Commander Cody Band puts some boogie in the woogie

In his six-plus decades of playing music, George Frayne has picked up a thing or two along the way. For his upcoming show, he's going with one of his core tenets: Just play the hits.

“What I do the best is play boogie-woogie,” Frayne says. “A boogie-woogie swing band is going to play all the hits. The songs that we do are great, classic songs.”

Frayne and the rest of the Commander Cody Band are set to hit the stage of Moondog's in Blawnox on May 9. Frayne says the band will play two one-hour sets with an intermission in between.

Built on a foundation of boogie-woogie, country, rock ‘n roll and blues, the original incarnation of the band was dubbed Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen.

The group churned out hits in the 1970s that include “Hot Rod Lincoln,” “Beat Me Daddy, Eight to the Bar” and “Smoke! Smoke! Smoke! (That Cigarette).”

The list of bands they have opened up for includes rock royalty such as Led Zeppelin, the Grateful Dead and John Lennon.

After putting out seven albums, Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen broke up in 1976. Frayne kept on keeping on with a rotating cast of musicians and changed the name to the Commander Cody Band.

In his heyday, Frayne says playing 200 concerts in a year's time was ordinary. Nowadays, he is more selective when it comes to hitting the road, cutting his total to 52 shows last year.

“I don't take everything that comes my way,” says the 71-year old, who was born in Idaho and now resides in upstate New York. “Those days are over.”

He's played Moondog's three times in the past decade, he says, always drawn in by the familiarities of an intimate atmosphere and a warm crowd.

“It's one of the most classic places,” he says. “It's a great saloon. I started off in saloons like that and I've been playing them my whole life.”

The most recent songs that will be played at Moondog's were recorded in 1991, says Frayne. The band has put out several albums since then, but Frayne doesn't feel an urge to slip anything more recent into the act.

“If I break out one new song, something old wouldn't make it,” he says.

In addition to the music, Frayne is an accomplished artist who earned a master's degree in sculpture and painting from the Rackham School of Graduate Studies at the University of Michigan.

Frayne is a rock star in the art community as well, having partied with and painted pop art-style portraits of iconoclasts such as jazz musician Louis Armstrong, country music legend Willie Nelson and gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson, the latter of whom once set fire to Frayne's hotel room by setting off several M-80s at once as part of a practical joke.

Ed Phillipps is a contributing writer for Trib Total Media.