Grand Funk’s “Captain” Mark Farner and the Mutiny of the American Band – Part One
In the late ’60s and early ’70s, before the age of modern concerts where pyrotechnics, dancers, and a backdrop of film clips may entertain the audience during a performance, arena rock was born. The band came out, sang live, played their own instruments, and entertained tens of thousands in arenas and stadiums around the country. You heard the band in all their raw power, not a group lip-synching to a tape of over-produced, studio-created sounds.
And make no mistake about it, Grand Funk Railroad — consisting of Mark Farner, Don Brewer, and Mel Schacher — was the quintessential American arena-rock power trio, the kings of early ’70s arena rock, and consequently one of the most popular and best-selling groups in the world. They were reportedly the first American band to rack up 10 consecutive gold/platinum/or double platinum albums, those being the first 10 albums they released. They were the second band ever to play Shea Stadium (the Beatles were the first), and though it took the Beatles seven weeks to sell out Shea, Grand Funk did it in just 72 hours.
The coolest of the cool at that time was frontman Mark Farner, the embodiment of the super rock star that every kid wanted to be. During those early years, before the singles success that came to the group in the mid 1970s, Grand Funk’s most identifiable song was one Farner wrote, “I’m Your Captain (Closer to Home)”; arguably it may still be, despite the success of later #1 singles such as “We’re an American Band” and “The Locomotion.” The song is about a ship’s captain whose crew has mutinied, and the lyrics, in part, say:
Everybody, listen to me, and return me, my ship
I’m your captain, I’m your captain, although I’m feeling mighty sick.
I’ve been lost now, days uncounted
And it’s months since I’ve seen home.
Can you hear me, can you hear me? Or am I… all alone.
Prophetic lyrics, considering that despite being the face of the band for decades and writing the majority of their material over the years, today he’s man on the outside looking in; through legal maneuvering, the other members have in effect pushed Farner out, essentially disassociating him from the group to the extent that he can’t legally use the group’s name unless he adheres to a very strict set of court-imposed guidelines including the phrase “formerly of Grand Funk.” Mutiny indeed.
Shady management, tax problems, and acrimonious break-ups all plagued the band over the years. If this sounds like an episode of VH1’s Behind the Music, the documentary tell-all that looked at the seamy underbelly of the music business, it actually was: the band was featured on an episode in the 1990s, and that was before things really got ugly. Yet somehow through it all, Mark Farner, a man of faith and optimism, remains positive in the face of a series of setbacks that might have brought a lesser man to his knees. I had a chance to interview him this month and catch up with one of America’s greatest rock ‘n’ roll icons and hear the story behind the rise and fall of the “American Band.”
REBEAT: Mark, first I want to ask a few things about those early years, the years when you were selling millions of records, and you were a rock band primarily known for those albums and live performances. You weren’t really the same type of band that would have all those Top 40 hits like you’d have later. Of all the things the band did then, what would you say is your favorite?
MARK FARNER: “I’m Your Captain/Closer to Home,” was my favorite for that or any other period. That whole album was a great album. That came from a place where I wanted to speak to the fans and to the world, just to provoke people to think about things.
I’ve always read that people interpret that song a lot of different ways — as being about Vietnam, politics, and all sorts of things. I’ve also read you’ve been noncommittal about it and said people need to figure out for themselves what it means to them. So I won’t ask that. Just tell me the story behind the song.
Actually, when I wrote “I’m Your Captain,” that was a song I prayed for — I believe God gave me that song and that’s the way I received it. I prayed and got up in the middle of the night and wrote down these lyrics that came into my head. I’m always doing that — some of it ends up being poetry, but sometimes it’s just words. But that night I got up and then in the morning I started playing; the wind was blowing and it was a beautiful day. And that whole opening lick all just came to me. I thought, “Maybe this is the music to those words in the other room that came to me last night.” I went and got them, and sang the song and wrote the chords and didn’t change them at all; I sang them the way I wrote them down in the middle of the night. Later when I played them for Don and Mel, they were just kind of blown away and said, “That song’s a hit.”
Speaking of that song, one of the iconic things the group did was put up the famous Times Square billboard to advertise the album with “I’m Your Captain (Closer to Home)” on it. What did you guys think about that? That was your manager Terry Knight’s doing, right?
