Don Brewer of Grand Funk Railroad

antiMUSIC: Was there more than a little bit of vindication on your part when after you fired Terry Knight, the band went on to even greater success, proving that you weren't just a marketing man's project?

Don: (laughs) Yeah, well that's putting it…yeah, that's putting it the way it was. Yeah, it was, there was a lot of satisfaction. We really were scared to death that we wouldn't be able to pull it off. He was filing law suits all over the place. We were going to end up being in court for years with him. He was claiming the rights to the name, and he was claiming the right to everything. Plus we were broke you know. He had control of all of the money. We didn't have any of the money coming directly to us; everything had to flow through him. It was a scary time. Sink or swim time for us. It was either we had to produce something new that would stand on its own or we were done. And we were just going to be battling in court for a few years. And luckily we just moved ahead. I started doing some writing and got Todd Rundgren involved as far as a producer's concerned. You know FM radio was changing from being the FM underground format to being more of an AM top 40 thing so we had to kind of focus on…we've got to make hit records, you know. And that's really what the focus was. If we don't make hit records…we can't just make seven minute album cuts anymore. We've got to make hit records or we're going to go, we'll be done. We really focused on what we had to do, and took the chore. We lost everything that we had, you know, from the first three years with Terry. And we just picked up with the name and we just started moving on. And man it was awesome to come out with a hit with "…American Band", and the follow-up to "Walk like a Man", another hit "Locomotion", and "Shinin' On". And you know, a totally different thing for Grand Funk fans, so either they disliked it or they liked it. It brought us to a whole other generation of people I think, to move on in that direction. And like I say, it wasn't really our choice, we had to do it (laughs). or we were done. To say, were we satisfied to be able to beat Terry Knight? Yes. That was, we were even more satisfied to be able to turn our career around and make a career, and now the things that have lasted all these year are really the music that we created then. That's what's still around all these years later.

antiMUSIC: Can we back up a bit and talk a bit about the early days? What do you remember about the Atlanta Pop Festival? Who else was on the bill? How many people was it for?

Don: Sure: it was, you know, it was really kind of a strange thing. The first festival we did, the first Atlanta Pop Festival we did, somebody there knew somebody who the booking agent we had in Ann Arbor. They called him and said, and was saying, "Hey I've got a new act. Is there any chance you can get them on the show? It's Grand Funk Railroad." And they said, well yeah, if they can get down here. We're not going to pay them anything, but if they can just get here, we can put them on as the opening act, opening day. Well s*** yeah! So we borrowed a van and rented a haul trailer. All of us jumped into the van, including the two crew guys, the three band members, a road manager, jumped into this van, pulling a U-haul trailer, we started going from Ann Arbor Michigan down to Atlanta, Georgia. And you know, on the way down, we flipped the trailer down over on the way, because the guy missed the turn that he was going to make down in Tennessee someplace and at the last minute we said (Yelling): "You got to make that turn!" and he made the turn then the trailer flipped over. All of our equipment went flying, lying all over the expressway. We're out there trying to get all the equipment back in the trailer. And one of the wheels had come off the trailer. (laughs) Anyways long story short , we did make it. We got down there and you know, we had never playing anything like that. Here we are walking out in front of a bunch of hippies. All gathered up in this field in Byron, Georgia, and it was just hotter than hell. And we're the opening act, opening day, ladies and gentlemen please welcome Grand Funk Railroad. And the audience is like: who the hell is Grand Funk Railroad. (laughs) They're all just kind of "well show us what you can do." and you know, the other acts on that bill, Led Zeppelin was on that bill, Ten Wheel Drive, Pacific Lights and Electric, Johnny Winter, who was huge in the south at that time. And all these, you know, just the biggest acts of that time were on. Here we are opening act, opening day, Grand Funk Railroad and nobody's ever heard of us before. And by the end of the show, everybody was on their feet, giving us a standing ovation. And we come off stage, we didn't even realize what the hell happened you know. We had never gotten a standing ovation before. (laughs) So then, you know, one of the promoters comes over and says (gravely voice) "Yeah, that was great. Can you stay? We'll put you on tomorrow." And they put us on at a better time slot the next day, out again. And the audience, by now, the word of mouth, you know, between all these people out there that are camped out for the weekend at this pop festival. (other voice): Grand Funk Railroad's great. You got to come out…" so it was like, by the end of the three days, we had this whole word of mouth thing going around the south that Grand Funk Railroad tore it up at the Atlanta Pop Festival. That was really our lucky break, the start of many good things to come.

antiMUSIC: You were signed by Capitol Records shortly after that. Do you remember how it came down and how did you guys celebrate?

