Craig Frost, keyboards for Grand Funk Railroad... the one website says, okay, I'm game, why was the GFR album called "Mark, Don and Mel"? I guess, the keyboardist wasn't a bona fide member?
I happen to know why---because the
Mark, Don & Mel 1969-1971 anthology summarised Grand Funk Railroad as the power trio
they were in those years, before they enlisted Craig Frost as a fourth member.
Frost was a member of Terry Knight & the Pack with Mark Farner and Don Brewer in the mid-to-late 1960s, before Knight left
the group to become a Capitol Records executive and impresario. The Pack tried to continue but after a mishap in the northeast
involving arranged gigs that proved not to exist, the band was stranded in a nasty blizzard and had to scratch and claw their way
home to Michigan, whereupon Frost and a couple of other members were told, apparently, to either give up the band or give up
their women. Mark Farner (by then the lead singer) and Don Brewer hooked up with bassist Mel Schacher and thus was born Grand
Funk, with Terry Knight managing and producing them.
After Grand Funk began to tire of the power trio format and manager Knight's overhype and dictatorial handling of them and
his double-dipping on their rather formidable income (they were America's no-questions-asked most popular concert draw and
sold albums in the millions in 1969-71), they fired Knight---at tremendous cost, as things turned out; they lost their song publishing
through 1971 in the settlement and their timing was horrible---they had, it was said, only three months left before their deal with
Knight would expire. They recorded
Phoenix with Frost credited as a guest musician, I suppose to get his feet wet before
making him a full-fledged member of the group. Now a quartet, Grand Funk enjoyed a formidable second life as hitmakers, making
six more albums before they broke up in 1976.
When they reunited in 1980 for two albums, they were back to a trio; they reunited again as a trio in the mid-1990s and kept going,
even after a rift that drove Mark Farner out of the group when they refused to allow him to be a band member and sustain a solo
career on the side. (They'd aced him out of his share of Grand Funk as a business entity; Farner to this day can only bill himself as
"Formerly of Grand Funk," legally---he can't be "Mark Farner of Grand Funk Railroad" anymore.) Grand Funk still tours today as a
quintet with Brewer, Schacher, singer Max Carl, former Kiss guitarist Bruce Kulick, and former keyboardsman for Robert Palmer and
Bob Seger, Tim Cashion.
Craig Frost has worked with Bob Seger's Silver Bullet Band since the 1980s (Don Brewer was a member for a time) and has sat
in with the current version of Grand Funk a few times since 2005.