Yeah. He said, “We can get that billboard for one month for $50,000 and I think we should do it.” He already had in mind with Sid Bernstein about doing the Shea Stadium gig. We sold that out in 72 hours, faster than the Beatles. And was before Ticketron. They had to go get the tickets. We were pretty proud of that. But the billboard workers went on strike and so that billboard stayed up four extra months for free. That’s like $250,000 worth of advertising!
Would you say those live shows, like the one at Shea Stadium, were your strength? You guys were such a concert band, and sometimes concert performances don’t really help a group because they don’t perform well. But I always had the impression that that wasn’t the case for you guys — that it was your strength.
Oh yeah, I think that was something we were known for, too. Sometimes the crowds were just huge, and so I learned early on to exaggerate my movements so the people in the seats far at the back could see it. I became more theatrical in the presentation than just standing there and singing and playing. And a lot of bands, that’s all they do. But look, I really got this figured out a while ago. A lot of guys don’t want to dance around, but I love to dance. I know guys want to dance, it’s just that they’re very reluctant to do so because of their egos, because they don’t want to look like some goofball. But at a club, for example, the guys who are on the dance floor — those are the lucky guys. If men would just show up out there — women love that stuff. I knew that early on when my sister and I would go to the National Guard Armory in Flint, Michigan, and enter the dance contest. My mother got me beyond that reluctancy. She said, “You gotta just do this to try it out.” She said, “You’ll feel it.” And I finally did start to feel it when I danced in public. It started paying off when I became popular with the ladies because I could dance!
So onstage, I pranced around danced and jumped and everything — I just took that love of dancing to the stage, Brother Rick. I’m a theatrical-type performer because I want to embody the character of that song. Even in the studio recording, I close my eyes, and I take on the character of the song. I imagine myself being that person and being that way in order to get the emotion to the right level to where people can really get it.
Do you do any of those older songs from the early ’70s in concert now? I mean that’s when you were more of what I’d regard as an album band. There were singles, but the really big singles came a few years later. I’m sure you do “Closer to Home,” but do you do any others from those first three or four albums?
I do. Because we have the advantage of the internet, we polled our fans and said, “What do you want to hear in the set list?” In two weeks, we had close to 3,000 responses, so we built our set based on what fans want to hear. We added in “Sin’s a Good Man’s Brother,” “Upsetter,” “Save the Land,” “I Can Feel Him in the Morning,” “Country Road.” We rotate because there’s so many songs. But when we pull one out like that it always gets the audience. They’re like, “Oh, man!”
A few weeks ago on REBEAT we did a Staff Picks on the one special album in our lives. I did the album E Pluribus Funk, because it’s the first album I ever bought. Do you still do any of those songs — I mean besides “Footstompin Music”?
“I Come Tumblin’” is in our set this year. Since you’re an E Pluribus Funk fan, you might be interested to know that the guitar I played on that album was a Les Paul that Stevie Marriott from Humble Pie sold me for $200. They opened our tour in Europe, and we loved the way they got the audience revved up and everything and thought it would be great to have them do that here. The people in the US would love them — Frampton, Marriot, Shirley. He brought the guitar with him when they opened for us at Shea. It had a broken headstock that someone had epoxied back on and it was just a little off — just a skosh. But when I played it, it was so fast, my fingers could go so fast. It was a great guitar.
You know, I read somewhere that you guys had tried to get Peter Frampton to join Grand Funk. Is that true?
We talked about it between us, in the band, but we never approached him or anything. That was probably around 1971. We did get him to jam with us when we did the Bosnia tour and album though, and he jammed in Detroit at the Pine Knob, and it was great. He’s a good friend and a great guitar player.
So, up until this point, as a power trio known for your live performances, you had released On Time [which went gold], Closer to Home [which eventually went double platinum], Survival [which went platinum], and E Pluribus Funk [which went platinum]. It’s not like your sales were hurting, yet suddenly the group’s direction changed. I know you guys fired Terry Knight, and you also added a keyboard player, but more importantly, you seemed to change the direction of your music. As a young man, I didn’t understand it. It’s not that the “new” sound was bad, and it was clearly successful in terms of singles sales, but it was completely different. I think a lot of people today know Grand Funk as that more Top 40-oriented band of the mid ’70s than the rock band of the early ’70s. Why did you guys change?
I was outvoted, that’s why, brother!
Tomorrow, Mark Farner talks about the band’s commercial pop focus in the mid 1970s, their acrimonious break-ups, and what he’s doing today — including his new EP.
