The Bad Penny (beta)

If Nashville band Friendship Commanders sounds familiar, it could be because you’ve visited this website before (and if that’s the case, we’re very grateful). We met the melodic post-metal doomsters in May and interviewed one-half of the band, Buick Audra, about her new solo endeavor. During the conversation, we learned about the guitarist/vocalist’s affinity for cats, and tucked away that knowledge for future use as part of The Bad Penny‘s Pet Sounds series.

Well, now is the time we’ve decided to use that card and crown Friendship Commanders as the 65th participant in our ongoing series (which launched less than a year ago, if you can believe it). The timing of this installment is even more appropriate, as the band – which also features Audra’s partner, drummer/percussionist/bassist/synth player Jerry Roe – is releasing a new album, titled BEAR, on Oct. 10 through Magnetic Eye Records.

While a couple of weeks stand between Friendship Commanders and the celebration of their bottom-heavy beast of a record, today we introduce you to two of the band’s biggest, and by far furriest, supporters.

To turn a phrase, when did your curiosity about cats come about?

I’m a proud cat person from a dog family. That’s not estrangement, is it? They all had dogs, or currently still have dogs, and I have always had a thing for cats. I think they have this kind of autonomy, [as well as a] deep affection and deep knowing of the people that they live with. I just love that, and I don’t ever want to live a life without cats. I’ve had brief periods without them, and when one animal has died, there’s been a period of time where I’ve decided not to have another one, and I don’t enjoy those periods at all.

I believe in grieving hard and allowing grief to be real, but these cats that I live with now are a joy. Well …and a terror also. There’s a duality. 

Are Rocky Balboa and Tommy Leone each a joy and a terror, or is one a joy and the other one a terror?

Oh, they each possess both sides. They’re both rescues, and my partner and I got them maybe two weeks apart after a neighborhood cat that we tried to adopt passed away suddenly. We had cared for him for about a year, and he just had one of those outdoor cat issues that [caused his] heart [to fail]. We took him to the vet and helped him to the other side. 

A couple weeks later, I saw Rocky on a local rescue site. He had been mauled and hanging out at a cemetery with a pack of other stray cats. The woman who worked in the undertaker’s office fed them every day. Her name was Norma. She found Rocky because the rest of the cats came and made a racket outside her office, alerting her to the fact that Rocky had been attacked. She came and got him, and she took him to a vet. He was mauled so badly, he spent a month in a vet and had all kinds of stitches.

The whole front of his body had to be shaved and patched up. When I saw him on the rescue site a couple months after his rescue, he didn’t look like a regular cat. You may not know this, but if you shave a cat, it takes a long time for them to sort of fluff back out. He looked really beat up. That woman who worked at the undertaker’s office named him Rocky Balboa because of the fight [he had in him].

So he moved in and is now one of the great loves of my life. He’s so affectionate. He has no aggression at all. I’ve never known cats to not have some sensibility to scratch or swipe. He has none of that. If I’m seated, he wants to be seated on me most of the time.

A couple weeks later, we went back to the rescue center, and there was a group of Tortie [Tortoiseshell] kittens who had been born outside and whose mother had died. Torties are always female. They’re black with orange and white flecks on them, sort of like paint. There was a litter of five of them, and one was a gray kitten with peach flecks. And that’s called a Dilute. 

We always joke that she hadn’t sat in the dye bath for long enough. They named all the girl kittens after streets in the neighborhood where they were found. Her name was Thomasina. And I said, “That’s terrible. Let’s name her Tommy Ramone.” I think Tommy had died the year prior.

So she’s Tommy Ramone, and my partner, Jerry Roe, is the drummer for Friendship Commanders. She sleeps on his floor all day, every day, in our studio.

That’s funny. So one cat gravitates toward you and one gravitates toward your partner.

Oh, yeah. She absolutely belongs to Jerry. I mean, they’re both ours, but they each have a person that they’ve chosen.

Did you ever figure out why that is?

I don’t know, but we love it. It’s so fun. And Jerry’s enormous. He’s 6′ 6″ and has this tiny little runt of a girl cat that’s like his shadow. And I have this big, beefy, Rocky Balboa cat.

Oh, OK. So you named Rocky because of his bulk, not after going on Ancestry.com and finding out he’s Italian.  gotta say, it’s really refreshing to hear that a rescue shelter would go to such lengths to revive a cat from the brink of death. You hear so many awful stories about how they just turn people away when they can no longer properly care for their cat. Or they euthanize them. Can you provide the name of this commendable shelter?

It was called The Cat Shoppe.

Sadly, The Bad Penny later learned that the shelter shut its doors in June 2023. However, its website is still active and provides critical information about similar organizations in the Nashville area.

Check out Friendship Commanders‘ Bandcamp page here, where you can preorder their new record, BEAR.

Go here for The Bad Penny’s Pet Sounds index.

This entry was posted on 09/23/2025 at 1:57 pm and is filed under Features, Interviews, Pet Sounds with tags Bear, Buick Audra, cats, Friendship Commanders, Jerry Roe. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.