Description

It was late 1969. I was a freshman in high school, and a certifiable rock'n'roll nut. A friend who lived across the street dragged a "portable" eight-track tape machine (it looked like suitcase and weighed 3-tons) to my house, jammed in a new cartridge (On Time) by a band I'd never heard of called Grand Funk Railroad, and said, "You gotta hear this..."

I admired the great rock icons of the 1960's, but to most of the people my age, the Olympians of rock's second movement were not our peers. The Beatles, the Stones, Bob Dylan, et.al. made great music, music we younger boomers understood and enjoyedmore…, but those people had long since dedicated themselves to playing primarily for our older brothers and sisters-not to us.

The Olympian Rockers were too serious. They had mythologies to live up to, or down to. Often they were not that much fun. They rarely-to-never toured, so we never saw them. Worse, they'd mostly gotten to the place where you couldn't dance to their music, you were supposed to just sit and listen to it. That was very bad, because when you're fourteen, dancing matters.

The older boomers (born between 1945 and 1954) despised the younger half of the generation (born 1955 through 1964) in that special way older siblings always hate their juniors. When the so-called "youth press" was not actively hostile to the second wave of the boom they were at least patronizing toward it. They dubbed us "teeny-boppers" and "microboomers," and published articles praising the music of boring aged drug burnouts-often guys who were actually 29 or even older. If those magazines wrote about microboomer bands at all, they always slagged them mercilessly. We used to speculate that the "youth press" was born old.

So, when my friend popped that eight-track of On Time into that refrigerator-sized "micro" stereo, I heard three young guys playing music that made sense to me. It was great! It was simple three-chord rock'n'roll, very heavy on the bass and drums that featured a pounding, hammering, sweaty rhythm that a dead warthog could dance to. It was like an epiphany.

I've often heard older boomers talk about the first time they heard the Beatles' "Sergeant Pepper." The tale is told with the eye moist and the sound of senile rapture in the voice. It generally involves the term "revelatory" to describe the Beatles' greatest album. In 1969, I'd heard Pepper and I liked it a lot, but it was so very civilized and so self-consciously "artsy." The powerful, savage music made by Grand Funk Railroad was apparently the work of Neanderthals from the barely-civilized jungles of Flint, Michigan, located somewhere in an exotic place called "the rust belt" and it was way closer to "revelatory" for me and most of my peers.

But Grand Funk really were my peers. They were horney, angry, hungry for success, and played rock and roll like it mattered. News flash: it does.

Grand Funk made songs you could sing to your girlfriend, they made songs you could actually learn if you played guitar. Most importantly, they made music you could dance to. They were great.

This album catches the boys at what had to be the high point of their touring career: the original three musicians performing the core songs that made them great. Dig this album. Embrace this record. It's the stuff. You gotta hear this...

Tracks

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Info:

Category:

Music > Albums

Case Type:

CD

Release Type:

Retail

Comments:

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Cover Info:

Title:

Grand Funk Railroad - Live: The 1971 Tour (2002) Retail CD

Part:

Front

Dimensions:

1138 x 1134 px

Size:

604 KB

Downloads:

1015 (0 today)

Uploaded:

Report a Problem Wrong Cover Duplicate Image Bad Quality Wrong Info

19/03/07 by alapoet

Quality Rating:

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