FTV: Craig Frost

 

     Let us first clarify who Craig Frost isn’t.  He is not related to Jack Frost.  He also wasn’t a member of the Michigan band The Frost or the Swiss metal band from Zurich called Celtic Frost.  At one juncture of his career, Craig Frost was a journeyman keyboard player on the Flint, Michigan bar band circuit.  Though Flint was seen as the poorer musical cousin to Motown, it did produce its share of great musicians, just not the number of nationally known bands as Detroit.  If one counts the Tri-City area that includes Bay City and Saginaw, the three most recognized names from the Thumb area of the lower Michigan Mitten are ? and the Mysterians, Terry Knight and the Pack, and Grand Funk Railroad.  Frost was a member of two out of these three bands and may have ended up making the biggest mistake of his life when he quit one of them.  Just for the record, Craig also was part of a band called Flint, but we will get back to that in a bit.

     Craig Frost was born in Flint on April 20, 1948.  His career as a musician began in 1960 and the lack of name recognition made him a perfect candidate for Rolling Stone senior writer Andy Green.  In his ongoing series Unknown Legends, Green talked to Frost for a May 2023 feature. 

In their discussion, Frost described how he began his early music career in Flint as a drummer, not a keyboard player.  Growing up as a fan of surf-rock music, Craig told Green he was infatuated by groups like The Beach Boys, the Ventures, and Dick Dale and the Deltones.  When he was in sixth grade, “My parents took me to see Johnny Cash.  I was in awe watching something like that.  I loved watching his band play.”

     As a drummer in his high school band, The Outcasts, he got to meet other musicians from local bands.  In 1968, the 17 year old Frost met a great singer who was playing bass at the time, Mark Farner.  Fellow drummer Don Brewer was gigging with a band called The Jazzmasters. “We were all in the same area in different bands,” Frost told Rolling Stone, “but we knew about each other.  When you were a local musician, if you’re any good at all, you’d start meeting friends.”  Beyond Frost’s experiences playing with local bands, he joined the thousands of fans who would make the pilgrimage south to Detroit’s famous venues like The Grande Ballroom to see the big acts of the day.  Acts like The Stooges, MC5, and the Bob Seger System were all major concert draws with Michigan roots.  Segar, Frost said, ‘He had that voice.  You thought shrapnel was going to come out of it.  I remember seeing him and just thinking, ‘Holy crap, what a singer!’” 

       Craig’s grandmother also played a part in his transition from drummer to keyboard player.    When she bought a new spinet piano, she had her old upright delivered to Frost’s home.  About the same time, he had picked up a small M3 organ and was learning to play the keys using sheet music from Grinnell Brothers Music House.  “Everybody was a drummer back then,” he says, “Nobody played keyboards.  And so I got my pick of all the little bands playing in the Flint area.”  

     I found this interesting because I got my first band audition because the Marquette area band Sweat Equity’s drummer had ‘lost his drums’ (and no, I never found out why).  He was their lead singer so he was going to continue as their new keyboard player, thus the search for a new drummer.  I have shared previously that I did not get the gig but I did learn how to play the tom beat to Wipe Out courtesy of guitar player / band leader Ron Phillips.  If you are wondering why the guitar player and not the drummer showed me how to play this lick, join the club.  I have been wondering the same thing for the last 57 years.  My other take away was a renewed interest in playing keys.  

     I had begun my musical lessons as a lazy piano player and abandoned that track completely when my hidden drum gene kicked in.  Four years after getting my Ludwig drum kit,  I was between bands entering college so I picked up a small organ and amp.  Like Frost had begun learning his way around via sheet music, my long lost keyboard chops emerged out of music books like All Things Must Pass (by George Harrison) and The Best of the Guess Who.  I never actually played keyboards in a band, but it was always fun to see the look on a new band member’s face when the drummer (me) would hop up and show them a riff or chord progression to a song during rehearsals.  I dabbled in keyboards and guitar, but drums remained my main mission.  In fact, relearning piano music helped my guitar playing and vice-versa.

