made it work as seamlessly as the Cody boys. They avoided the stuffy, studious approach that made so many of the budding country-rock and blues-revival bands of the era seem just a bit too precious. The Codys sang songs of truck drivers and the women who missed them, covered obscure country and rockabilly singles, threw in some gospel, preached unabashedly about the joys of intoxication, and made it all work.

But what gave Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen their special mojo was not only their vast collective musical knowledge and prodigious skills but also the wide range of dramatically different personalities contributing to the mix. For one thing, the eight musicians came originally from such far-flung locales as Alabama, California, Connecticut, Michigan and New York before finding themselves in the same band. And although they were based in the Bay Area, they were the antithesis of the jam-based psychedelic bands associated with San Francisco’s Fillmore and Avalon ballrooms. At times, the LPA teetered on the verge of musical anarchy, yet somehow, they were as tight as any band around. Perhaps that juxtaposition of sensibilities was why they were readily accepted by the same crowd of hippies that embraced the more cerebral sounds of the day.

At first, they were something of a well-kept secret, but in the fall of 1972 the world at large caught on. A cover song that had appeared on their debut album, “Hot Rod Lincoln,” was released as a single and catapulted into the Billboard Top 10. Originally recorded by country artist Charlie Ryan in 1955, the speedy rockabilly-esque saga, the signature tune of George Frayne, Commander Cody himself, began with the declaration, “My pappy said, ‘Son, you’re gonna drive me to drinkin’ if you don’t stop drivin’ that hot rod Lincoln,’” and got wilder with each successive sung-spoken line, guitar lick and sound effect. Their only real hit, the recording boosted the band’s national profile considerably.

There was, however, much more to Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen than “Hot Rod Lincoln,” and it’s all here on these two discs, a fantastic cross-section of original material and covers. These recordings are culled from several sources, but they play out much the way one of their classic concerts did. Get behind the wheel, start ’er up and step on it. It’s got overdrive, just won’t stall!

Jeff Tamarkin