Sometimes when a band takes on an outsize personal importance — like Grand Funk Railroad did for me as a teenager — the passage of time carries the inevitability of disappointment, perhaps brought on by misplaced expectations.

That thought passed through my mind at Meijer Gardens Wednesday night as I watched a conga line erupt in the middle of Grand Funk's ultra-hokey rendition of "The Loco-Motion." Sure, the band sounded good — just like the records — and people were having a high time. But…

The summer is so chock full of festivals that it can get overwhelming. On any given weekend, you can go somewhere in the West Michigan region and find fun, food and music. We hate to break it to you, but you're just not gonna get to them all. That's why REVUE has compiled a short list of West Michigan's classic festivals. These are the events that have been going strong for years, and your summer is essentially incomplete without them. So, check out the list and plan accordingly.

Bound for Peru — and untold adventures in the rainforest — Heartless Bastards’ frontwoman Erika Wennerstrom doesn’t have to explain why her blues-fueled rock ‘n’ roll band’s new album is titled Restless Ones. She lives it.

In August 1970, Michigan hosted the mother of music festivals at Goose Lake in Leoni Township, a park 70 miles east of Kalamazoo. The three-day orgy of music, drugs and, inevitably, sex, makes today’s tightly controlled, corporate-run music festivals look like a day at the mall, which is really what they are, given the non-stop product pitches and sponsorships.

Reaching heights of pop stardom they never expected, the members of Neon Trees go back to their roots with the band’s latest club tour. “An Intimate Night Out” will feature the new-wave rockers — known for such multi-platinum hits as “Everybody Talks,” “Animal” and “Sleeping with a Friend” — playing club-sized venues and connecting with fans face to face.

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.

The Midwest has been a cradle for some of emo music’s most influential and hardworking bands. Even as some of the emo/math rock/hardcore-centric venues in the area came and went (i.e. The DAAC, Skeletones), the sound has undeniably stuck.

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.