     In his Rolling Stone piece, Green mentioned the episode of The Simpsons where Homer schools his children about Grand Funk Railroad.  When he tells the kids about the band after hearing Shinin’ On on the car radio, he says., “Nobody knows the band Grand Funk?  The wild, shirtless lyrics of Mark Farner?  The bong rattling bass of Mel Schacher?  The competent drum work of Don Brewer?”  Green points out that by the time GFR had recorded the album Shinin’ On, Craig Frost was a full time member of the band.  This is a forgivable omission for Homer  because Grand Funk first came to the rock world’s attention as a trio.  Guitarist Farner was a more than competent keyboard player in his own right on songs like Rock n Roll Soul and Mean Mistreater.  It turns out that when Frost joined the band, it wasn’t his first go around with Farner and Don Brewer.

     In 1965, Farner and Brewer found themselves together in a band called Terry Knight and the Pack.  Knight had been a DJ and decided to move over into the performing side of the biz.  He scored only one hit with that unit (I Who Have Nothing) before striking out on his own to try and land work with The Beatles new Apple Records label.  This left Farner in charge of the band who began playing out as The Fabulous Pack (with little help from their manager).  Frost joined that Pack in 1968 and at the time, Farner was beginning to write some songs that would become Grand Funk tunes.  Stranded in Cape Cod in a winter storm, the band became disillusioned and ended up straggling back to Michigan.  Frost and the bass player left and the band dissolved.

     Looking back, Craig remembers thinking, “Oh man, I wish I would’ve stuck around,” when Grand Funk started making some waves.  Mark and Don had contacted Knight for advice and he told them to find a bass player (Mel Schacher from ? and the Mysterians entered the picture at this point) and turn up the volume.  Power trios were the big thing then so they weren’t really looking for a keyboard player then.  He also told them to put some energy in their stage act and not to just stand there while playing.  Once Knight got them on the bill for the massive 1969 Atlanta Pop Festival (where they played for free), Capitol Records noticed.  The label signed them and a sort of GFR-mania broke out.  Frost spent this period back in Flint playing in bar bands.

     After their early success (fans loved them, some critics, like the hip guys at Rolling Stone, hated them), they had a falling out with Knight in 1972.  Foolishly, GFR broke their contract with him.  They won the ensuing lawsuit but it cost them dearly to get out of the contract.  They basically had to start from scratch while Knight collected a massive payday.  Had they waited a few months, the contract would have ended and they would have been free to do as they wished, but musicians are not lawyers.  Farner admits they made a big mistake.  Knight would retire from the music business but sadly, he was murdered in 2004 when his daughter’s drug addled boyfriend stabbed Terry to death during an altercation about the boyfriend’s drug use.  

     Grand Funk went on to sell a lot of records, log a lot of radio airplay, and to sell out Shea Stadium in 72 hours – no online ticket sales – just sales from the stadium box office window. Asked if he was jealous of his former bandmates success, Craig told Greene, “I was proud of them,  I was also still in contact with Farner and Brewer.  But I was very happy for them.  I wasn’t one of these, ‘I don’t like you guys anymore, you guys made it.’  I was proud of them.  Brewer came into a club that I was playing with a band,  He was sitting there watching me.  At the end of the night, he goes, ‘Craig, why don’t you come and practice with us and just see what happens?”  And so I did.“

     Frost considered this an audition even though he knew all the other guys.  After he joined as a permanent member, his first gig with them was in Seattle:  “I remember my right hand cramped up.  I think two fingers were working so I pretty much sucked that night.  It got better later, but my hands would cramp up in the first few shows because I went from playing in a club to playing in front of 15,000 people.  And that’s a jump.”  Not only did Frost get a second chance with the band, he was also given credit for fleshing out their sound.  He used his organ and clavinet much the same way a rhythm guitarist would fill out the sound and even the critics noticed.

     During his time with GRF, Frost said he had the opportunity to work with a couple of what he called ‘little geniuses’.  The first was Todd Rundgren who produced the American Band album in 1973.  Brewer wrote the lyrics (and yes, Craig says he knows all the characters name checked in the song are real people because he met them all on tour) but Frost credits Rundgren for getting the right sounds out of the instruments to make it a hit:  “We knew it was good, the intro, everything.  There’s a lot of energy in that song.  I didn’t know it was going to be as big a hit as it was, but I knew it had something.”  The Little Eva song Locomotion ended up on the record because Farner came in singing it one day.  They started jamming to it, Rundgen started twisting dials on Frost’s Mini-Moog synth and suddenly, they had another hit record to release.

     There were a couple of things Grand Funk did to help them stay on top for a long time.  They avoided hard drugs (preferring to smoke a little weed), but they never performed high.  When asked how often they played high, Frost replied, “Absolutely never!  It took 100 percent to play.  It took all your concentration to do what you were doing on stage.” They also practiced like the band was a job.  The American Band album only took three days to record because they had already rehearsed the arrangements and had them down before entering the studio.

