by Steve Miller
Mark Farner: They introduced us as “Grand Frank Railway.” The guy never did get it right that weekend. But we got on the Led Zeppelin tour in the fall. But it didn’t go very good after the … at Olympia in Detroit.
Dave West (West Laboratories, amplifier developer): I saw Grand Funk open for Led Zeppelin in October 1969, and they tore the place apart. I mean the fans were going crazy, standing the whole time, every song into the next. About halfway through, the manager for Led Zeppelin, Richard Cole, and a couple of Zeppelin roadies came around to Terry Knight and told him they had to come off now. And Knight refused. So they went over to where all the sound equipment was plugged in—this was pretty small PAs and stuff back then—and unplugged the whole thing. All of a sudden Grand Funk was standing there just holding their instruments.
Mark Farner: Their manager, Peter Grant, came out and grabbed Terry Knight, and Terry thought he was going to kill him. So he told him to shut the band down or he was going to. Terry was just going, “A-a-a-baha … ,” and their manager shut down all the PA systems. They didn’t go on for an hour and a half after we got off. Half the people left. They didn’t want us on the tour anymore because we stole the show from them.
Rick Kraniak: The only Grand Funk track that even got played early on in Detroit was “Time Machine”—kind of a I-IV-V progression, you know, blues rock, and other than that, they didn’t even get played in Detroit. They were getting really big nationally, though. Detroit ignored them.
Jim Atherton (manager, Terry Knight and the Pack): I was working with Mountain about a year after Grand Funk began to take off in 1969. I sold amps, and you know we were out there doing the thing with the Mountain, and at the time they were having this big hit with “Mississippi Queen,” first half of 1970. We were in their offices in New York, and they were telling about how they were going to Memphis and they were gonna be opening for Grand Funk and they were just gonna kick Grand Funk’s ass—ya ta da ta da. They were going on and on with me about that and I was like, “Well, guys, let me know how that works out, will ya?” Just on volume alone, Grand Funk would prevail.
Mark Farner: I always wanted to create this atmosphere where the only thing going was the music. That’s why it was important to play really loud. I don’t want people talking while we’re playing.
Dave West: I sold Mark his amps, amps that I made, West Amps. Mel used them too for a while. Mark did endorsements for me. And when they got really huge, they were flying all over, and they would come into the little airport near where I lived, in Lansing, Michigan. Send a couple guys on a private plane just to pick up sixteen JBL speakers, amps and some parts.
Don Brewer: Once we got a record deal with Capitol Records, and once the first record, On Time, broke, we were immediately in limousines, and actually we got into chartering airplanes, and all that kind of stuff.
Dave West: Money was no object—they had really made it. Farner used to have this set up, these amp heads were placed fairly close together, and he’d have a couple guys in the crew sit on a stool next to the amps during the live shows. Mark really cranked it up, and he would overload the tubes to get the sound he wanted. These were British made, $12 apiece. So the road crew guys are up there with asbestos gloves and, in a rack beside them, had these tubes. And when a tube would flame, they would quick grab it and put another in, just like that. They’d be almost on fire. They also changed all sixteen output tubes before each gig. $12 apiece, $200 overall—no big deal to them.
Mark Farner: Terry would tell them to throw the tubes out after every show and put matched pairs, brand-new matched pairs in. And they’re, you know, for a matched pair it was a couple hundred dollars. These guys are going, “Are you crazy? We can’t throw these things away.” And it was our money.
Don Brewer: We eventually found out we had been completely ripped off by Terry Knight. He brought us into New York, and he got a couple of his attorneys, and they had us sign these agreements that were totally in their favor—and this was back in the day[s] of hippies and brothers and everybody loving each other, and nobody’s gonna rip anybody off, and so forth and so on.
Dave Knapp (Terry Knight’s brother): Remember that these guys were treated like kings everywhere and they went everywhere, and they were just kids—twenty, twenty-one years old. They didn’t know how to handle money.
Don Brewer: This deal was where Terry was getting all of the money, and we were basically making a paycheck. That’s what ended our relationship with Terry.
