His initial efforts, which included an unsuccessful single and local performances, were not met with much success, so Knight persuaded a band known as The Jazz Masters to accept him as their frontman in 1965.
[2][5][6] Knight was able to use his contacts to enable the Pack to record their first single, "Tears Come Rolling"/"The Colour of Our Love", at the Golden World Studio in Detroit, released on the Wingate label.
[3] At this time the band was managed by Jim Atherton, of Flint, who felt that a traditional label such as Wingate could not properly promote a British-influenced Rock group like the Pack.
Atherton convinced fellow Flint businessman Otis Ellis to record the band on his small Lucky Eleven label.
[3] Six of their nine singles made regional Top 40s throughout Michigan, Ohio and New York, with two of them – "You're a Better Man Than I" (originally by The Yardbirds) and "I (Who Have Nothing)" (a cover of a Ben E. King song) – reaching the national charts.
The band went through several personnel changes, with Johnson and Caldwell leaving the group, replaced with Al Shane on keyboards and Kenny Rich on guitar respectively.
By mid 1968, the band consisted of Farner on lead vocals and guitar, Brewer on drums, Craig Frost on keyboards and Rod Lester on bass.
In August 1968, The Pack recorded a full-length LP that was never released, with three songs from these sessions, "Getting Into The Sun", "Can't Be Too Long (Faucet)", and "Got This Thing On The Move" subsequently appearing on the compilation album "Thirty Years of Funk: 1969–1999".
Upon returning home, Farner and Brewer regrouped, forming the nucleus of Capitol Records' best-selling act of the early 1970s, Grand Funk Railroad, initially managed and produced by Terry Knight.