If you can get over the resemblance of the cover to Blue Cheer's first LP, Vincibus Eruptum, you'll find inside a collection of music every bit as revolutionary. But it's nice to know their popularity is at least justified, on some level. Of course, they may not be interested in the rewards of true musicianship, when they've already placed themselves outside and beyond all other groups, in a class all their own, through their public relations campaigns. Not as well as a group like the Stones, the Yardbirds, the MC5 or many others, but well enough to begin thinking of themselves in terms of such company. With this new album, Grand Funk shows that they have got both lessons down. It also calls for a flawless sense of timing. To pull this off as well as they did required a superb understanding of dynamics - the way energy builds and affects the audience in a song, and how the interaction of the instruments within the structure of the song accomplishes this. ![]() The feeling they give is that it really is "just a shot away" and you better look out, kid. On Survival they showed just how effective their droning, overamplified bass and monophonic guitar sound could be, by removing all embellishments from "Gimme Shelter" and reducing it to its stark, urgent, basic skeleton. The thing was, they just hadn't perfected it yet, or learned to employ it to maximum advantage. ![]() But we should have recognized that this band had that special something, that original sound everybody tries for. ![]() Those three or four (I forget, having long since given them away) albums that came before Survival were pretty bad, there's no question of that. Oh, we were right too, but wrong just the same. It's time to admit we were wrong about Grand Funk.
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