Another live one from Grand Funk!

Since "Live Album" was my favorite GFR recording, when I first saw this CD I got very excited and being the GFR fan that I am I of course had to have it. Is it as good as "Live Album"? No it is not. This is mainly due to the repetition of songs from the original "Live Album". However, it must be understood that these recordings were taken from live performances around the same time period, with a similar play list as "Live Album" so of course there is repetition. Also, the energy does not seem as electrifying as with "Live Album". This could be due to the performances captured here or the way they were recorded. Whatever the case may be, this CD still shows that GFR (at the time) beats any group performing then or now for un-polished rockin' energy and simple raw power. Not to mention that GFR was one of the musically tightest bands around. GFR was selling out huge stadiums and every hippie kid was diggin' what GFR was puttin' down. GFR, with their long hair, loud driving rhythms and political commentary was the voice of a generation. It just goes to show me how we desperately need that today. Thanks to all who put this CD together and to Mark, Don and Mel for playing their butts off!

Chutzpah Revisited

Reality check: These three weren't exactly the best band on earth, if you regarded them strictly on musical terms. And all the populist caterwauling on earth that tries even now to sell the line about Grand Funk Railroad pissing off the critics because the critics didn't discover them first while The People Did (which is only partly true, if you recall the 1969 Atlanta Pop Festival which sent them forth in the first place) is two parts fantasy and 98 parts what the gardeners spread around the lawn every year. (Further reality check: what really pissed off the critics was their original manager-producer all but telling them where to shove it, while taping the three Railroaders' mouths shut for the most part, during that 1969-71 run, before they'd even had anything resembling a credible record out. And it didn't help when he called a press conference for the Shea Stadium concert, saying he'd open the band up to all kinds of questioning, and bitched in an extensive magazine interview about only five of the invited press bothering to show up - especially when it came out that he had invited ONLY those five!)

Everybody with me? Good. Now listen up: All things considered, these guys had the market cornered on chutzpah. Combine that with their having been a band that wasn't even half as terrible as the critics had it (though who's kidding whom, Grand Funk as a trio produced a round of albums memorably mostly for the insane-in-the-brain muddy recording, with a small dollop of worthy cuts managing to sneak past the sludge) and you've got a kind of Everykid's rock fantasy: cranking the amps to twenty, thwacking away no matter how much actual chops you had, and not being able to make up your mind whether you wanted your new band to be Cream as the MC5, or the MC5 as Cream, when you all grew up. And the place it worked best was in concert. Which anyone who still has their copy of 1970's "Live Album" (now thankfully back in print, on CD) could have told you.

Admit it: "Are You Ready," which they were probably getting sick and tired of playing by the time of the show that yielded this version, would have been hailed as The Word if Rob Tyner and company had dreamed it up around about the "Kick Out The Jams" period, and if Farner's guitar break isn't an echo of the Five's squeak-staccato solos in "Ramblin' Rose," I'm not sure what might be one. And it isn't as much of a stretch as you might think to imagine Grand Funk's piledriving-squall version of "Gimme Shelter" (which sounded even more squalling in the studio, on "Survival," than in the version here cranked out at the legendary Shea Stadium concert) in the hot little hands of Wayne Kramer and Sonic Smith. (Compare Grand Funk mashing the Rolling Stones like this with what the Sex Pistols did to the Monkees' "(I'm Not Your) Steppin' Stone," for a guilty-pleasure comparison, if you dare.)

They'd never have suggested it (I doubt that they were that hip, though they weren't quite the naifs they were once portrayed to be, either), but the finale of "Into the Sun" (one of their best early songs) as "Live Album" had it damn near beat the Velvet Underground's distorto-scratch-rock side at its own game. Presented here in a version nailed at Cobo Hall in Detroit, the song does about the same thing without the audience noise allowed to drown out the band's squall of sound. And if Farner's solo turn on this version of "Inside Looking Out" doesn't remind you of every guitar-crank wet dream the kids up the block were having and trying (and maybe getting the police called in to quash) in those years, then you were probably out of town at the time.

I'm still not sure whether to rank this ahead of "Live Album," because the latter's accidental atmospherics put an oddly effective patina on the whole thing, but in a lot of places the stuff here is a little more energetic and, besides, I'd rather have one early (and rather cagey) take of "Footstompin' Music" than "Mark Say's Alright." (By the way, that's actually one whale of an organ solo Farner pounded out for "Footstompin' Music" - think in terms of Felix Cavaliere if he'd been a member of the Seeds - when he wasn't grinding out guitar breaks we might have called grunge precursors in the 1990s.) And once you get used to it, making a medley out of "I'm Your Captain," "Hooked on Love," and "Get It Together" isn't exactly going to curdle your intestines.

But it's worth the price to have, and the price isn't exactly a bank-breaker. Call them barely-inspired amateurs if you must, but Grand Funk Railroad in live performance was plain fun, essentially harmless, and - make a note of this, folks - they seemed genuinely to like their audiences. Which is a hell of a lot more than you can say for all the acts before and since who have the Serious ears, the Serious hosannas, and treat their audiences as though those crowds had burglarised their houses. Subtract a star if you think launching a concert with a recording of "Also Sprach Zarathustra" was just a little bit too tacky (or you want someone to blame for giving Elvis the same idea); add a star if you're the knucklehead who swiped Farner's volume pedal at Shea Stadium.

