“Listen to this, it’s cool,” my friend confided, and the first thing I heard was that jumble of radio and TV noises. I remember hearing “Paranoid” during an idle moment before fifth-grade homeroom when, incredibly, a friend and I somehow got to commandeer the class phonograph before the teacher made us turn off that racket and sit down. (We will leave the question of whether white British art-school dropouts playing electrified versions of Robert Johnson acoustic blues tunes is truly “authentic” for another day.) To them, Grand Funk was all about hype, commerce and grandstanding noise. Unlike that hapless soul immortalized in Moore’s film, however, these kids managed to avoid raising rabbits for their dinner and hooked up instead with a Svengali-like manager, Terry Knight, who masterminded their rise to festival stardom.Įverything about Grand Funk was, well, contrived, from guitarist Mark Farner’s fake Southern accent (you could tell he really wanted to be Jim Dandy) to the group’s penchant for performing shirtless (supposedly more sexy? I dunno) to the fact that on their second, eponymous album (known by fans as the Red Album because of its obnoxiously day-glo red color) you can hear drummer Don Brewer shouting and whooping out encouragement to Farner during the obligatory overlong guitar cadenza on “In Need” as if they were playing at the freakin’ Atlanta Pop Festival instead of holed up in a recording studio! Hey guys, do you know where you are?Ĭritics loathed them, of course, preferring the “authenticity” of groups like Cream. Theirs was a story of three hardscrabble kids from Flint, Michigan (the location, years later, of Michael Moore’s documentary Roger and Me). In fact, Grand Funk Railroad had more in common with southern-boogie party-animals Black Oak Arkansas (“Jim Dandy to thuh resss cyooooooo!!”) than with the bleak-and-black Satanists from Birmingham. No, not that “Paranoid.” Back in their arena-filling heyday of 1969-71, Grand Funk-all-time purveyors of loud working-class white noise-were in fact frequently lumped together with Black Sabbath by the critics (who hated both bands of course), purely for the coincidence that both bands had songs with that title.
DJ Snufkin's 12 Songs of Christmas (with bonus tra.Fairport Convention, "Who Knows Where the Time Goes".Snufkin wears old clothes and lives in a tent. Snufkin is an adventurer and a vagabond, admired by those who are small and shy. Snufkin is the son of the Mymble and the Joxter, and he is half-brother to the Mymble's daughter and Little My.
#Grand funk railroad paranoid update
I update when I feel like it, so don't expect daily updates. Who knows what will pop up on these pages? It also gives me a space for a little creative expression. The purpose of this humble blog is to write about the music I love, so that the random surfer may be inspired to discover these songs for themselves and, of course, buy other music by these artists. "A man's work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened." Albert Camus
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