Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen

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Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen was a Country rock band formed in 1967 in Ann Arbor, Michigan. The band's name was inspired by 1950s film serials featuring the character Commando Cody and from a feature version of an earlier serial, King of the Rocket Men, released under the title "Lost Planet Airmen". The band's founder and leader, George Frayne, took the stage name Commander Cody.

The band's style was basically a mixture of country music, rockabilly, and blues. It became legendary for marathon live shows, but many felt that the spirit of those performances was never fully captured in the band's recordings.

After several years spent playing in local bars, core members of the group migrated to San Francisco and scored a recording contract with MCA records; the group's first album release, titled Lost in the Ozone, arrived in late 1971 and yielded the group's best-known hit, a version of the country song "Hot Rod Lincoln" which reached the top ten on the Billboard singles chart in early 1972. The band's 1974 live recording, Live from Deep in the Heart of Texas features cover art of armadillos by Jim Franklin, and the band released several moderately-successful albums through the first half of the decade. After appearing in the Roger Corman movie Hollywood Boulevard, Frayne disbanded the group in 1976. The core members of this version of the band were Frayne, John Tichy, Billy C. Farlow, Bill Kirchen, Andy Stein, Paul "Buffalo" Bruce Barlow, Lance Dickerson, and Bobby Black on pedal steel. John Tichy, now Dr. John A. Tichy, is a Professor in the Department of Mechanical, Aerospace and Nuclear Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) in Troy, New York, having earned a PhD. from the University of Michigan.

The 1976 book Star-Making Machinery by Geoffrey Stokes was an analysis of music industry production and marketing using Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen as its primary case study.

Retaining his stage name of Commander Cody, Frayne had a mostly-obscure solo career, touring and releasing albums sporadically from 1977 to the present day; some later albums were released under the Lost Planet Airmen name, though seldom were original group members involved. Recent releases have been under the name The Commander Cody Band; in addition to Frayne, current members of the band include Steve Barbuto on drums, Mark Emerick on guitar, and Rick Mullen on bass.