I said the prayer my mother taught me, and I put a P.S. Somebody pinch me!’” “Closer To Home (I’m Your Captain)” from ‘Closer To Home’ (1970) You know, we’re making a record, so I was like, ‘Wow, it’s really happening. What’s next?’ Listening back to it was thrilling. I remember Terry Knight heard us track ‘Heartbreaker’ one time, and he said, ‘Okay, that’s done. “I used my Musicraft Messenger guitar and my West Fillmore amplifier, and I just ripped. Of course, the whole first album was done in three days – recorded and mixed. By the time we got in the studio, I could’ve played it in my sleep. “I played it with Grand Funk pretty much the same way as I did with the Bossmen. It wasn’t so much that I was a great musician it was because I was going after the audience. We’d play it live, and there’d be the breakdown section where I do a guitar solo. In fact, we did it in the Bossmen for the last six months that I was with them. I had it in my back pocket for a few years before Grand Funk. Then I started hearing everything – the drums, the bass, how I should play guitar. I just started playing the chords, played ’em over and over, and soon enough the melody came to me. “This was my first attempt at songwriting.
GRAND FUNK RAILROAD HITS HOW TO
I could never read music, but I knew how to put melodies across in my solos, and I could get the audience going.” “When I played with Don and Mel, I just got into this frame of mind, and I was cookin’. “My guitar playing has always been based on pure emotion,” he says. I’m 72 now, so I’ve got to work the muscles a little more than when I was a young guy. How do you explain it?”įarner is similarly unanalytical when it comes to his exuberant approach to electric guitar playing, a distinctive blend of robust rhythms, widescreen leads and irrepressible jams that ignited car radios, arenas and stadiums throughout the ’70s. I’d pick up my guitar, and at first I had nothing, but before long I’d have a complete song.
But it was incredible how I could get in this state of mind. “I just needed the confidence that I could do it, and once I had it, I couldn’t stop,” he says. That one night unlocked a door for Farner, and it led to a cavalcade of hard-charging, soulful classics that he would go on to write for Grand Funk Railroad from the late ’60s and well into the next decade.
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