RETRO: Grand Funk, ‘Survival’ (1971)
Not long ago, I interviewed Grand Funk frontman Mark Farner for REBEAT, which was a personal thrill because as a teenager I loved the band’s music. They were reportedly the first American band to rack up 10 consecutive gold/platinum/or double-platinum albums, and their fourth album, 1971’s Survival, was my favorite album by the group by far. It was released when they were still considered a rock band, a group less concerned with making Top 40 records and more concerned with pleasing their fans — though pleasing fans and selling albums weren’t exactly mutually exclusive. Though Survival did not have a single release that made the Top 40, nevertheless it sold a million copies the day it was released and went platinum.
Even so, Survival is a record that’s little-known today. The more commercial sound of their seventh album, We’re an American Band, gets a lot of the attention the group garners now, or if the focus is on the early years, it’s their second album Closer to Home that critics address most often. But there’s something quite unique about Survival, and since REBEAT focuses on the obscure and the popular, I want to take a look at it here.
“Country Road”
The album opens with a Mark Farner-penned tune, “Country Road.” Despite the now-legendary disagreements and acrimony that may have plagued the group in later years, there’s no evidence of that here. Farner, Mel Schacher, and Don Brewer blend so well that that you get the sense they were made to play together; indeed, it would appear that way for a few more years at least. Schacher’s bass drives the song, and listening to it, I wonder why his playing has received more notice in conversations about the greatest rock ‘n’ roll bassists.
It’s also a song, if played for any knowledgeable rock fan, that can be pretty clearly pigeonholed as being from the late ’60s/early ’70s. It has that sound and feel, and the allusions to Vietnam are palpable. It’s a good song to open the album.
“All You’ve Got is Money” and “Comfort Me”
For me, the funky “All You’ve Got is Money” is a pretty disposable song, lacking in the originality that I think this album is known for in many ways: it wouldn’t seem out of place as a deep track on an album by any number of rock groups from the period. “Comfort Me” starts great, like the power ballads that would evolve in the 80s, but becomes a little uneven as it goes on. It’s still a very good tune though.
“Feelin’ Alright”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RQu5ol5ZoJM
The fourth song on the album, and the last cut on side one, is the first of two covers, in this case the Dave Mason- penned song “Feelin’ Alright.” By the time this album came out, both Mason’s group Traffic had released the song where it made it only to #123 on the charts, and Joe Cocker’s 1969 version had surpassed it by going to #69 in 1969. Grand Funk released this as a single, and it surpassed them both, climbing to #54 in 1971. It’s a solid version, but the chart history of this song suggests it was more suited for album play than Top 40 fare. However, Cocker would re-release his version in 1972 and it would finally break into the Top 40, stalling at #33.
“I Want Freedom”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b6_cfUcTpCU
“I Want Freedom” is one of two very unique and exceptional songs on the album. For one thing, it starts with a minute or two of studio chatter as the guys try to get the track laid down the right way. When I interviewed Farner, I asked him why the studio talk was in there. His simple response was, “We were just havin’ fun. And because it was fun I believe Terry Knight, who produced, just decided to leave it in because it’s cool. He said, ‘I think people will dig it.'” Admittedly, as a teenager I thought it was cool as anything I could imagine. It’s a great song, a rock classic that has never gotten its due in my opinion. Furthermore, I think Brewer’s drum work is exceptional here, and if you ever hear this album on vinyl and hear the deep resonance of the drums as they move back and forth from speaker to speaker at the end of the song, you’ll understand why I love this song. Call me a purist, but you won’t get that listening to a digital cut on your computer. Get the vinyl and crank it up. You’ll hear it.
“I Can Feel Him in the Morning”
“I Can Feel Him in the Morning” is the second of the two songs on this album I think are quite unique, a song I think is unusual for the time because of its religious undertone. It begins with children talking about who and what God is, and differences between good and bad. While it may sound schmaltzy, it actually works quite nicely.
But the really amazing thing is, other than a couple of covers, this is the first time in four albums that a band member other than Farner wrote the song. Despite the fact that Mark Farner is a man of deep faith, and this is probably the most religious song they did, he didn’t write it all by himself. He told me, “I wrote the music, and Don Brewer wrote the words. I was jamming — you know you discover things as a guitarist. I was jamming it in the studio. Brewer said, ‘You have any words to that yet?’ I said, ‘No man, I just kind of came up with it and I’m putting it together. You want to try something with it?’ He said, ‘Yeah I’ll go home and write some words.’ So he came back in the next day and he had it all done. As far as the words, they’re great words because they make you think. Anything we can do as musicians to provoke people to think without pissing them off is good. That was what that was all about.”
It’s a great and beautiful song. It’s no wonder Brewer was chomping at the bit to write songs for the group too. He wouldn’t be credited with anything on the next two albums, but after that, he’d write “We’re an American Band” all by himself, and the rest, as you probably know, is history.
“Gimme Shelter”
To close out the album, the group opted for another cover, this time of the Stones’ “Gimme Shelter.” Oddly enough, this second cover was the other single they released from the album. It rose to #61, and as the Stones’ version hadn’t charted, this second cover surpassed the original on the charts as well.
It would be sacrilege to say that this is better than the Stones’ version, and it’s not — but it’s really close.
All in all, just seven songs comprise Survival, but the album epitomizes American rock in the early 1970s. The songs deal with many of the questions American youth had at the time, in a way Grand Funk did best. If you haven’t heard it, you should. It is a true classic.
