MY CAREER IN FIVE SONGS
DURING HIS SEVEN-YEAR tenure with the original Grand Funk Railroad, Mark Farner churned out an astonishing number of original songs, writing the lion’s share of material for the group’s 10 studio albums. Throughout much of the 1960s, however, while performing with bands such as Terry Knight & the Pack and the Bossmen, Farner never tried his hand at songwriting, believing it was something only the pros could do.
“Writing songs just seemed like this magical thing that I wasn’t capable of,” he says. “I came up listening to the radio, and I’d hear Buddy Holly and the Beatles, or there’d be all the great hits by Carole King, and I’d be like, ‘How do they do it?’ Were they just born with this gift that I didn’t have? So even while I put a lot of work into playing the guitar, I never used it as a tool for songwriting, because I thought I couldn’t do it.”
That all changed one night in 1966. After playing a gig with the Bossmen, he was hanging out with Dick Wagner, the group’s leader and songwriter, and eventual hired gun for Alice Cooper, Aerosmith, Kiss and
