Friday, Jul 25, 2008
There stands before you a murderer -- the band that killed rock 'n' roll.
Apr 10, 2000 | Among cultural historians, it has long been an article of faith that the '60s dream died in an ugly bar fight at Altamont Speedway in December 1969. Given the evidence, it's not a bad guess. After all, the Rolling Stones' well-intentioned fiasco proved that rock 'n' roll wasn't about good vibes and peace (man) and made it clear that the Woodstock nation was far better equipped to destroy itself than to take on any nebulous "establishment." Within a year, superstars would start overdosing like flies, the Beatles would sue one another and Don McLean would write "American Pie." How much more habeas corpus do you need?
As Freddy Krueger later observed, you can't kill something that's already dead. By the winter of '69, rock was already flat-lining. If the bad news had yet to reach the front lines -- and some might argue that it never has -- the monument to virile youth the Stones helped erect only a few years earlier was an edifice about to be wrecked.
And, ironically enough, not by its sworn enemies or its craftiest exploiters. Not by MTV, hip-hop, the Internet or even Celine Dion. No, rock 'n' roll was done in by three well-intentioned nobodies who, to their credit, worked hard and believed in themselves. That their values ran counter to the counterculture might have left them on the outside looking in a year earlier, but the '60s were ready for last call. That party had gone out of bounds with hard drugs and the discovery of death as a lifestyle and was facing a grim and uncertain morning after. The new-left politics rock had inadvertently fueled had diverged into feel-good Moratorium marchers and self-obsessed bombers. Stardom had corrupted musical idealists and left them easy prey for commercial interests. With Newtonian certainty, the great leap forward was ready for its about-face.
The world didn't need any more fixing, at least not of the sort that had turned to mud at Woodstock. There was nothing to be nostalgic about, since youth culture needed to see its reflection, and the Elvis '50s didn't look familiar at all. The future was too hard to comprehend and far harder still to imagine shaping. No, what the world needed, in the eyes of those unaware of its possibilities, was the kind of fun that didn't mean anything. As the social pendulum began its great swing back, Grand Funk Railroad rolled up to embody that know-nothing reactionary spirit and make it the soundtrack of the '70s.
Grand Funk arose from Michigan's working-class industrial fug around the same time as the Stooges, but their garage-bred ineptitude was a completely different American breed. The Stooges were bad seeds, pollution-fueled aliens who had abandoned life's assembly line to make music of enormously negative appeal as they accelerated blindly toward a personal hell. Ugly and depraved, unsophisticated but knowledgeably honoring some worthy predecessors, these vicious bohemians fit into the cultural fabric like cigarette holes in a couch. Their clothes and demeanor, if at all conscious, were not meant to help them fit in but to stand out, to inflict whatever offense was still possible in a time of great moral decay.
Grand Funk were Nixon's silent majority, living proof that long hair and loud music signified nothing more than the Prez muttering "Sock it to me" on "Laugh-In." Arriving on the scene too late to grasp rock's pivotal role in shaping the '60s, they observed a landscape of no-account hippies, foreign influence and dissipating idealism and didn't like what they saw. (The braless chicks, drugs and ready cash were another story.) Unlike the sissies and bookworms who had found rock 'n' roll their court of last resort, Mark, Don and Mel were hard, simple and strong -- macho moral descendants of John Wayne and Billy Jack -- and they knew their country needed them. Owing nothing to history, unashamed of their shortcomings and undaunted by their obstacles, they suited up and got to work. Though hardly in the same league, they shrewdly fashioned themselves a power trio after Cream, who conveniently dissolved just in time.
Others could lock themselves away, spending unconscionable amounts of time in the studio making grandiose art-rock of increasing intricacy and technical reach; Grand Funk displayed the rugged efficiency of line workers. These get-it-done types released two albums in each of their first four years, paving the way for cynics like the equally unselfconscious Kiss, who also knew to keep striking while the iron was on fire.
In addition to a career-launching appearance at the Atlanta Pop Festival a month before Woodstock, Grand Funk released two albums in 1969 and began their inexorable plod to superstardom. Released only weeks after Altamont, their second long-player, "Grand Funk Railroad," is a textbook classic of sweat-rock, a lumbering collection of clichis played with the conviction of Charlton Heston parting the Red Sea and the mindless determination of Rocky Balboa leaking blood on the canvas. Whereas the Stooges presumably noticed the vast chasm between their work and the sound of young America -- and thought themselves the better for it -- Grand Funk comically gave it their best shot with quavering vocals, grunting bass and high-school guitar licks. And they were richly rewarded.
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