Week 28: Music from a Catholic School Education 2

To that raven-eyed rocker with the guitar slung low. I owe you rock and roll.

Part 2: The Grand Funking of Grand Funk

My awareness of rock and roll started at an early age with my mom’s Beatles records, which is probably why I always associate the Beatles with children’s music. Even their more complex songs like I Am The Walrus seemed like nursery rhymes even as my mom tried to explain to me the implications of lines like “see how they fly like Lucy in the sky”. This is probably why I always believed John Lennon when he said Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds originated with one of his son’s drawings. It wasn’t until years later as I entered teenagerdom and discovered my uncle and his record collection that I began to have a different understanding of all that rock and roll could mean.

My uncle had always been around. He is my youngest uncle and about 12 years my senior. We lived in a two story house; mom and I on the second floor and my grandparents and my uncle on the first floor. My uncle’s room had always been out of bounds to me, a mysterious door in the middle of my grandparents’ house where strange people walked in and strange smells and even stranger music came out. My uncle had been in college for many years studying guitar, saxophone, and flute, and it seemed he had no intention of ever graduating or moving out of grandma’s house. He was and still is what we might call the black sheep of the family. And while in my young mind I associated the visual arts with the success of my grandfather, I had always associated music with all the gray hairs my grandmother claimed my uncle had bestowed upon her with his loco lifestyle.

But now I was a teenager and wanted to hear music that wasn’t the Beatles, or the current disco hits of the day. And suddenly I found that my uncle’s door had never been barred from me and that he was more than willing to let me have a peak into his world. And thus I discovered “grown-up” rock and roll.

Back then, my uncle was what we might now call a full-fledged hippie. He had long hair and an even longer beard, which, combined with his hypnotic blue eyes and the white linen shirts and pants he liked to wear, gave him a very Jesus-like appearance and charisma that was not lost on my young catholic mind. I had already spent a good number of years in school learning about Jesus and Mary Magdalene and Sodom and Gomorrah, so when the door to his room opened I felt like I was walking into a biblical tent on the shores of the Dead Sea. His room smelled of incense, tobacco, and other smells, some more pleasant than others. The signs of music were everywhere; a saxophone, a guitar, flutes, sheet music, and records were sprawled around the room in disarray. Everything was dim, smoky and soft and all the furniture, the dresser, desk, shelves, basically any wooden surface on the room, had been decorated by letting lit cigarettes lay on them until they reached the filter and burnt a little black triangle on the edge of the wood. This pattern was repeated throughout all the surfaces. My uncle apparently never laid a cigarette on the same burnt spot twice.

My uncle also had a fantastic record collection, which included staples like Led Zeppelin, Jefferson Airplane, and CCR, but also less common fare such as the Faces, Cactus, and the Rascals. And Grand Funk Railroad. Especially the 1970 Grand Funk Live Album, which would inadvertently lead to a turning point in my young catholic student life.

Grand Funk’s double Live Album is a true live record, a document of a live performance by the band. This means the tapes were not edited, remixed, enhanced or touched in any way at all after they were recorded, what they played is what you hear. The result is a sprawling monster of a record, full of flaws and technical issues that most 21st century engineers shudder to hear. But to my inexperienced 14 year old ears it was sheer audacity and madness. A record unlike anything I’d heard before.

My uncle would let me glimpse at his life, but he never really let me experience it. I was, after all, just a kid. But listening to his records, I imagined that the music in them was what his life was like. And the Grand Funk Live Album in particular seemed to convey the excitement and indulgence I imagined filled his every moment. The record overflows with intensity and excess. Spacey sections follow fast rockers, guitar wah wah solos follow minutes of repetitive bass riffs, soft melodies build into walls of distortion, the tempo and intensity seem to be constantly building up and then slowing down, and as if all that wasn’t enough, the last side of the double album monster is one single song. What this record presented to me had been unimaginable, impossible to me up to that point. But more than all that, it was a sound picture of a rock concert. And I wanted some. I wanted to see the world which had spawned my uncle and his room. I wanted some live rock and roll.

So when about a year later I found out that none other than Grand Funk Railroad themselves were going to be playing at a baseball stadium just about a 30-minute drive from my house and right down the street from the skatepark I used to frequent, I figured this was my chance. I convinced my grandmother to drive me to the skatepark to meet my school buddy, Tripo, so nicknamed for constantly staring out of the classroom windows towards the ocean at the end of the street like he was on an acid trip riding the perfect pipe on that perfect wave. From the skatepark, Tripo and I walked the short road to the stadium, but in our typical 15 year old fashion, we didn’t have any money, tickets, or any plan about how we were going to get into the concert. Luckily, Tripo lived in the neighborhood, and knew the back roads, shortcuts and hidden doors that all neighborhoods have, and he knew how to sneak into the baseball stadium through a low section of the outfield fence. As we were jumping the fence, I was sure we were going to get arrested and sent to jail for the rest of our lives, but I guess back then no one cared much about security in rock concerts and we were able to uncomfortably walk through the open outfield and around the dugout area to the inside part of the front gate where people were walking in. It was already dark and the PA system was blasting some blurry music, and the whole scene reminded me of the camping trips that as a child I would take with my mom to various beach festivals where surfer dudes twice my age would be talking about 714 pills and lefty waves. Except the people in the stadium didn’t surf, and were more on the pale and hairy side. Tripo and I floated around aimlessly like lost children in a sea of people all of whom looked old enough to be our parents, but who had no interest in anything to do with us. I remember feeling extremely young and out of place, and I was sure we would get discovered any minute and get thrown out, or worse.

And then it happened. The opening band started. And a raven-eyed girl with a guitar was right up front and center. She couldn’t have been much older than I was, and she was certainly younger than the people in the audience who for the most part continued milling around aimlessly waiting for the Grand Funk to start. But this girl paid no attention to them; she swung her guitar low and rocked it like she was on the tracks of the Grand Funk Railroad as it was about to barrel right over her if she didn’t hurry up and rock out, right now. Years later I would see her again in a small club in Texas and again I would get the distinct feeling that she was looking right at me when she was playing, but by that point in my mid 20s and with lots of concerts under my belt, it was just a funny debate between my girlfriend and I about who was she really looking at. But at 15 in a huge baseball stadium, her eyes locked with mine and she sang for me and for me only. And she told me with rock to not give a damn about my bad reputation, the others were living in the past and we were a new generation. And from then on out, I think of her every time I wonder about where I fit in with the bearded people, or the surfers, or the smart people, or the cocolos, or the rockeros, or whoever.

It would be a while before I figured out who that raven-eyed girl was. I think the first time I saw her was on the I Love Rock and Roll video. I also don’t remember much of the concert after she stopped playing. We stayed for the Grand Funk set, but all I remember from it is a lot of mush. Probably the mush my brain was in after her blistering set. And since there were no punk rock clubs during my catholic school days, (well maybe Shannon’s Pub, but that’s another story), for several years afterwards, when I listened to punk rock records I would imagine them rocking the way that Joan Jett rocked that day at the baseball stadium opening up for Grand Funk Railroad.

Bad Reputation.mp3

For other parts of the series click on the label link below.