Grand Funk- Closer to Home- Mark Farner, Don Brewer
By June 1970, the three man hard rock’n’soul locomotive from Flint MI known as Grand Funk Railroad had already recorded and released three studio albums in barely eighteen months, the latest being Closer to Home. If you were an American teenage male then, it was a Big Deal in the same all-consuming way as it later was when Rush released Moving Pictures ten years later, or when Metallica did the Black Album ten years after that. There’s something about those decade-setting hard rock benchmarks, and Closer to Home was a prime one for 1970.
In Summer 1970 there were perhaps a half dozen US cities with progressive rock on the radio, and even those few were hidden almost exclusively on the largely unknown band called FM. This is the world into which Grand Funk Railroad, soon to drop the caboose for just Grand Funk, would morph from a minor garage band called Terry Knight and the Pack. Top 40 radio on the AM dial was in its golden age, but for a 16-year old in Zanesville Ohio, even that was hard to find until after sunset when two Chicago AM stations hundreds of miles away, WLS and WCFL, legally were allowed to change their coverage patterns, blanketing the otherwise pop media-starved Upper Midwest at night. Had it not been for one intrepid radio host, Ron Brittain and his late Sunday night “Subterranean Circus” on WCFL, I might not be writing this today, for it was from there, alone in my bedroom with a battery-powered pocket-sized transistor radio, that I first heard musicians including Isaac Hayes with his epic cover of Burt Bacharach and the late Hal David’s “Walk On By”. It was there also that I heard intriguing new music by bands with funny names including Jethro Tull and Ten Years After, but the band with the funniest name of all also had one of the heaviest sounds to my hormone-saturated ears: Grand Funk Railroad.![](https://www.inthestudio.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/grand-Funk3-wide-e1592183248158.jpg)
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