Mark Farner: We were paid $350 a week, man, and we thought we were big time, dude. You know from what we were making, we were big time. That was a lot of money. But we had no clue as to the amount of money we were actually making. That was all kept from us. We eventually got past it, but it was nasty.
Don Brewer: When we recorded We’re an American Band Todd Rundgren produced it and he stayed at my apartment, the Knollwood Apartments in Grand Blanc. We’d pull into a 7-Eleven to get some milk or something, and he’d come in with me. I had the big afro and he had the multicolored hair, and we’d walk into these places, and jaws would just drop to the floor—“What the fuck is this?” C’mon, this was in Flint, Michigan. But I don’t know if that would have made it in Detroit, either.
Mark Farner: Frank Zappa came to Michigan to produce us, but he stayed in Hartland, closer to Ann Arbor, not with us. When he got there—you know he came from Los Angeles of course—and he wanted to come and visit the area and see how we worked. But not Flint. He said the thing that he liked the most about us right off was when Craig Frost backed up against Brewer’s leg and farted on it. He said, “Any band that farts on each other is alright by me.”
Don Brewer: Frank Zappa never really made it all the way to Flint, just to our studio in Parshallville. He stayed in Ann Arbor. He’d go out to the club in Ann Arbor every night, try to pick up chicks. He’d walk in, and obviously everybody knew who he was. He’d always carry coffee with him and smoke cigarettes like crazy. Always. Always had coffee with him. In a thermos.
In Detroit, Woodstock Was the Weak Shit
Tom Wright (photographer, manager, Grande Ballroom): We were having this festival at the Michigan Fairgrounds in May 1969. There was the MC5, the Stooges, the James Gang, and the Frost, among others. Some kids brought flyers for Woodstock and were passing them out. This was Detroit. Everyone was laughing at them. Joan Baez? It certainly wasn’t up to Detroit standards for rock and roll.
Michael Quatro (promoter, keyboardist, Michael Quatro Jam Band): In July 1969 Michael Lang and one of his partners were preparing to get Woodstock together the next month. I told them how to do it, and they didn’t pay attention. I had this great bill over in Saugatuck—Procol Harum, MC5, Muddy Waters, Amboy Dukes, Brownsville Station, the Stooges—and it was the Fourth of July weekend. I told Lang and his partner to get their advance ticket sales together because they told me they wouldn’t be able to keep up the barriers at night—anyone would just walk in free. I had sixty thousand paid admissions from eight cities at my show from as far east as Pittsburgh. And my cost to get the whole thing going was $5,000. And come Friday, all the gates fell down, and everyone could walk in free. But it was okay; I already had made my money. Lang didn’t get that. I told him to get advance ticket sales up. He could have saved himself a lot of money if he had listened to me.
Mitch Ryder: When you look at Woodstock, you gotta look at the whole picture: the way that the cultural fucking fascist leaders tried to turn that into something bigger than what it was for their own selfish purposes. They wanted to be able to define what was hip, and Woodstock was going to be the vehicle that would tell them that was hip.
Michael Quatro: The next year I did the Cincinnati Pop Festival. That was the first nationally televised rock concert, and I had a great bill—a bunch of Detroit bands. And we paid. Terry Knight called me in January 1970 and wanted to get Grand Funk on a Joe Cocker bill. At Cincinnati Gardens, as it were; I called up Cocker and Dee Anthony and they just couldn’t make it happ
en. So I called Terry back, and he knew I had a lot of pull, so when I said I can’t book Grand Funk, you know, I used every favor and couldn’t get them on the Joe Cocker show, Terry thought that I had just let it go. So Terry was pissed. Now it gets to be May 1970, and Grand Funk is number one in the country, and I need Grand Funk for Midsummer Rock, the Cincinnati Pop Festival. I called Terry and he said, “Well, we’re up to $10,000 a night and were number one.” I said, “I’ll take them,” and he said, “No, for you, it’s $20,000.” He doubled the price. Hell, yes I took them.
Bob Heath (producer, WLW Cincinnati): Michael Quatro brought this idea to me; I had been part of that Joe Cocker show—which Cocker didn’t show up for, by the way—and he wanted to have it taped for TV on WLW and also broadcast in stereo on the radio when it was played. So the idea was we would tape the concert, then edit it, then distribute it through syndication later in the year. Which is what happened.
