Grand Funk Railroad scored its second number one pop hit with its exuberant 1974 cover of the
Gerry Goffin and
Carole King dance-craze classic "The Loco-Motion," which rocketed singer Little Eva to overnight stardom a dozen years earlier.
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Goffin and King, the husband-and-wife songwriting duo famed for Brill Building pop classics like the Shirelles "Will You Love Me Tomorrow," the Chiffons' "One Fine Day" and the Drifters' "Up on the Roof," originally composed "The Loco-Motion" for Dee Dee Sharp, who topped the R&B singles charts earlier in 1962 with "Mashed Potato Time." Goffin and King cut a demo version of the song featuring their live-in babysitter, 19-year-old Eva Boyd, and when Sharp passed on "The Loco-Motion," producer Don Kirshner agreed to issue Boyd's rendition as the maiden release on his new Dimension Records imprint. The single, credited to Little Eva, topped the Billboard Hot 100 in August 1962, and went on to sell more than a million copies. Boyd even created a dance to accompany the record.
"Though 'The Loco-Motion' alludes to dance movements, neither Gerry nor I had envisioned an actual dance," King writes in her 2012 memoir A Natural Woman. "Eva had to invent one for personal appearances. Standing beside a locomotive for publicity photographs, with 'The Loco-Motion' playing on loudspeakers, Eva moved her body that day in imitation of the arm that drives a locomotive, and a dance was born."
Grand Funk (singer/guitarist Mark Farner, singer/drummer Don Brewer, bassist Mel Schacher and keyboardist Craig Frost) covered "The Loco-Motion" for its eighth studio album, Shinin' On. The Flint, Mich.-based act - praised as "a hard-driving, industrial rock'n'roll band that related to the average hard-working American" by hometown hero and Grand Funk megafan Michael Moore, the documentary filmmaker behind Roger & Me and Bowling for Columbine - had already emerged as one of the biggest concert draws of its era: a 1971 performance at New York's Shea Stadium famously sold out all 55,000 tickets in just 72 hours, far outpacing the Beatles' historic 1965 Shea appearance, which took weeks to reach the same milestone. But chart success eluded Grand Funk prior to 1973's radio-ready We're an American Band, recorded in Miami with producer Todd Rundgren; the anthemic title track conquered the Hot 100, followed by the Top 20 hit "Walk Like a Man."
Rundgren returned to helm Shinin' On, recorded at The Swamp, Grand Funk's new studio, located on a 200-acre patch of land in rural Parshallville, Mich. "We were really kind of a jam band in the studio. We would endlessly jam on stuff," Brewer told Songfacts in 2004. "We had basically finished the album. ‘Shinin' On' was going to be the first single, and we really weren't even thinking about what to do as far as another song was concerned. And Mark came in one day, and just off the top of his head he was singing ‘Everybody's doing a brand new dance' - you know, just for fun. And we all went ‘Yeah! Grand Funk doing "The Loco-Motion!"' You know, it was like a tongue-in-cheek kind of thing. And we said ‘Let's try it. Let's do it.' Todd had the idea of doing the song kind of like the Beach Boys' ‘Barbara Ann,' where it sounded like a big party was going on. Except Todd could really crank up everything with the hand claps and all that stuff. So it just had this huge sound to it, and it sounded like a big party."
Grand Funk's foot-stomping rendition of "The Loco-Motion" chugged to number one in May 1974, making it the second song ever to top the Hot 100 in versions recorded by two different artists. (The first, "Go Away Little Girl" –– recorded by Steve Lawrence and Donny Osmond, respectively –– was also authored by Goffin and King.) Australian pop sensation Kylie Minogue released her own cover of the song in July 1987 as her debut single, under the title "Locomotion." It went on to become one of the biggest-selling Australian records of the decade, also reaching the Top Five in the U.S., U.K. and Canada.
"The Loco-Motion" remains a staple of Grand Funk's live set half a century later. "I love watching the audience get up on their feet and start dancing as soon as we sing the opening lines," Brewer told Grateful Web in 2021. "They even do a ‘Loco-Motion' line dance through the crowd. Fun to watch!"
