Good old fashion rock 'n' roll footstompin' music from GFR

I'm sitting her listening to Grand Funk Railroad and it dawns on me that this power trio was the great garage band of the Seventies. What we have here are three guys playing stripped down music, without much overdubbing or strings sections or horn players. You listen to "Heartbrearker," "Inside Looking Out," "Closer to Home," "Mean Mistreater," and "Feelin' Alright" and it becomes really clear your are listening to raw rock and roll. By the time the boys do their cover of "Gimme Shelter" the comparison to the early work of the Rolling Stones is pretty obvious as well. Of course, as we continue our little tour through the history of the group, their music does get spruced up a little bit and we see considerably more polish by the time we get to their "hit" songs such as "We're an American Band," "The Loco-Motion" and "Some Kind of Wonderful." All that does is reinforce my preference for their earlier work, before they dropped "Railroad" from their name and they were dedicated heart and soul to playing "Footstompin' Music." "The Very Best Grand Funk Railroad Album Ever" is not going to win any new converts to the group, it is just going to fill a nostalgic need for the rest of us. GFR was not a classic rock-n-roll band, they were just a very good one, as this album proves.