Mark Farner
Wake Up...

It's a pity to speak ill of a musician with such a glorious and significant distant past (not for everyone, but for many, including myself, his Grand Funk Railroad was an outstanding group with unique qualities in the first part of their career). The historic guitarist of the Michigan trio, and later quartet, disbanded the formation in 1976 to go solo. He reformed it in the early eighties for one last couple of records but then returned to making albums under his own name.

This work here is the fourth in Farner's solo career, it's dated 1989 and it's worth nothing, starting from the photographic rendition of the orange/globe immortalized (so to speak) on the cover, ugly on its own and poorly served by an unfortunate lighting setup. The album title urges one to wake up, but it's the middle of the night across the board: a cellulitic rock, “moderate” in the most detrimental and vacuous sense of the term, permeates all the compositions and performances, and while listening to his unmistakable voice, once impressive and stunningly energetic, convincing even in those moments when Mark lost control due to too much zeal and limited technique, disappointment is the dominant feeling.

Even the electric guitars in action here are completely blunt, ordinary, harmless. In the early seventies, the blond youngster half-Cherokee delighted us by mistreating a big aluminum guitar painted in camouflage, producing a roaring and cutting sound, especially when he activated a certain switch near the volume and tone knobs, which engaged a killer distortion directly built into the instrument, a contraption capable of generating a commendable fuzzy racket.

To definitively compromise everything (but this may also be due to my way of thinking and considering religions) there are also the lyrics, permeated with devout and radical Christian belief: it's all about praising Jesus, relying on him and only him to rise from human weaknesses, to alleviate all sufferings, to see the light and bask in the glory of the Lord.

Dear Mark… I prefer you young, part in the middle with straight blonde hair down to your butt, howling like a hyena, bashing the guitar and pushing, pushing like a maniac, backed by a seismic rhythm section the likes of which we haven't seen again (Don Brewer on drums together with Mel Schacher on bass were pure dynamite! Listening to them in action on the live Grand Funk catalog albums is a kind of remedy for one's guts).

This record is ‘na chiavica, as they would say in Naples.