Funk's box-office might as underground revolution. But his static obscured the band's true bared-bone mettle. Grand Funk made their reputation on tour, cutting
On Time,
Grand Funk and
Closer to Home on the run, all between August 1969 and March 1970. The flat, hard production, then a matter of time and economy, pulls the simple pow of the music upfront: Farner's high, clear tenor; the iron-treble tone of his guitar; the elephantine fuzz of Schacher's bass; Brewer's brute, John Bonham-like drive. As the main writer, Farner avoided complexity like a pox. But "Heartbreaker" and "Into the Sun," both from
On Time, and the cover of the Animals' "Inside Looking Out," on Grand Funk, are pure electric-Michigan animalism, an all-testosterone blueprint for the White Stripes.
Live Album and the previously unissued
Live: The 1971 Tour are not as punchy; the crowd noise gets in the way. But the 1971 tracks from the band's Shea Stadium shows that year are honest snapshots of Grand Funk mania at its peak.
Survival, E Pluribus Funk and Phoenix, all from 1971-72, creak with growing pains. It took producer Todd Rundgren, on 1973's We're an American Band, to polish the pop and Motown lurking inside the amp stacks. The title hit, the stampede "Black Licorice" (with its pumping keyboards by recent addition Craig Frost) and "Walk Like a Man," a hard-rock twist on the Four Seasons, are perfect bombs of sweat, sugar and steel. The late albums have their moments, like Farner's keening wail in "Bad Time" on 1974's All the Girls in the World Beware!!! Still, every train runs out of track someday.
For most folks, a hits disc will suffice. But the best of these reissues show that, for a time, Grand Funk were the people's choice. And the people were right.
DAVID FRICKE
(From RS 919, April 3, 2003)
It's a measure of Grand Funk's less than overwhelming critical acceptance that the chief topic of interest for most reviewers has been the band's current producer. Their fans probably couldn't care less—they'll always be true. But producers have made a difference for Grand Funk. It's a long way from Terry Knight's aural sludge, which made early albums almost unlistenable, to the tight gloss Todd Rundgren imposed on We're an American Band, still their most universally accessible album. It's the Age of the Producer, they tell us, so the current Grand Funk helmsman Jimmy Ienner shares in the limelight.
As a producer/creator, Ienner presents contradictions of taste and approach. Since 1972, he and the Raspberries have created several all-stops-out production masterpieces. But during that period his other major client was the brass rock band Lighthouse, purveyors of an unwieldy jazz-rock combination far removed from the Raspberries' crisp pop style. Though he occasionally made Lighthouse listenable, it remained a dubious venture.
Grand Funk's simplistic, ponderous rock presents another kind of challenge for Ienner. The production is sparse by his standards (though fairly lavish for Grand Funk), and generally fails to impress. On "Runnin'" he adds a raft of brass which, with Don Brewer's gruff flat vocal, combines to create a convincing imitation of Chicago or Lighthouse—the last thing anyone would want to hear from Grand Funk. The horns sound better on the old Howard Tate tune, "Look at Granny Run Run." But they dilute much of the solid-rock impact of "Wild," turning it to flaccid rock. Some pleasant strings are featured on "Memories," but Mark Farner's vocal overkill destroys the delicate mood of the song. Otherwise, Ienner's most noticeable production effect is the dense, brooding atmosphere on the longest track, "Good & Evil." It's also the album's low point, with a strangled vocal mouthing some sort of bastardized gumbo mumbo jumbo: Grand Funk should leave the hoodoo to those who do it with a touch of class, like Dr. John.
But all of this is to overlook the band's own direction and its roots—and those account for the album's considerable strengths. Like many Midwestern bands of the past (the Rationals, Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels) and their spiritual brethren on the East Coast (the Rascals, Vagrants), their original influences consisted of the soul music of the Sixties. In that vein, "Responsibility" and "Look at Granny Run Run" are heavy on the organ and R&B style. Most bands of this stripe ran into the familiar problem of making solid but inferior imitations of songs in the R&B catalog. But entertaining music can still result. The band's best shot is on the hit single, "Some Kind of Wonderful," a remarkable copy of the obscure 1967 single of the Soul Brothers Six. The band falls far short of the original's vocal power, but there's undeniable strength in the stripped-to-the-bone bass throb an