Don: Well you know, we really didn't have time to celebrate. We just started working and going into the studio. We had taken a bunch of material. We were trying to become a new act and not do a lot of covers. I think we were only doing…oh, I think Inside Looking Out was a cover and maybe a couple of other covers that we were doing. But most of the other material that we were doing was original material. Mark had written for the band called The Pack that we had done in 1967-68, we'd done it as a five piece, and the recording wasn't very good. So we took at lot of that material that we were doing, like Heartbreaker was one of the songs. Getting Into the Sun I think was another song. And we had reworked them to be power trio style rather than '60s style. Now we're a power trio going into late 60s, you know this whole…

antiMUSIC: Cream, sort of thing?

Don: Yeah, Cream, Hendrix, really reworked the stuff to be big and powerful stuff. And that's what we were doing live. And that's what we started rehearsing to go into the studio to record, for Capitol. Terry Knight was our manager at the time. And of course he had a job at Capitol as an A&R guy, he wanted to be an A&R guy. And he was able to work his way up the ladder through capital because he brought Grand Funk Railroad into Capitol. So we had kind of a connection. And when this word of mouth thing started happening, with the pop festivals, not only Atlanta, but also Texas, we did great over there. There was this whole buzz going on and that's how we got the deal with Capitol.

antiMUSIC: You did On Time, The Red Album, and Closer to Home which were all released within a year and a half of each other. You guys must have been just a non-stop flurry of activity. What was that period like?

Don: It was and that's how you had to do it back then. We signed a deal with Capitol, and that was in our contract. We had to do two albums per year and do touring to support each one. So what we would do, we'd go in and we'd start rehearing, you know we'd spend only a few weeks rehearsing to go in the studio. You know back then you didn't spend a year or two years recording an album; we'd cut it in two to three days. It was done. Including mixing and overdubs and everything else. It was just done. So if you notice on a lot of those earlier records, especially the first two, if you listen, there's mistakes, (laughs) you just couldn't spend time on it. You go to it the best you could and you put it down. And it's really, when I listen to any of that stuff now, I go, that's what's great about it, and it's just a band playing with a feel and a groove. You don't care about the production. It just sounds honest and it's true, and wow, it's just really cool. I wish we'd go back in that direction in the music business. And then go out on the road, after we release a record immediately. We're out playing 40 shows, you know, immediately and you just go out and do that. And then the second you get off the road you take a week off and you go back into the studio and start working on the next record. That's how we did it I would say for almost six years, we were two albums a year. And two tours. (laughs) You didn't have time to think about. You just had to do it.

antiMUSIC: For Phoenix you brought in Craig Frost. Why did you decide to bring in a fourth member and is it true that at one point you had invited Peter Frampton to join the band?

Don: We did. I called Peter on the phone. We had done some work in Europe with Humble Pie, when we left Terry, when we went through that whole big mess with Terry, you know. We could see that radio was changing. We knew things were changing. And we wanted to go in a little more commercial direction. And we always wanted to make a statement by changing the band from being a trio that Terry was taking all the credit for creating and go off in a little different direction like, ok, this is us now. So that's why we were really interested in adding another guy. Also just to get another guy going in that direction. I called Peter on the phone. Peter had just left Humble Pie and he was just working on his solo thing, and he just couldn't break away to do Grand Funk stuff. He was really focused on becoming a solo act. The Craig Frost thing came from the fact that Craig came from the pack in the earlier years, prior the Grand Funk Railroad. And he was a good friend of ours since school and from The Pack, and he kind of missed out on the whole trip to Grand Funk and the stardom and everything. And that's kind of why we got Craig involved, it was like if we're going to add another guy, he should be considered. So we brought him in and we started jamming. It took us in a new direction. I think the Phoenix record, was an experimental record for us, which way are we going here, you know? And we're trying to find …you know, again, we've got our sights on radio and we're trying to find, luckily we had a top 40 hit with Rock and Roll Soul was off that record. And that was like, ok. We got to go a little more in that direction if we're going to get on the radio. And that took us again a little further in the direction toward American Band, and put our focus in that way. And that's really how Craig came into the thing.

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