Bill Spiegel (producer, WLW Cincinnati): The day before the show and I was asking around for the contracts, this guy from New York had come in and told us he would handle all that. He didn’t. So we had to move around quick to get these contracts signed. Some of the bands didn’t want to be taped.
Bob Heath: Back then they had guys who were your consultants. This guy Mike Goldstein from New York, he would tell Marriott Hotels how to reach the youth market because that was a really foreign thing to most companies. He came to Avco, which owned WLW. The big fear was that because Cincinnati is this conservative town people would fall apart. So the protection is they put Jack Lescoulie, who used to host the Today Show on NBC in the fifties and sixties, in the broadcast booth. It was like bringing out Walter Cronkite to narrate a rock show with people smoking dope and having fun.
Tom Copi (photographer): I came down to Cincinnati from Ann Arbor with my brother-in-law, who had a canteen with acid water. It rained like hell the night before the show, a really soaking rain, and they didn’t want to let anyone on the field. It was held at Crosley Field, a baseball stadium. The stage was at second base, but of course, as soon as it started, everyone ran onto the field.
Tom Weschler: The crowd was cool except for when they wouldn’t let them on the grass.
Tom Copi: I took that shot of Iggy walking on hands from the apron of the stage. We had great access.
Iggy Pop: In Cincinnati we just sounded fucking bad. Imagine if someone got a hold of a copy of Fun House and turned the bass off—it just doesn’t make it.
Tom Copi: I got that shot, then someone handed Iggy the peanut butter that he smeared all over himself and on the crowd. When Iggy came offstage, he had the peanut butter all over his hands, and there was a local DJ standing onstage near the edge, wearing a powder-blue silk shirt. Iggy just wiped the rest of the peanut butter on his shirt. The guy was laughing, but you know he wasn’t happy.
Neal Smith: I was under the blanket on “Black Juju,” and the TV camera’s right on my face—I’m blowing kisses to it. Stations in the Midwest turned the station off. They went to black because they said, “This is too outrageous.” It was immediately censored once they saw me winking and blowing kisses for the camera with my makeup on and everything. They freaked out. There were a bunch of stations in the Bible Belt that just, boom, pulled the plug on it.
Bill Spiegel: I think WNEW and WOR picked up the show, but very few stations carried it. There was nothing really outrageous about it, but people hadn’t seen rock and roll on television in prime time before. For a reason.
Tom Weschler: Seger was on that bill in Cincinnati; he was still living in Ann Arbor. Mike and Russ Gibb put it on. We got to the airport; we were gonna fly the band down there. The roadies were already there with the equipment. And we got to the airport, and no Bob. Punch goes, “Gimme the keys to your car.” I went [sighs], “Oh gosh.” That’s all I needed was a mad Punch Andrews driving my gorgeous Ford. I had this big, fat LTD. My dad worked for Ford, so he gives me this LTD to use. Punch was a crazy driver. He takes the car, drives up to Ann Arbor, takes a later plane, you know he had to pound on the door to wake Bob up. He sleeps like a baby. So Punch woke him up, got him down there. My car survived, left at the airport with no gas.
Bob Heath: There are video tapes of many of the bands. We taped Bob Seger that day. We had to take breaks, and it was fifteen hours of music, so some bands we didn’t get. But we got a lot of them. We also got some shots of the police going after kids when the show let out. The cops called us and wanted to see the tapes of after the show in case there were officers who got too aggressive. We got a subpoena to deliver those tapes. There was one that I saw where a cop hit kids with a billy club when he thought they weren’t moving fast enough.
Tom Wright: A couple months later we did Goose Lake. A guy named Richard Songer wanted to do a festival in Michigan that same summer. He got hold of Russ [Gibb] to get the acts. Songer had no clue and no experience in that and Russ was booking not only the Grande but he was getting bands into Cobo and other places—the Doors, Hendrix, and national acts like that.