     The second ‘genius’ Craig cited was Frank Zappa.  Frost doesn’t remember exactly why an eclectic musician like Zappa wanted to work with GFR, but he does recall he had a great sense of humor and was easy to work with.  After Good Siingin’, Good Playin’ came out in 1976, the band broke up.  Farner claims Brewer quit but Craig paints a different picture:  “Most of us wanted to keep playing but Mark wanted to go out on his own.  He had political things he wanted to say.  It really wasn’t the Grand Funk thing to be political.  That was the end of the band.”  Zappa had invited Brewer and Frost to tour with his band in Europe but they declined.  Craig said they were glad to have been asked, but Zappa’s band was always populated by such top notch musicians, he could not see how he would fit in.  Instead, the three of them (including Mel) returned to Flint and continued to jam.

     Their project without Farner produced one album, Flint in 1978 that included tracks featuring guitar contributions by Frank Zappa and Todd Rundgren and sax by Wet Willie’s Jimmy Hall.  The album didn’t sell enough copies. CBS was in a financial crunch and had to reduce their output by 30 percent.  This left the second Flint album (1979’s Layin’ It On the Line) unreleased.  Reviews of their live shows were promising but the lack of label support doomed the band before it could build a following of its own (and of course, there were the inevitable comparisons to GFR).

     In the wake of Flint, Frost kicked around for a couple of years until Bob Seger’s office called about an audition.  Craig was the first one they had in and to his horror, he discovered all of the arrangements he learned were in a different key than they were played at the audition. Seger told his manager to get the other keyboard players the right keys, but that didn’t help Frost much.  He recalled, “I played the best I could.  I thought I gelled pretty well with them and they wanted me to come back.  They had me play the organ this time (the first audition was done on piano) and in the end he goes, ‘Craig, you’ve got the job.’”

     The first Seger album Frost worked on was The Distance produced by Jimmy Iovine.  Iovine clearly preferred to use session guys on the recordings and Craig wasn’t sure the producer wanted ‘the keyboard player from Bob’s band’.  Greene noted that Frost had played the organ part on Roll Me Away and that Roy Bittan played piano on the track.  Frost told Rolling Stone, “Oh, what a monster [Bittan] is.  I worked with some really good keyboard players [on Seger’s albums] and Roy Bittan is just…oh my God, what a great player he is.  And I worked with Billy Payne, too.  What fantastic players these guys are, just amazing.”

     Bob Seger was a bit of a perfectionist and he was not afraid to tell his players exactly what he wanted:  “I see what you are trying to do Craig, but don’t do that.”  Frost laughed at the thought and said, “I would say, ‘Okay Bob, what do you want to hear?’  He always knew what he wanted when he went into the studio.”  Seger was also particular about who he took on tour.   Guitarist Drew Abbott and drummer Dave Teegarden were there when Craig started with the band:  “These were good guys.  But in 1983, we went out with other people.  It was up to Bob.  When it came down to it, it was like, ‘Bob’s the boss.  This is what Bob wants.’”

     After the Like a Rock tour, Seger stepped back from the road for ten years.  When he came back with It’s a Mystery in 1995, Frost was having a bout with anxiety and a thyroid problem.  When Grand Funk had a short-lived reunion, Craig told Seger, “I am in your band as long as you want me.”  True to his word, he was there performing with The Silver Bullet Band when Seger was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.  When Seger wanted to replace Teegarden in 1983, Frost recommended Don Brewer and he did indeed do a couple of tours with Bob.  Craig has also guested with Grand Funk when their paths cross.  Nobody in Frost’s world burns their bridges.

     Greene wrapped up his interview by asking Frost if he still played keyboards for fun:  “Oh yeah, I mean, I am lucky I am not a bass player or something.  I’ve got a grand piano in my living room that I torture the cats with, but I haven’t turned on all my electronic stuff in my music room.  That  was for Seger stuff, or if Grand Funk were to call.”  Frost says Seger seems to be ‘pretty retired’ and there is a ‘serious wedge’ between Brewer and Farner which will probably prevent any reunion of the classic GFR lineup.  At least Craig can keep playing for his cats.

 

Top Piece Video:  The full band intros from Seger’s last tour – and as he said, Craig Frost was still there . . .