Commander Cody is George Frayne, and was nineteen years old on the day Whitney Houston was born, in north Jersey; the two were within 100 miles of each other. Frayne was living in the New York metro area, working through his summers as a lifeguard, among the millions of bathers at Jones Beach. Houston’s family moved from Newark to North Orange in the summer of 1967, the same summer that Frayne moved on to Ann Arbor, Michigan, to pursue on a masters in Sculpture and Painting. The Houston family—entertainment exec John and performer mother Cissy—taught Whitney piano and voice at home. George Frayne graduated in 1968, and accepted a job teaching art at Wisconsin State University in Oshkosh, but couldn’t sustain both his work in his art and his day job. By June of 1969, the monikered band and its leader—Commander Cody and the Lost Planet Airmen-- arrived in San Francisco with their gear loaded in a truck Frayne had just bought; they were ready and willing to join the psychedelic disarray taking place. Two months later, the Airmen would have risen suddenly, to be the opening act for the Grateful Dead. Frayne would still be jamming with Jerry two decades later.
Whitney Houston was eleven years old when she first took a solo, at the New Hope Baptist Church in Newark; Frayne’s major-label success came the same year, with Lost in the Ozone, a work of Byrds-inflected country-rock too electric for the Grand Ol’ Opry. Allegedly, Warner Brothers wanted the band to sound more like the Eagles; the band, in its rockabilly and Texas swing sensibility, declined. Tracks were recorded both in Ann Arbor and in Berkeley, California, and the album’s single, “Hot Rod Lincoln,” went #9 on the Billboard country/western charts. The next year, the Cody and the Airmen produced Hot Licks, Cold Steel & Truckers Favorites, and achieved generally an album-a-year through the 1970s. By the time Whitney Houston was singing background vocals on Chaka Khan’s “I’m Every Woman” in 1978, Frayne and his Airmen had released seven albums, including a 1975 live recording Rolling Stone noted as one of the finest live recordings of all time (Live from Deep in the Heart of Texas). By the early 1980s, Whitney Houston had been spotted performing at one of her mother’s shows, by an Arista Records A&R rep, and Frayne’s band had morphed enough that he declared himself The Commander Cody Band; since its inception, Frayne’s group has included John Tichy, Billy C. Farlow, Bill Kirchen, Andy Stein, Baulf “Buffalo” Bruce Barlow, Lance Dickerson, and Bobby Black.
In 1986, Commander Cody released Let’s Rock on Blind Pig Records, after a six-year hiatus from recording; the same year, Whitney Houston had risen to an established stardom following her debut album. In 1988, Houston sang for Nelson Mandela, the Summer Olympics, and on the Grammys, and won one, for Best Female Pop Vocal; in 1988 while Commander Cody amassed a huge band for a well-produced eight minutes of “Beat Me Daddy 8 to the Bar” on that year’s Jerry Lewis Telethon, and released Sleazy Roadside Stories on the Relix label. Through the 1990s, Frayne would pursue his visual art, producing a feature film, a series of oversized canvases of photorealism, and sculpture, while the music and touring continued. Whitney Houston sang the National Anthem at the Super Bowl in 1991; I remember watching in awe at what it might have meant to all of us, as many watching at home as were in the stadium, a place larger than I could imagine. Whitney Houston went on to quadruple-platinum status; she was probably on The Bodyguard World Tour when I discovered my father’s cassette of Lost in the Ozone: faster country than I had ever known. I remember I went to a prom in the mid-1990s whose theme was Whitney Houston’s triumphant “I Will Always Love You,” and I took the Commander Cody tape with me to college, and have never lost it. I don’t own any recordings of Whitney Houston, but can hear the haunting strains of that pop song even now in my memory. Cody kept up with his touring, his recordings, and his art; in 2009, alongside another new recording (his twenty-first, Dopers, Drunks and Everyday Losers), Commander Cody released a coffee-table book of his stories, including fun tales of hotel mania with Hunter S. Thompson involving fireworks in the hallway. Relix Magazine said Frayne’s new recording still, after over forty years, “bridge[s] the gap between twanged-out country sagas and sing-along hippie anthems.”