The definitve GFR "live" experience!

If you ever wanted to know what it was about Grand Funk Railroad that drove their fans wild, and the parents and rock critics crazy, it is all captured here during the tour of the most exciting and creative apex of their career--the year 1971. Undoubtedly, the selections from the basement tapes found for this collection are probably representative of the best versions of these songs as they were performed live. The weakest, perhaps being the first two, "Are You Ready" and "Footstompin' Music". "Are You Ready" is a song that had sort of run its course by this time as a "concert opener", and it really sounded as if the band was tired of playing it, as they sort-of, "rushed it" through. "Footstompin' Music", on the other end, sounds like a jam that evolved out of an earlier song, "In Need", and the band had only had it around for a couple of months when they decided to "try it out" on the crowd at Cobo Hall in Detroit in April--and, of course, would be the song that would soon overtake "Are You Ready" as the band's official opening number. GFR was one of those bands like Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath who believed in "testing" a new song on the road before they put it on an album, and it would be 6 months at least before they would record "Footstompin' Music" properly for the "E Pluribus Funk" album--for me, the one time that the song fully came together. The only thing that the earlier version lacked here was simply the right guitar, and I think guitarist Mark Farner knew that. that's not to slight the Messenger guitar, because it worked brilliantly on every other song here. But it just seemed to lack the "OOMPH!" in the guitar solo that switching to a Gibson SG would do for Mark later on "E Pluribus Funk".
But the thing that impresses me most about this collection is, indeed, the guitar playing of Mark Farner on this tour. The more I hear his earlier work, the more impressed I am with him as a guitarist, and the more I am at a loss to understand why the critics slagged him for his guitar playing. It never really was bad, anyway, but it certainly got even better on this tour. He just flat-out put on a guitar clinic on some of these songs! Songs like "Paranoid", "I'm Your Captain", and "Get it Together" show his great mastery of the "wah-wah pedal", probably some of the best "wah" I've heard. Certainly, the "wah-wah" on this version of "Paranoid" sounds better than the "wah-wah" on the version from the "Live Album" a year earlier, and actually closer to the distortion on the studio version from the "Red Album". Dunlop, or whatever brand Mark used, should be thanked for providing such great distortion pedals for this tour (I suppose, good enough to nick, as one fan Terry Knight scolded for trying to do, as you'll hear at the end of "Gimme Shelter" from Shea Stadium.) What Mark's Messenger guitar lacked on the guitar solo on "Footstompin' Music", was more than made up for on the guitar solos of "Paranoid", "Hooked On Love", "Gimme Shelter", and "Into The Sun".
Another thing that this disc really brings more into focus about Grand Funk is how good they were at musical arrangements "on-the-fly", for concerts. For example, how to play "I'm Your Captain" on tour with a more creative opening, and without an orchestra. Well, they simply open with Mel Schacher's bass riff from the song, and Mark joins in "chicken scratching" his guitar, and then, "BAM!", he launches into the official opening riff. Then, they make the song a "Closer To Home" album medley, going into "Hooked On Love' just before the bridge, and seguing from there into "Get It Together". Not only brilliant, but an exciting way to keep everyone in the crowd happy! As for "Into The Sun", they turned it into a "show-stopper", adding three extra minutes of jamming, as an encore number for every concert in those days. There isn't a whole lot of difference, however, between this version of "Into The Sun", and the one from the "Live Album" a year before, except that mark tries to solo a little more during the "end-of-song" jam. I always liked the studio version of "Into The Sun" from the "On Time" album as one of my favorite GFR songs, but I think they could have done a little more with it "live". As they did on the "Live Album" from the previous tour, they basically took "Into The Sun", originally a motown-ish "James Brown" rhythm number with a beautifully-melodic intro, and transformed it in concert into a metallic rhythm machine, making it louder and faster than it was on the first album. It sounds "okay" like that, but I think here is where GFR could have taken a lesson in "Jamming 101" from Led Zeppelin and the Grateful Dead, in that, they could have changed it up or "tweaked" the end-of-song jam to make it more interesting each time they performed it, and so that it doesn't end up with the same "drone" each time. After all, they changed "Inside Looking Out" to where it sounded different than the version on the "Live Album" from the previous tour. Had they tried to experiment with "Into The Sun" the same way, they could have had a real "stunner" for a show ender every time.
But generally speaking, this disc of GFR's 1971 tour serves as "Exhibit A" as to where GFR's reputation, or labeling, as a "heavy metal" band might have come from. They only approached the "metallic heights" a few times on their studio albums. But as a "live" band, when they turned up the volume, they turned everything, even their most soulful numbers like "Hooked On Love" and "Into The Sun", metallic. This disc is a must have for every GFR fan, or any music fan who simply wants to know what made GFR tick. This has been a missing piece of their legacy that has just now been put on disc, and can fill in the blanks for all those who couldn't get enough of the band's early material.