Most bands need a few hits before they can fill a stadium.
Mark Farner‘s band did it the other way around. In July 1971, Grand Funk Railroad sold all 55,000 tickets to Shea Stadium in 72 hours, faster than the Beatles had in 1965, and the record held until the ballpark closed in 2008.
Farner, the Flint, Michigan, trio’s singer and guitarist, turns 78 today.
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They Did It Before the Songs You Know
“We sold out Shea Stadium before ‘We’re an American Band,’ ‘Some Kind of Wonderful,’ ‘The Loco-Motion’ or ‘Bad Time,'” Farner has said.
They’d cracked the Top 40 for the first time the year before with “I’m Your Captain (Closer to Home),” a song Farner wrote. Critics mostly hated them anyway, which is how they ended up with the nickname “the people’s band.”
He Got There in a Police Car
The band flew in by helicopter while Humble Pie, with Steve Marriott and Peter Frampton, played on a stage set up at second base.
“The stadium was rocking, I mean visually rocking … bouncing up and down, and we could see it from the air,” Farner said.
The limo that was supposed to meet them wasn’t there, so they rode into Shea in the back of police cruisers. When they got to “I’m Your Captain,” the crowd sang right over him. “I could hear them singing louder than I was singing,” he said.
The Drummer Has a Less Romantic Explanation
Don Brewer doesn’t dispute the record. He just credits the box office, which had gotten faster at selling tickets in the six years since the Beatles played there.
“We did sell out faster than the Beatles, no doubt about it,” Brewer said. “But look how fast things sell out now. They sell out instantaneously and what is it due to? Technology.”
Their First No. 1 Landed on His Birthday
Grand Funk’s first No. 1 came 53 years ago today, on Sept. 29, 1973, the day Farner turned 25. “We’re an American Band” knocked Marvin Gaye’s “Let’s Get It On” off the top.
It isn’t his song, though. Brewer wrote it and sang lead.
Farner got a No. 1 of his own the next spring, when “The Loco-Motion,” with him on lead vocals and Todd Rundgren producing, went to the top on May 4, 1974.
These days Farner plays those songs under a name of his own, Mark Farner’s American Band.
Grand Funk Railroad took him to court over it. In 2019, a federal judge let him keep it.
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