I didn’t know that Whitney Houston had been found dead in at the Beverly Hilton Hotel in Beverly Hills on Saturday afternoon. Houston was found dead at the Beverly Hills; the news had been first reported by a Twitter user at 4:15 PM, forty-five minutes before any mainstream media, and four hours before the Commander Cody Band took the stage of the Tupelo Music Hall in White River Junction, Vermont. I won’t proport to know what the connection is between the death of a starlet—one of America’s beauties, who serenaded us through proms and the Star Spangled Banner, through films and cassettes, the Grammys and the Olympics—and the crowd on the other coast, that gathered within a converted freight house, to witness the historical, and the epic work of George Frayne, Commander Cody, on a cold night in New England, interpret slices of our American musical heritage. There is something unique and patriotic that spans these events, these lives, from musical coast to coast; boogie-woogie piano, conceived deep in the heart of Texas and elsewhere, echoed across the heartland, in unwitting American memoriam.
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"It’s really simple what’s happening out there now," Commander Cody, explained in an interview with J. Eric Smith. "Ever since the ’90s came on there’s been this whole generation of people who actually thought that Janet Jackson and Madonna and all of them were singing and dancing at the same time when they saw them on stage. But now they’re realizing ‘Oh my god, that was on tape!’ and they’re looking for something real. So when they go to some bar and hear what a real live band is all about and grasp the concept of people making it up as they go along, they’re like ‘Whoa, we’ve been missing something all these years!’ That means that people who can do what I do are in business these days."
I cannot confirm the validity of the quote above, taken from an alleged interview with J. Eric Smith (no relation). The excerpt is taken from
http://www.answers.com/topic/commander-cody-and-his-lost-planet-airmen#ixzz1mEkZbAxJ
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George Frayne, with “vertigo and two torn rotators and a fractured hip,” as he described to an interviewer in 2009, emerged to center stage at the Tupelo Music Hall in White River Junction, Vermont on a cold Saturday night in February, and stood behind his stickered Yamaha keyboard on a stand (“Ancient Alien on Board”). He wore a suit jacket and t-shirt, dress pants, ball cap with an airman-style emblem. To his left stood bassist Randy Bramwell, before two bass cabinets; behind him, Steve Barbuto on a shiny red Yamaha kit (two toms, three rides); to his right, the maniacal electric guitar master Mark Emerick. Commander Cody carried a Heineken and a cane, appearing as a poor man’s Joe Cocker, or a abstractionist’s Kinky Friedman—he has never had Too Much Fun, he declared, as the band kicked off the first of two sets. “There’s a Riot Goin’ On,” “Smoke Smoke Smoke that Cigarette,” a reworked Elvis tune (“Don’t Let Go”), a story-song about “sin and degradation in the old west: ‘Thanks a Fucking Lot Lone Ranger,” rasped the Commander. How many other musicians through the bright green hue of a Heineken bottle, call out categories of rockabilly, country and western, Texas swing, and blues, and move between these distinctions with ease, grace, and humor?
Frayne’s piano playing was not riotous, but reserved—tender, almost delicate—honky-tonk arpeggios waddling through eighth-notes down the board. There were staccato upper-octave cadences like Jerry Lee Lewis, but only when Cody deemed them not only appropriate, but necessary. In a fictional duel, Commander Cody’s piano chops wouldn’t come close to matching those of his closest contemporary (in antiquity and pop music genre-bending), the psuedonym’d Dr. John (Mac Rebennack). But Cody’s presence at the electric keys, his laughter and drama from beneath his set-one ballcap and past-the-ears not-gray mop of hair in set two, was enchanting, personable: faster and shorter than some of the aimless storytelling I’ve heard from folks like Leo Kottke or Richie Havens, but anecdotes more akin to the gravely humor of Tom Waits, self-effacing and not mystical. Commander Cody rejoined his band mates for the second set, carrying a cardboard twelve-pack: “I came to Vermont to party!” he cheered.
Unlike Tom Waits, Dr. John, Leo Kottke, and other still-alive-and-touring gravel-voiced legends of pop, the Commander Cody Show can bomb: Frayne told the crowd it had, on the night previous to this show, in White Plains, New York. Guitarist Mark Emerick, from beneath his black cowboy hat, said during the set break that less than one hundred people had come out for the show, and the highbrow crowd didn’t dig the swing. Over the coming spring, The Commander Cody Band is booked in the Sportsman’s Tavern in Buffalo, the Bamboo Room in Florida, and the Stanhope House in Stanhope, New Jersey, which bills itself as an authentic roadhouse: music, food, drink. The Commander Cody Band is also slated to perform at a VFW hall in Herkimer, New York, to benefit a local Humane Society, before leaping onto the bills of selected summer festivals.
