Wednesday, Jul 9, 2008
Grand Funk Railroad killed rock 'n' roll?! Plus: Sun Microsystems scientist's doomsaying isn't convincing; white New Yorkers need to protest police brutality.
Apr 13, 2000 | Ladies and gentlemen of the jury ...
BY IRA ROBBINS
(04/10/00)
The thesis that Grand Funk Railroad killed rock has to be one of the dumbest, most shortsighted things I've ever heard. Music, especially popular music, is cyclical, just like any other human endeavor. It begins with the laboring artist with a vision, the popularization of that vision and concludes with the grinding of that vision into dust by the popular marketing machinery (assuming the vision has sufficient cachet to make it out of step one, that is).
If GFR hadn't come along, 50 other bands would have, none of which would have delivered the kill shot to a genre that was already running on empty artistically. Art, by nature, must be built up, torn down and restarted. Saying GFR killed rock is equivalent to saying that The Beatles invented it.
-- Eric Wooten
Damn, I feel terrible. I recently bought their greatest hits CD. And I liked it.
-- John Verrier
At their worst GFR were pedestrian, sweaty hard rock with little more to offer than a soundtrack to regurgitate cheap beer and Quaaludes to for their groin-smacking, bong-sucking audience. I would suggest that if Robbins had looked a little harder at the fingerprints on the many knives in the back of rock 'n' roll, the more likely offenders would turn out to be the legions of deeply pretentious art rockers that plodded right alongside GFR (including in their ranks critical faves like Fripp and Eno). At least Mark Farner -- unlike his far more Hestonian homeboy Ted Nugent -- didn't find his politics until far past the peak of his fame.
-- Larry Grogan
It's easy to dump on Grand Funk Railroad, hell, we all did back then. But in the interim some of us figured out that the vaunted idealism and artistic pretense of '60s rock was a sham, a durable sham, but a sham no less.
It is almost excruciating, in the year 2000, to still hear the bleating of writers like Robbins about their holy 1960s. Gimme a break. I was there, and there wasn't a rat's butt worth of difference between the calculation of a Mark Farner and the sophomoric pretense and narcissism of a Jim Morrison. You even have conveniently forgotten how much the late-'70s punks you venerate hated the '60s peace-love-dope nonsense, and with good reason.
What still matters? Great pop tunes. Great singers like Otis Redding. Great songwriters like Buddy Holly and Lennon & McCartney (before they did all the dope), John Fogerty, Springsteen, and blues and jazz, from whence most of the best stuff came.
-- Don Cicchetti
Thanks to Ira Robbins for a witty and accurate view of the '70s rock scene. Let's not forget that the same decade brought us such bands as Foreigner, Boston, Styx and REO Speedwagon, all promising bands that chose to stay with the formula that worked the first time rather than try anything creative.
It is refreshing in today's VH1 "Behind the Music" nostalgia to see some honest criticism of the era.
-- Dale Howard Swinehart
I read your Grand Funk piece with a big smile. They were a big, dumb band, first of the dinosaurs. As a teenager in the early '70s, I loved them. I haven't replaced my long-lost vinyl albums with CDs and I probably won't, but if "Heartbreaker" came on the radio tomorrow, I'd crank it and laugh. Sure beats Lenny Kravitz.
Of course, Homer Simpson explained it best to Maggie a couple of years back: "You don't remember Grand Funk? The bonging bass of Mel Schacher? The barechested guitar of Mark Farner? The competent drumming of Don Brewer?"
-- Jeff Calvin
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