Mark Farner of Grand Funk Railroad Is Off on a New Track

Old Grand Funk Railroad fans who go to Bogart’s tonight in Long Beach to hear the famed Michigan power trio’s former frontman, Mark Farner, can expect to have most of their hollers for the band’s string of hits rewarded.

Requests for Grand Funk’s first and most famous No. 1 hit, “We’re an American Band,” however, will not be honored.

Part of the reason is that “American Band” was one of the few Grand Funk singles Farner didn’t write. More importantly, though, its references to “getting it on” with “these fine ladies” and other hedonistic pursuits of American bands of the time wouldn’t fit very congruously into his set nowadays.

Farner, 39, has joined the ranks of the twice-born. And as evangelical Christians, he and his new band will come into your town, but they won’t help you party it down.

“We do ‘Footstompin’ Music,’ ‘Are You Ready,’ ‘Loco-Motion,’ ‘Some Kind of Wonderful,’ ‘Closer to Home,’ ‘Heartbreaker,’ ‘Bad Time’--those songs don’t have any evil connotation to ‘em, and they don’t tell people to go out and get loaded,” said Farner by phone from El Paso, Tex. “But there are some songs I absolutely wouldn’t do.”

Whether touring as part of the recent “Super ‘70s Fest” or hitting the club circuit on his own, Farner mixes the hits from Grand Funk--which was the first rock group to be awarded 10 consecutive platinum albums and which sold more than 25 million albums during its 1969-75 reign--with explicitly Christian material from his new solo album, “Just Another Injustice.”

“The people who come to hear (the oldies) are getting some satisfaction as far as being able to relive a memory,” said Farner. “When people hear songs from an era, they tend to go back to when they were out on a date or driving down the back roads at 100 m.p.h. with the top down on the convertible or wherever they were during that. And I don’t want to rob them of any of those memories.

“But I want to be able to play my new (Christian) stuff and get their reactions to it. . . . And I haven’t had anybody come up and tell me they didn’t like the new stuff. In fact, they love it. We’ve sold hundreds of the new album on the road--to Grand Funk fans.”

Surely, though, some of the longtime devotees must be shocked to find out that one of the original heavy-metal stars--whose previous solo album was panned in the Rolling Stone Record Guide for its “naive politics and cheap hedonism”--has turned spiritual?

“No,” said Farner. “As a matter of fact, for the most part, people felt that it was just a matter of time. The die-hard Grand Funk fans who come to see me are the ones that started off with us back in ‘69, ‘70, ‘71, when Grand Funk was a band that wrote about issues that were pet peeves of our generation--ecology, the Vietnam War. We were more of a people’s band and didn’t get a lot of AM air play then.

“Those people recognize the spiritual connotations of a few of the songs, like ‘I’m Your Captain’--it was always there, the searching, wanting to do something good, wanting to find the answers just like everybody else.”

Grand Funk disbanded in 1977, and Farner recorded two largely ignored solo albums. The trio got back together in 1981 for the first of two reunion albums. A second and final band breakup in 1983 preceded the breakup of Farner’s marriage--paving the way for the desperation that led to his conversion.

“I was sitting there with my two boys at the house, crying in my beer, and I just said, ‘Well, Lord, I’m gonna try to find you,’ and I started looking for God again,” said Farner.

Farner’s former partners haven’t found the same answer, but “I don’t try to lord it over anybody. (Drummer Don) Brewer called me one time and said, ‘So you think I ought to repent, eh, Farner?’ He was joking around, but you can’t help but think--if you’ve lived enough years, as we have, and gone through the things we went through and some of those close calls on the airplanes--about God and what you’ve done with your life.

“It’s sad that people have to get shocked into it sometimes, but there’s so many other distractions in life that we were tied in with. One of ‘em was spending money. Man, we spent millions of dollars in the pursuit of happiness, and found out you couldn’t buy it. And I think that that, in itself, is more of a testimony to my other two cohorts in Grand Funk than my beating them over the head with the word of God.”