Grand Funk Railroad
Live Album

THE REVIEW

Flint, Michigan, a bedroom community developed fifty years ago following the Ford boom but today reduced to a ghost town, with its decaying houses inhabited only by a few elderly families and a handful of desperate people. Around here, the emerging hard rock of the sixties/seventies had to contend with the prevailing rhythm'n'blues. Detroit and the glorious Tamla Motown label were just a stone’s throw across the river; local radios were blasting the new rock gospel but especially black music 24 hours a day, with the biggest black stars coming nearby to record and hold highly attended concerts.

The Grand Funk Railroad grew up in Flint, loved Cream and Marvin Gaye, Jimi Hendrix and Otis Redding, and so, however bombastic and raucous their rock was intended and in reality, the warmth and soul of black music always coursed through it, making it unique and unrepeatable, scandalously underrated by many fans who only remember the later part of their career, more commercial and watered-down.

However, in this 1970 live album, rhythm'n'blues is kept to a minimum, and there's certainly no trace of dilution! Grand Funk are young, at the start of their career, in front of the massive crowd at the Atlanta Pop Festival, and they really kick it. It's a live album like they used to publish in the past, with the audience rightly loud in the mix, few uncertainties, and many flubs left plainly visible and not corrected in the studio. The result: insane drive, energy at atomic levels, more than adequate instrumental skill totally devoted to making the crowd in front of them go wild. They succeeded perfectly.

They're just three making all that noise: Mark Farner is the leader, singer, and guitarist, a mixed-race (Native American and blonde!) with hair down to his butt and a high, penetrating voice full of soul, he hits his guitar like a blacksmith (fully metallic, camouflage green, and with a built-in distortion pedal, gloriously displayed today in a Hard Rock Café), but he learned to sing from his black brothers, and you can hear and enjoy it. His voice is alive, violent, and soulful, off-notes included. Supporting him is the loudest bassist ever, Mel Schacher uses a distortion pedal to get a sound where calling it robust is an understatement, it's genuinely fat, thick, bison-like, his genius and repetitive riffs uphold the pieces and make the speakers shake. Drummer Don Brewer helps Farner with the vocals but mainly keeps the rhythm going, with excellent technique and speed.

It’s eighty minutes of hell, from the initial Are You Ready drowned mostly by the audience's enthusiasm, to the encore Into The Sun, with only two breaks to catch their breath, the blues Heartbreaker and the piano-driven Mean Mistreater.

Curiously, both double and single versions of the CD are available on the market (the 1970 LP is double). Grand Funk still perform concerts in the USA today (without Mark Farner, who tours with his own group). They are billionaires but don't put on airs, just Brewer who plays golf and the stock market, Schacher breeds and protects wild deer in the forests of Michigan, Farner is very active with Greenpeace and initiatives in support of Native Americans. People with guts, the rough ones are others. They are in the history of rock.