![]() ![]() ![]() “I told Don and Mel, ‘Tommy wants us to keep going until we can’t play it anymore.’ So that’s how we cut it. I’m hearing strings, French horn, cello.’ When I played it for him, I got to the slow part, and he said, ‘After that, you need to play the chorus over and over. “Tommy Baker did the strings and orchestration for the song. That’s a hit!’ I said, ‘God gave it to me. Mel and Don said, ‘Man, Farner, you wrote a hit. ![]() I took it to rehearsal that day, and both Mel and Don said, ‘Man, Farner, you wrote a hit. I played this inversion just by accident, and I was like, ‘How did that happen?’ Then I started singing, and the whole song just came out. Then I made a pot of coffee, reached over and grabbed my Washburn guitar, and I started playing. on it: ‘God, would you please give me a song that would touch the hearts of those you want to get to?’ I got up and wrote the words – they were just there. I said the prayer my mother taught me, and I put a P.S. Somebody pinch me!’” “Closer To Home (I’m Your Captain)” from ‘Closer To Home’ (1970) You know, we’re making a record, so I was like, ‘Wow, it’s really happening. What’s next?’ Listening back to it was thrilling. I remember Terry Knight heard us track ‘Heartbreaker’ one time, and he said, ‘Okay, that’s done. “I used my Musicraft Messenger guitar and my West Fillmore amplifier, and I just ripped. Of course, the whole first album was done in three days – recorded and mixed. By the time we got in the studio, I could’ve played it in my sleep. “I played it with Grand Funk pretty much the same way as I did with the Bossmen. It wasn’t so much that I was a great musician it was because I was going after the audience. We’d play it live, and there’d be the breakdown section where I do a guitar solo. In fact, we did it in the Bossmen for the last six months that I was with them. I had it in my back pocket for a few years before Grand Funk. Then I started hearing everything – the drums, the bass, how I should play guitar. I just started playing the chords, played ’em over and over, and soon enough the melody came to me. “This was my first attempt at songwriting. I could never read music, but I knew how to put melodies across in my solos, and I could get the audience going.” “When I played with Don and Mel, I just got into this frame of mind, and I was cookin’. “My guitar playing has always been based on pure emotion,” he says. I’m 72 now, so I’ve got to work the muscles a little more than when I was a young guy. How do you explain it?”įarner is similarly unanalytical when it comes to his exuberant approach to electric guitar playing, a distinctive blend of robust rhythms, widescreen leads and irrepressible jams that ignited car radios, arenas and stadiums throughout the ’70s. I’d pick up my guitar, and at first I had nothing, but before long I’d have a complete song. But it was incredible how I could get in this state of mind. “I just needed the confidence that I could do it, and once I had it, I couldn’t stop,” he says. So it’s fair to note that the band, in the end, averaged less than a minute an album, famewise.That one night unlocked a door for Farner, and it led to a cavalcade of hard-charging, soulful classics that he would go on to write for Grand Funk Railroad from the late ’60s and well into the next decade. Under normal circumstances, the cliche of Andy Warhol’s dictum, regarding everyone being famous for fifteen minutes, would be avoided, but Grand Funk Railroad were not averse to cliche. Nowadays though, in a time when the most mediocre art has a revisionist fan base devoted to it and no single moment of cultural detritus is allowed to be forgotten, even a joke about Grand Funk’s obscurity requires an explainer. By the airing of the 1996 episode, any media praise of the Flint, Michigan band (who had, just twenty years before, been awarded thirteen gold albums, ten of of which were certified platinum, and who had famously sold out Shea Stadium in less time than it took for the Beatles to do the same) was hard to come by. But as illustrated in season seven, episode 24, Homerpalooza, even that great man’s praise came with some caveats. Footstompin’ Music Even prior to the Simpson family patriarch’s craven retconning as being a fan of whatever radio bullshit was popular at least ten years previous to any given episode, and before the television series’ own reenactment of an archetypal classic rock band’s descent into diminished returns and grim self-parody, few public figures advocated for the music of Grand Funk Railroad with more vigor than Homer J. ![]()
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