A Great Album & A Funny Story For 40-Somethings

I think the previous reviewers of this great album said it best. So I won't repeat what they've written. So allow me to romanticize the past and tell you my story of Grand Funk Railroad's album, "Survival."



When this album came out, I think I was 7 or 8. Since my brother was always sneaking out of the house at one in the morning to smoke weed with his delinquent friends (after all, it was the early seventies), I would swipe his records while he slept off his hangover the following day. I would sit and listen to all that great music on our Sears stereo console cabinet that was practically the size of Janis Joplin's coffin!



As we 40-somethings remember, albums were great! Unlike boring CD's that are so bland and sterile, albums were big and featured really cool cover art that jumped out at you! You just had to have it! Even if the music sucked, the cover art was cool and it looked great in your bedroom! I can remember sitting around with my friends in my bedroom, just studying the cover art and liner notes, as if it were the FBI studying the JFK assassination film. To top it off, there was always some kind of media that accompanied albums (posters, fold-out lyric sheet, band post cards, etc...).



"Survivor" came with 3 individual 8"X10" color posters of each band member, which I swiped immediately from the album and put them up on my bedroom wall. Heck, he was so out of it that I don't think he ever noticed.



And so it was one evening in 1972, my hard working, hippie hating, "rock n'roll-is-the-root-of-all-evil" dad, returned home from a hard days work and saw the band pictures on my wall. The pictures, which featured each band member dressed as cavemen and clutching bones with meat hanging off them, saw them and exploded.



I'm not sure if Amazon.com will allow me to repeat the profanity that was uttered from dear ole' dad, but suffice to say that my dad cursed for a solid 30 minutes without repeating the same curse word twice.



For some reason, he didn't make me take the posters down. I guess my dad was cooler than I thought. Those were the days.

My least favorite, but still good

Survival has always been my least favorite of GFR's albums (I'm not counting the disgraceful releases of the post-E Pluribus Funk era). However, there is still some classic GFR moments on Survival that make it highly listenable. Song highlights are Country Road and Gimme Shelter (GFR does one of the best covers of a Rolling Stones song I have ever heard). I bet the reason Survival is a bit weaker than previous releases is that GFR recorded this after an exhaustive tour. Whatever the case maybe, Survival is a good over all effort and worth the purchase for the GFR fan, but not a good introduction for the new listener.

Once, one of my least desireable GFR import CD's...

...Now, one of their most desirable domestic remasters, thanks in large part to the very revealing bonus tracks. This is many people's favorite GFR album. But early on, it wasn't one of mine. To me, it was sort-of like, "Closer to Home, Part 2"--too introspective, not real exciting. Pretty good guitar riffs, but not a whole lot of "concert-ready" material (except, maybe "Gimme Shelter"). But I always took consideration that this was an album made during a period of a lot of heavy touring, and gave GFR the benefit of the doubt for having little inspiration at the time, and having to resort to remakes like "Feelin' Alright", and "Gimme Shelter" to fill an album out, and keep the wolves at Capitol Records happy. But as I have grown older, and sort of "mellowed-out", I've grown to appreciate this record more--if nothing else, but for the fact that the band wanted to show the critics, as well as fans, more of the melodic side of the group. And this album has some of Mark Farner's most beautiful songs, notably "Comfort Me" and "I Can Feel Him In The Morning", as well as some of his best songwriting ever. Not bad for a guy with little time to write songs! And with the re-mastered edition featuring previously-unreleased "Survival-session" bonus tracks, I've really begun to see this album in a whole different light!
First of all, this album originally never had any numbers on it that I would consider "catchy" enough to be a hit for Top 40 or FM radio at the time. I would imagine that the band was so out of ideas for singles, that they just put out remakes of "Feelin' Alright" and "Gimme Shelter" that sounded good, with Mark Farner putting his own unique "stamp" on them, but didn't do much on the charts. But GFR made a foolish decision not to include the previously-unreleased (now featured here) track, "I Can't Get Along With Society" on the original "Survival" album. Not only would it have fit in nicely with the rest of the songs on the original album, but it would have stood alone as one of the best, if not THE best, song on the album. And with the pre-Doobie Bros.-like, upbeat riffing of mark Farner and catchy lyrics, "Society" would have certainly been the band's next big hit after "I'm Your Captain". It was a bad move not to put that out, and the only reason I can think as to why, is that perhaps the lyrics may have been "too controversial". But it was a song that truly spoke of the way things were with young people in 1971, and perhaps would have been one of the most defintive rock anthems of the hippie generation, had it only been allowed to see the light of day.
Second thing about the bonus tracks here is that they certainly reveal that there was way too much editing out of the original album--more than perhaps any other GFR album. The unedited-extended version of "Country Road" especially--but also "All You Got Is Money" and "Feelin' Alright" had WAY too much taken out of them for the original album. Some of the best guitar riffs and excellent extra verses were removed from these numbers, that could have made what I thought in the beginning to be kind of a dull GFR album, much more exciting. "Country Road", in particular, could have been a much more exciting track to open this album had it been left in it's unedited state. Perhaps the only weak bonus track here is the one I thought would be the strongest--the "Survival-session" version of "Footstompin' Music", known here as simply, "Jam". It's always interesting to me to hear the evolution of a song from its infancy to the final recording that makes an album. As you might know, "Footstompin' Music" ended up on the next album "E Pluribus Funk", just as the final version of "Nothing Is The Same" came from the sessions for the "Red Album" and would end up on the next album "Closer To Home". I suppose, in either case, there wasn't much time to get it right before the album's release, but I can tell you that unlike "Nothing Is the Same", which sounded ready for the "Red Album" and worse on the final version for the "Closer to Home" album, that it was a wise decision on this song to wait 6 months for Mark Farner to temporarily retire his Messenger guitar, for a Gibson SG to record the final version of "Footstompin' Music". The Messenger guitar served Mark very well on many a GFR song, but for some reason, it just lacked the "punch" in the guitar solo of the "Survival"-session version of "Footstompin' Music", that the Gibson SG would fire up on the "E Pluribus Funk" album.
And Don Brewer's muted, towel-covered drums on this version didn't help things, either.
Once again, the bonus tracks are very revealing about "Survival".
From the excessive editing to the poor choice of singles, and keeping songs off the album, to the towels on the drum heads to "mute" the drums, producer/manager Terry Knight made a lot of really poor decisions on the original "Survival" album. But thanks to the new version of "Survival" with bonus tracks, you get to hear the album as it should have been--at least on tracks 7 through 12. Capitol records certainly righted a wrong here, doing this disc justice, and making it the best of all the GFR re-masters!