Grand Funk Railroad is the very cool band with the very cool name recording some of the greatest hits of the 1970s that we still love today. The founding members Don Brewer (drums, vocals), Mark Farner (vocals, guitar, keyboard, harmonica) and Mel Schacher (bass) from Flint, Michigan, shot into the stratosphere with their anthem “We’re An American Band.”
Grand Funk Railroad’s impressive catalogue of hits earned them 10 platinum, 12 gold albums and they are considered the biggest American rock group in history. The band sold out New York Shea Stadium in 72 hours, smashing the record held by The Beatles.
They hooked up with some of music’s greats, including Frank Zappa, who produced their album Good Singing, Good Playing (1970) and Todd Rundgren, who produced two of their biggest albums We’re An American Band (1973) and Shinin’ On (1974).
Brewer and Schacher joined with seasoned musicians Max Carl (vocals), Mark Chatfield (guitars) and Tim Cashion (keyboards), are celebrating GFR’s 50th anniversary of their hit version of “The Locomotion” with The Loco-Motion Tour 2024, which careens into Patchogue Theatre for the Performing Arts on Sept. 14.
It was a privilege to get this in-depth interview with Brewer.
What can audiences expect when they come to your concert at Patchogue Theatre?
We focus on playing the Grand Funk hits “I’m Your Captain,” “Closer to Home,” “The Loco-Motion,” “Some Kind of Wonderful,” “We’re An American Band,” and a few others we’ll throw into the show. We know people are coming to hear Grand Funk and we want to give them what they want.
This is the 50th anniversary of GFR’s version of “The Loco-Motion.” Why did the band originally choose to cover Little Eva’s hit song?
It was a fluke. We had just come off our big hit album, We’re An American Band, and had two Top 40 hits with “We’re An American Band” and “Walk Like a Man.” We went into the studio with Todd Rundgren and were working on material for the next album, Shinin’ On. We needed one more song and came up with how about Grand Funk Railroad doing “The Loco-Motion.” It was so silly, maybe it would work. We got the lyrics to the song, listened to the record and played it. We went into the studio with Todd and he just knows how to work the dials, so he made it sound like a big party going on. When we play it live, somebody in the audience starts a conga line and people are dancing in front of the stage. It’s a great song!
Who originally thought of the band’s cool name?
We grew up in a little town called Swartz Creek, Michigan, which is right outside of Flint. You pulled up to the railroad crossing and the train would go by with box cars that had “Grand Trunk and Western Railroad.” In the ’60s, we were a band called “The Pack” and we wanted a change. A new term for music had come along around 1966, “funk.” So, we did a play on words, instead of Grand Trunk Railroad, we became Grand Funk Railroad because it related to where we were from, it sounded big and powerful, and at that time it was risqué. People asked, “What’s the name of your band?” Grand Funk Railroad. They immediately thought we were saying the other four-letter word.
How does it feel knowing that you wrote maybe one of the greatest rock’n’roll songs ever with “We’re an American Band?”
It’s amazing! The Olympics in Paris just used it. When I wrote the song, I was trying to create a hit. We were going through a period where we had just finished six albums. They all went gold. Then we found out our manager, Terry Knight, had been stealing our money and we’d signed really bad contracts. We left Terry and he sued us. Also, we were a big FM underground radio band and they played the 7-minute songs we were making like “Inside, Looking Out” and “Closer to Home.” But all of that changed about the same time. Everything became hit radio. Hits became commercial 3-minute songs, so I analyzed hit records. It’s a verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge and then it goes back to the chorus and out. I wrote “We’re An American Band” around that format and I took little experiences that were happening to us on the road then I came up with the tag, “We’re An American Band.”
After 55 years, Grand Funk Railroad still brings in crowds. What do you attribute to the band’s staying power?
I think the music that we created in the late ’60s and early ’70s was very honest rock ‘n’ roll. It was before they got technical and started spending a year in the studio recording an album. We used to record our albums in two or three days. We’d rehearse everything and go into the studio, cut the tracks one day, do the overdubs the next day then do the mixes on the third day and it was done. There wasn’t a lot of trickery in the recording. We didn’t have time to fix everything, so there are mistakes all over the place, but it lends itself to the times and it doesn’t get in the way of the song. What you played, that’s what it sounds like — it’s very honest rock and roll.
