In 1990, the Indigo Girls won a Grammy Award for “Best Contemporary Folk Album” — at that same ceremony they also lost in the “Best New Artist” category to another duo: Milli Vanilli. Perhaps that’s an indicator of how the recording industry can work sometimes. Honest and true songwriting isn’t always rewarded. But the Indigo Girls, Amy Ray and Emily Saliers, have retained their staunch following thanks to their never-waning brand of folk rock.

If you have ever contemplated debilitating world issues like war, greed and corruption and thought, “We can do better that this” — you’re not alone. That’s what Anti-Flag has been preaching for more than two decades.

Most big-city orchestras and university-based classical programs take a diminuendo in the off season, but there is always a summer crescendo at the regional epicenter of summer classical music, the Interlochen Center for the Arts in the northwest lower Michigan, about 15 miles southwest of Traverse City.

In some ways Grand Funk Railroad has always been the Rodney Dangerfield of hard-driving rock ’n’ roll — they get no respect.

From the very beginning, the Flint-bred band made a gargantuan noise. Their bombast was not unlike the MC5, but Grand Funk skipped the cosmic revolutionary stance in favor of a more working class, populist worldview. In the argot of the time they were a “people’s band.”

But even at the height of the band’s popularity, in the first half of the 1970s, they took a beating from the critical establishment who mainly complained that they were too loud and lacked sophistication.