In the late spring of my freshman year in high
school in 1975, a short, plaintive pop song wormed its way into my
consciousness. I first heard it on my favorite local radio station, WNEW-FM,
then kept hearing it all over the place blaring out of transistors, until
finally it repeated, as if on a constant loop, in my head as I took long walks.
Misery has rarely sounded so wonderful.
“Bad Time” was written by Mark Farner of Grand Funk
(or, as it had been known before, Grand Funk Railroad) and produced by Jimmy Ienner for the band’s All the Girls in the World Beware!!! LP.
I didn’t know it at the time, but the two collaborated at a low point in the
personal life of the former and a career zenith of the latter.
Farner, Grand Funk’s lead guitarist, could (and did)
have just about any woman he wanted as part of a hugely successful hard-rock
group, but it only resulted in disrupting his marriage to his first wife,
Cheryl. (In the end, the two would divorce.) In contrast, Ienner was coming off
a hot streak, producing Three Dog Night, the Bay City Rollers, the Raspberries and, when the latter
band split, its lead singer, Eric Carmen.
The mid-70s—or, at least, for someone coming into
the heart of his teens, like me—was the era of what I like to think of as
“Anguish Pop.” There was Barry Manilow (“Mandy”) and his Gaelic counterpart,
Gilbert O’Sullivan (“Alone Again, Naturally”). But, through Carmen's eponymous solo debut album, Ienner had
mined a particularly strong vein of it, in the form of “Never Gonna Fall in
Love Again” and “All by Myself.” He had figured out how to harness his artist’s
skills (piano) and early musical training (classical) for a wide, mainstream
pop audience.
He followed the same principle here with Farner and
his bandmates. To maintain their commercial viability in the last couple of
years in the face of changing musical tastes, their songs had become shorter
and softer (although, to be sure, anything
sounded softer compared with the band in its early years on the charts). And
keyboards would prominently underscore the chorus of "Bad Time" (“I must have picked a bad
time to be in love”).
But in the midst of this tightly coiled song,
Ienner—or, more accurately, Farner—unleashed
a ferocious guitar solo in the bridge, giving his outcry a harder, more painful
edge. The entire song clocks in at 2:55—almost made to order, by single
standards of the day—but it feels all too short, given the storm of emotion
only briefly glimpsed here.
The band, like Farner’s marriage, was experiencing
tensions, including over its musical direction in All the Girls in the World Beware!!! Decades later, longtime fans
of Grand Funk expressed similar ambivalence—or even open dislike—of the band’s
evolving sound in the mid-Seventies. Yet “Bad Time” itself contains to attract
adherents like myself and Dave Swanson, who in this article for “Ultimate Classic Rock,” referred to it as a “genuine pop classic” for its “pop-meets-rock-meets-country-meets-garage
style.”
YouTube contains a few live cover versions, but the
one that feels the most accomplished, as if it can add something to the
original, is this 2010 performance by The Jayhawks. It feels so special because the band had had time to think
and refine it without boring themselves to tears. (This Twin Cities group
performed it first on their 1995 studio CD, Tomorrow
the Green Grass, but have gone through a number of lineup changes in their
three-decade history.) But the band also exhibits a compelling commitment to
this song, making it the only cover tune on Tomorrow
the Green Grass.
Both in The Jayhawks’ studio and live performances,
the song has more room to stretch out, to establish its emotional temperature—particularly
on the 4:12 live version, where the jangling guitar kicks in. Moreover, while Grand
Funk’s original was fueled entirely by male energy, The Jayhawks’ cover version
afford a different dimension, through backing vocals by keyboardist Karen
Grotberg.
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