Grand Funk Railroad
"30 Years Of Funk: 1969-1999 The Anthology"
(Capitol Records)
An American Band
"The Story Of Grand Funk Railroad"
(by Billy James-SAF Publishing)
"Grandpa, tell us another story about the seventies, will you please?" Shannon and me were watching another one of those 'Behind The Music' things on VH1. This episode was about a band called Grand Funk Railroad. They kept talking about how these Railroad guys were the most popular group and that they were always setting attendance records wherever they performed. We never even heard of them. What's the deal?"
"Grand Funk? You want to know about Grand Funk? Now that's a blast from my Detroit past." The old man smiled nostalgically as he struggled to sit up in his easy chair. "I couldn't have been much older than you when I first heard Grand Funk Railroad," he began. "You see, your Uncle Carl was into Cream and Jimi Hendrix and he wouldn't let me hang around with him when I was a kid. Our other brother Alex liked the MC5 and Iggy and he was too cool for me as well. I needed my own group to idolize and that's where Grand Funk came in. They weren't as hip or as talented as those other bands but they were what we called a "power trio" and played really loud. They had long songs that sounded great when we were smoking'uh'our Marlboros.
"For some reason everyone hated Grand Funk at that time, which made me love them even more. Eventually I found some other rejects like me and we talked about the band constantly. We went to see them perform at least a dozen times and even called out to them by their first names-Mark, Don & Mel. I must have worn out the grooves of their live album from listening to it so much. Hey! Would you believe that in 1970 a double album cost $5.98 and a concert ticket was only four bucks? In a lot of ways, I grew up with Grand Funk. They were the first band I knew that was against the war in Viet Nam and Mark Farner was always warning us about hard drugs. Farner also had the longest hair I'd ever seen but as the years wore on he kept cutting it shorter and shorter, just like me! By the mid-seventies the band had gotten really popular and it didn't feel very exclusive to dig Grand Funk any more. FM radio had become a big deal and hard rock was getting through to all sorts of people. Besides that, the band started having hit singles with old R&B tunes like 'The Loco-Motion' and 'Some Kind Of Wonderful' and all these younger kids were getting into GFR. The> days of plodding, adolescent rock tunes like 'Time Machine,' and 'Mean Mistreater' were long gone and I stopped buying the band's records."
The old man suddenly paused in mid-sentence and got this faraway look in his eyes. He muttered something about Mel Schacher's bass playing being "really, really heavy" and began softly singing the first verse of "I'm Your Captain/Closer To Home." Shannon turned to his older brother and said, "Great, you got grandpa to have another one of his acid-flashbacks. Are you happy now? It'll take him all day to get it back together and mom is going to restrict us from our Sony Playstation for the rest of the week. Let's go cop some Special K so we don't die of boredom tonight. Grand Funk Railroad-now what kind of name is that for a band?"
by Mitch Myers
copyright 1999 New City Communications, Inc.