It was a special night for guitarist Mark Emerick: unlike other legs of the band’s eternal bus-based travelling tour, he had driven himself and his gear up to White River Junction from the Albany area, and had brought with him a beautiful 1968 Fender amplifier (with reverb; I believe he said it was a Bandmaster) and matching cabinet—whose tubes, even after multiple repairs, still overheat enough that he can’t fully trust it. His the usual standby, a smaller one-piece Fender, sat unused, as he pushed the amp—an expressive and fluent instrument in itself-- to its glorious harmonic limits. Cody introduced Emerick as hailing from Coxsackie, New York, “the shopping capital of the Capital District.” Mark Emerick was not with the Airmen when, in the mid-1970s, the band was booed offstage at a country music convention in Nashville (“go find a rock concert”), but he did embody that spirit, of hard rock expressiveness and manic choices in 2012, across licks that ranged from the laughable to the technical, with an impassioned discipline, espousing that he knows what an expert is: solos worthy of the signature that adorns his Les Paul gold-top (Dickey Betts), mostly played on his teal green Telecaster. He slammed hard on the pickup-selector switch, often, getting different tones for solos, choruses, and verses across the band’s two sets; he has been with Cody for fourteen years; he has played with the Marshall Tucker Band, Allman-Brother iterations, and no doubt a host of session musicians. He could sit in with Tom Petty, John Mayall (booked for weeks hence on the same stage), or Paul Shaffer’s CBS Orchestra, and his chops would not fail him, or the audience. Halfway through the first set, Mark Emerick ripped through half a solo before grabbing his open Budweiser bottle, and held the mostly-full bottle against the strings, creating not gentle slide-guitar effects all the way up past the frets; truly crazy stuff. Without losing his cowboy hat, after his solo he stopped playing, tipped his head far back and slammed his beer, relishing his own end-zone. During the set break, a bearded fan gushed to Emerick, calling his licks the best he had heard live since seeing Stevie Ray Vaughn in the 1980s. Answering this high praise in the second set, Emerick had some fun with facing his amplifier’s massive speaker, gaining those genuine vacuum-tube sustained feedback notes, that hovered in and around the tight rhythm section. Was Mark Emerick’s playing as good as any overcrowded and jam-inflected summer eve at Saratoga Performing Arts Center; was it better than the din of psychedelic jam-noodling that echoes its way out of Higher Ground, where undergraduate heads bob and young bodies bump around to simpler and more repetitious stuff than Commander Cody?
That Burlington crowd would pay to see Emerick, Bramwell, and Barbuto complete their tease of Hendrix’s “Foxy Lady,” that was used as a dividing rally between the second set and the encore: more reckless than calculated, and emotive as the swinging country wail of Bob Wills. One tune that was part of the Commander Cody Show (Frayne had a small handwritten list in his pocket), “Good Morning Judge,” seemed like a Sam and Dave song I’ve never heard, and Emerick did a fine emulation of Steve Cropper’s unique patterns. Was it the fastest version ever played, of Cody’s famous remake of “Hot Rod Lincoln?” The Commander told the crowd that Red Bull had asked to use the song as part of their sponsorship of a soap box derby (to which George Frayne said, “send me a fuckin’ check”). Emerick knew too well how to play like Bill Kirchen, the Lost Planet Airman who played the characteristic electric riff in the original studio recording (Kirchen named his style “dieselbilly”); I imagine the foursome, including Frayne’s well-delivered narrative vocals, were clipping along well past 150 beats per minute. Also in the second set, the band made earnest fun of a song too real to be included on any movie soundtracks, but should have been, by now: “Down to Seeds and Stems Again Blues” . Frayne changed the lyrics of the verse about the perils of home ownership and foreclosure, to “the man from Bank of America stopped by the other day...”
Through it all, and the suddenly frigid night: boogie-woogie, Texas Swing a la Bob Wills, country, original guitarist Bill Kirchen’s “dieselbilly” style, a rock with Credence and revival—an electrified Mumford and Sons, led by an artist who might as well have been a college professor or member of the Firesign Theater (“Wine Wine Wine, Do Yer Stuff”). Without Cody, the trio would excel in its own purist rock paradigm, but might risk appearing to be engrossed in a battle of the bands where nobody wins: a live show built of technical accuracy and the most classic of pop rock licks played well. But the presence of George Frayne, perhaps not unlike the presence of Whitney Houston, made the performance a marvel of mirth and music: at the encore, the country pioneer Cody shuffled offstage, and back behind his keys, to close the show with a song that was something about China, whose music sounded like a new variation on the earlier “Beat Me Daddy, 8 to the Bar” riff Frayne’s left hand had been holding down well since the late 1960s; the lyrics were tough to make out, but feeling of a patriotic boogie shone through triumphantly.
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