Russ Gibb: Goose Lake was the biggest deal. Before we even did, it we go up to the capitol in Lansing and meet with Governor Milliken and his chief of police, and we told them what we were going to do. We said, “We suspect there will be dope there. How do you want us to handle that?” So they mulled it around, and we sat there for four or five hours in that meeting. They said, “Well, tell you what: we won’t arrest anybody in the park because that might cause a riot, but we want seventy undercover cops there.”
We were giving the ticket holders chips we bought from Las Vegas. Yeah, you got a chip with a special emblem on it. That’s how you could get in. We gave seventy of them to the state and that was it. And they said, “Don’t do anything, let it go. We’ll take pictures, and we’ll get them on the way out.” That was their theory. So we did that.
Don Was: The curious thing about that was Goose Lake had happened, and really people now think it was Detroit’s Woodstock.
Letter to Editor, Detroit Free Press, August 7, 1970: I am a concerned citizen interested in the welfare of our younger generation and highly alarmed about the effects of the recent wave of so-called pop concerts… . [Goose Lake] will provide an opportunity to be free of social restraints for three days and will set the stage for orgiastic revelries, including the use of dope. No thinking person can question the adverse effect this has on the moral fiber of young people.
Mitch Ryder: I was supposed to be there for one day, but I dropped some acid, and I ended up being there for three days, and I slept in Teegarden & Van Winkle’s trailer. I performed with two different groups and I was just trippin’.
Tom Wright: So it gets going, and Songer had an army of guys working for him and all the equipment needed to build a city. That was Goose Lake. We had asphalt parking for thirty-five thousand cars with yellow stripes. There was no chaos on the roads. The sound and light towers were built of bridge steel. You could have hit them with a missile and not taken them down.
Russ Gibb: Songer and his brother were starting to build expressways. They would tear away an old highway and they would haul it away. Before long they had two trucks, then they had five trucks, then they had twenty trucks, then he started to build. They used those trucks to build this whole village at Goose Lake.
Tom Wright: We went to the rotating stage after I learned at the Grande that if you want problems, just screw up the music. That’s when they break urinals and windows, and so we just couldn’t allow the music not to go on. Everybody got forty-five minutes to play, even if it was Mountain—they had forty-five minutes and that was it. It meant that was the best music they had. You couldn’t even take a leak; you would go to the john and miss something.
Russ Gibb: The stage was the sole genius of Tom Wright. They were gonna put up a regular stage, and Tom said, “No, no. I want it to turn because I want to keep music playing. You’ll have one band set up and as soon as they’re over, spin that fucker.” Before the first day was over the newspapers were lo
aded with “dope festival” because there they were smoking and selling and you name it.
Jackson Patriot, August 9, 1970: Youth, their spirits drug-broken, lie in the billowing hospital tents, some surrounded by friends talking them back to reality. One group, led by a guitar, sings softly to their fallen comrade.
Pete Trappen (fan): It was like Woodstock; there were booths selling hashish, mescaline, peyote, LSD. I was high on some mescaline and met a girl, and we wormed way up to the stage when Mountain was playing. I was twenty feet away from the stage. Security was a joke, and someone jumped up on stage with what looked to me like a knife. Felix Pappalardi saw this, took his bass, hit the guy. Everyone saw this, but the band kept playing. I’m not sure to this day if it was part of the show, but another split-second, and Leslie West would have been bleeding.
Michael Lutz: During our set a guy fell off the light tower. He was so stoned, nothing happened to him. We played on Friday afternoon and had to leave right after to drive to Kansas City for a show the next night.
Dan Carlisle: We covered Goose Lake from top to bottom. I went out to Goose Lake, and it was dirty and crowded and full of speed freaks. It is in the eye of the beholder, those things. Maybe someone who went out and got laid and got some good food had a good time—it all depends on who you ask. I was backstage and I looked at it for a brief time and thought, “If this is what it was coming to, then we have to stop it.” But it was very successful, and everyone went.
Al Jacquez: Rolling Stone gave Goose Lake two paragraphs. There were all of these great bands. I mean this goes down and no one pays attention. People were not that far away from the stage as most festivals. They had a manually operated circular stage set up on the back half, and then guys pushed it and you would come around, then there was no time between acts. We went out there in the dark and then, wham, lights.