CoronaVinyl Day 460 (G): Grand Funk by Grand Funk Railroad

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Today's CoronaVinyl category is "G," and I listened to power trio Grand Funk Railroad's second studio album, 1969's Grand Funk.

I know I've said it before when I reviewed other Grand Funk albums, but I'm still amazed and impressed at how heavy the band's early music was.  This album is pure hard rock, bordering on proto-metal, with some blues influence.  While it's not like the psychedelic rock of the tmie, it does a few extended jams where the band just wails.  The more I listen to their early material, I still don't know how Grand Funk isn't cited as a bigger influence on heavy metal and hard rock.  They were doing a lot of the same stuff Deep Purple was doing.

This album was their first platinum album in the U.S., and it reached #11 on the Billboard album chart -- while their next seven studio albums would all reach the Top 10.  Even more impressive is that the album did so well despite the lack of any successful singles.  The only single that charted on the Billboard Hot 100 was "Mr. Limousine Driver," which squeaked in at #97.

Favorite Song on Side 1:  "Got This Thing on the Move"
The album starts out with a banger with an apt title to kick off an album.  Fuzzed out guitars, heavy bass, crashing drums, and soulful vocals make for a great first track.

Favorite Song on Side 2:  "Inside Looking Out"
Side 2 is the jam side, with only three songs, none of them shorter than six and a half minutes.  The album closes with a nine and a half minute hard rock cover of an Animals' song that became a Grand Funk live staple, and you can see why.  They crush it, leaving it all on the table and taking the original (that was less than four minutes) and putting their own stamp on it.  I could definitely see this being extended out during a live show.  And this version is also sampled by Beck on "High 5 (Rock the Catskills)" from the Odelay album (one of my favorite albums of the '90s).