Everybody with me? Good. Now listen up: All things considered, these guys had the market cornered on chutzpah. Combine that with their having been a band that wasn't even half as terrible as the critics had it (though who's kidding whom, Grand Funk as a trio produced a round of albums memorably mostly for the insane-in-the-brain muddy recording, with a small dollop of worthy cuts managing to sneak past the sludge) and you've got a kind of Everykid's rock fantasy: cranking the amps to twenty, thwacking away no matter how much actual chops you had, and not being able to make up your mind whether you wanted your new band to be Cream as the MC5, or the MC5 as Cream, when you all grew up. And the place it worked best was in concert. Which anyone who still has their copy of 1970's "Live Album" (now thankfully back in print, on CD) could have told you.

Admit it: "Are You Ready," which they were probably getting sick and tired of playing by the time of the show that yielded this version, would have been hailed as The Word if Rob Tyner and company had dreamed it up around about the "Kick Out The Jams" period, and if Farner's guitar break isn't an echo of the Five's squeak-staccato solos in "Ramblin' Rose," I'm not sure what might be one. And it isn't as much of a stretch as you might think to imagine Grand Funk's piledriving-squall version of "Gimme Shelter" (which sounded even more squalling in the studio, on "Survival," than in the version here cranked out at the legendary Shea Stadium concert) in the hot little hands of Wayne Kramer and Sonic Smith. (Compare Grand Funk mashing the Rolling Stones like this with what the Sex Pistols did to the Monkees' "(I'm Not Your) Steppin' Stone," for a guilty-pleasure comparison, if you dare.)

They'd never have suggested it (I doubt that they were that hip, though they weren't quite the naifs they were once portrayed to be, either), but the finale of "Into the Sun" (one of their best early songs) as "Live Album" had it damn near beat the Velvet Underground's distorto-scratch-rock side at its own game. Presented here in a version nailed at Cobo Hall in Detroit, the song does about the same thing without the audience noise allowed to drown out the band's squall of sound. And if Farner's solo turn on this version of "Inside Looking Out" doesn't remind you of every guitar-crank wet dream the kids up the block were having and trying (and maybe getting the police called in to quash) in those years, then you were probably out of town at the time.

I'm still not sure whether to rank this ahead of "Live Album," because the latter's accidental atmospherics put an oddly effective patina on the whole thing, but in a lot of places the stuff here is a little more energetic and, besides, I'd rather have one early (and rather cagey) take of "Footstompin' Music" than "Mark Say's Alright." (By the way, that's actually one whale of an organ solo Farner pounded out for "Footstompin' Music" - think in terms of Felix Cavaliere if he'd been a member of the Seeds - when he wasn't grinding out guitar breaks we might have called grunge precursors in the 1990s.) And once you get used to it, making a medley out of "I'm Your Captain," "Hooked on Love," and "Get It Together" isn't exactly going to curdle your intestines.