Tuesday, June 17, 2025

Texas International Pop Festival, Dallas International Motor Speedway, Lewisville, TX, 9-1-1969, Part 1: Grand Funk Railroad

It's time for more music for the 1969 Texas International Pop Festival. With this album, I'm starting to post albums from the third and final day of the festival, September 1, 1969. So we're back to "Part 1" again. This time, it's Grand Funk Railroad.

Grand Funk Railroad were one of the best-selling music acts in the early 1970s. In fact, although their debut album "On Time" had been released two months earlier, they were pretty much complete unknowns. In fact, the band had only been together for a few months already. They did play the Atlanta International Pop Festival about a month earlier, and got a good response to that. But still, they weren't well known enough to be invited to perform at the festival. 

However, they agreed to play for free, and even covered their own expenses. The first day of the festival began relatively late, at 4 P.M. So they warmed up the crowd for about an hour prior to the official start time. That performance went over so well that they were asked to be the opening act for the remaining two days of the festival. They ended up performing all three days. They went over well with the crowd all three times, which gave the band a lot of positive buzz, making this a pivotal moment in their music career. 

As it so happens, even though they performed three times during the festival (like many other acts that performed multiple times during it), we only have recordings from this day (or mainly from this day - see below). I often don't know the exact order of the acts on each day. But in this case I do, since all accounts say Grand Funk Railroad was the first act of the day. 

One twist though was that the concert started earlier than expected. The two previous days, the concert began at 4 P.M. But one of the promoters was quoted in a newspaper saying they changed it to 11 A.M. on this day because "We just didn't want another ending as late as we got Saturday." Unfortunately, word of the change didn't get out to everyone. So Grand Funk Railroad played to probably the smallest crowd of the entire festival.

This recording has two sources. The intro talk plus the first song, "Are You Ready," is from a soundboard bootleg. One can also find a video of that song's performance on YouTube. I'm not entirely sure which day that is from. Everything else is from an audience bootleg, which is labeled as being from this date, September 1st. Thus, the sound quality for that part is poorer. To help out, I used my usual editing tricks for this kind of circumstance. I used MVSEP to lower the amount of crowd noise during songs, and I used UVR5 to boost the lead vocals in the mix. Overall, it's a good audience bootleg as far as such things go, but it's still an audience bootleg, so beware.

Note also that the first part of the first song and last part of the last song of the audience tape were both cut off. So clearly this is only part of their set. We don't know how many more songs they played. I found other live versions from 1970 and used those to fill in the missing parts of those songs. That's why those two have "[Edit]" in their titles.

By the way, I'm pretty sure this is the only known bootleg recording of the band from 1969. 

This album is 47 minutes long.

01 talk (Grand Funk Railroad)
02 Are You Ready (Grand Funk Railroad)
03 In Need [Edit] (Grand Funk Railroad)
04 talk (Grand Funk Railroad)
05 Heartbreaker (Grand Funk Railroad)
06 talk (Grand Funk Railroad)
07 Inside Looking Out (Grand Funk Railroad)
08 Ups and Downs (Grand Funk Railroad)
09 Into the Sun [Edit] (Grand Funk Railroad)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/KAx3LXPv

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/2OporCnq1NASJp8/file

The cover image is from this exact concert. It shows lead guitarist Mark Farner. This was the only decent photo I could find of the band from the concert. The original was in black and white, but I colorized it using the Kolorize program, as well as some tinkering in Photoshop.

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