Grand Funk - We're an American Band

I think this is the first time I ever saw a record on colored vinyl.  I was 11 and it was summer time and you know they played We’re an American Band at the Longbrooke pool where I could pretty much always be found, even though I didn’t live there, on an almost constant basis.  I think I had a Berea News paper route so I finally had some money and had started buying albums.  My friend Stub (that’s what we called him) had just bought it and we listened to it on his dad’s old AR mono rig.  That thing was hi as fi could go, if you asked me.  Anyway, Stub had just got it and was telling me it was a gold record.  I probably called him a liar!  Everyone knew records were black!

It was such a cool thing, though!  That record came in a shiny gold laminate kind of cover and it came with four stickers that looked sort of like the label, a finger pointing right at you in a very 70’s bit of design style.  I had to have one.  Even if I only liked one song on the album I had to have it.  So I collected a few houses and went to either Daisy Music or The Shoppe (maybe even Grant’s?) and bought myself a copy.  I couldn’t wait to get home and check it out.

When I go there, I went in my room and opened it up, sliding out the cool stickers and immediately sticking one on the first of four stupid places to waste my stickers on (I don’t know what it was, probably my brother).  Then I slid the record out, and…and…THE DAMNED THING WAS BLACK VINYL!  Man, was I pissed!  I remember talking to some record store owner shortly thereafter (probably the Daisy Music guy, he taught me a lot about how to behave in a record store and such) and that’s when I found out what limited editions were.  It took me decades to come across one that looked like Stub’s, but I finally found one, with all four stickers.  I think it ended up being free because I bought a stack of used records all at once and  I got a break on the price at Jerry’s in Pittsburgh.  This one plays nicely, but it has some crackles in between songs I could do without but it’s better than it would have been if I had gotten a gold one in 73, that’s for sure!

So as far as the music goes, I still think it’s a pretty terrific album.  I think Don Brewer and Mark Farner both have great voices for big, lunkheaded 70’s Rawk, and they wrote some catchy stuff that a kid could always get behind.  Mom and dad hated it, and this album has Craig Frost adding some half decent keyboards so even my inner Yes fan was treated to some cool solo’s on songs like Black Licorice.  Which back then I thought was probably kind of a socially unacceptable thing, but I wasn’t sure why.

I think Creepin’ kind of helped shape a lot of my views about music at that time.  I didn’t mind long songs, in fact I think I kind of liked them better than short radio hits.  It was really cool to hear WMMS or WNCR play Creepin’ or the even better side two opener The Railroad late at night when I was supposed to be asleep.  Those songs sounded like what I thought older kids would listen to.  At least the ones that I thought would be cool.  I may have been wrong.  I don’t know.  I know it seemed like no one read Creem anymore when I got older, and Rolling Stone hated these guys, so I was probably wrong.  I know that when Punk was blowing my mind I still liked Grand Funk, and the people I met that liked Punk hated Grand Funk.  So I don’t know where they really stand on the Rock N’ Roll scrapheap, but I think they were pretty swell.

I always thought Walk Like a Man should have been the second single from this album.  It may have been for all I know, but I always thought Don Brewer just sang his ass off on that one.  He sounds like a MAN.  No prissy little rocker, he sounded like a dude that your old man would call mister.  At least he did to me.

So my vinyl could be a little less noisy, but it’s not irritating and I’m really glad to have a gold one, finally.  I’m also just going to leave the stickers be this time.  Now that I think about it, those things used to be everywhere.  They were on school lockers, inside bathroom stalls, on stop signs and metal doors – they were ubiquitous.  I bet if I think about it, I’ll notice one, or at least its remnants, somewhere around here before too long.  I actually got to see these guys eventually, and they were great.