Grand Funk Railroad on Playboy After Dark

Hugh Hefner's recipe for a good time: Tony Randall, Barbie Benton, and Grand Funk Railroad. I dare you to come up with a more volatile trifecta of ingredients for achieving maximum hedonism. The perfect salve for our troubled souls in these trying times.


Fun Fact: Mark Farner infamously used a Messenger brand guitar, which featured an aluminum and magnesium neck and a built-in boost/distortion circuit. While little is known about this short-lived, west-coast based luthier, we do know the guitars used De Armond pickups, designed and manufactured right here in Toledo, Ohio. Pictorial evidence indicates Farner replaced the De Armond pickups with humbuckers somewhere along the line.

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Mark, Mel, and Don: The Rise and Fall of Grand Funk Railroad

Times Square, New York City, June 14, 1970.

Quarantine got you down? Why not check out Peter Makowski's condensed account of when three working-class yobs from Flint, Michigan, tapped into the national zeitgeist and briefly ruled the world?

Excerpted from Grand Funk Railroad: The Forgotten Story of a True American Band

"But the fact that the media played absolutely no part in Grand  Funk’s success turned out to be a major selling point to their audience. Critic/documentary maker, native of Detroit and bona fide Funk fan Michael Moore once said: 'People loved this band because some record company didn’t concoct it; image consultants didn’t choreograph it. This was a people’s band that just wanted to rock. A hard-driving, industrial rock’n’roll band that related to the average hard-working American.'

Indeed. There was a huge, ignored and uncatered-for audience in the U.S. Midwest who worked nine to five, paid their taxes and every weekend partied their brains out on a mixture of ripple wine, grass and barbiturates. While the middle classes had the privilege to protest about Vietnam, these poor bastards were actually being shipped out there to fight. This was a pissed-off generation who simply wanted to rock’n’roll. Grand Funk came to the rescue." –Peter Makowski, Classic Rock  / Louder

Now surf on over and read the complete story on LOUDER