Blues For Allah 50: Franklin’s Tower

Announcing Dogfish Head Grateful Dead Juicy Pale Ale. Collaborating for over a decade now, Dogfish Head and Grateful Dead have crafted a light-bodied pale ale brewed with sustainable curds of grains, granola, and heaps of good karma for a refreshing brew that's music to your taste buds. Check out dogfish.com for more details and to find some Grateful Dead Juicy Pale Ale in your neck of the woods. Dogfish Headcraft Brewery is located in Milton, Delaware. Please drink responsibly. The Good Old Grateful Dead Cast. The official podcast of The Grateful Dead. I'm Rich Mayhan with Jesse Jarnau, exploring the music and legacy of The Grateful Dead for the committed and the curious. Ladies and gentlemen and fellow Dead Heads, welcome to season 12 of The Good Old Grateful Dead Cast. I'm your co-host Rich Mayhan. Thank you very much for tuning in. In this episode of The Good Old Grateful Dead Cast, we complete the song trio of Help Slip Frank by taking a good, long look at the groover that is Franklin's Tower. Well, folks, The Grateful Dead blues for all of 50th anniversary deluxe edition arrives this Friday, September 12th. This 3-CD set features the newly remastered album with unreleased sound check and concert recordings. Check this out. The set features almost two hours of unreleased recordings. Among the highlights are rehearsals from the band's August 12, 1975 sound check at the Great American Music Hall in San Francisco, including the album tracks, Sgt. Spirit, Help on the Way, Slipknot, and today's song, Franklin's Tower. The collection continues with performances from June 21, 1976 show at the Tower Theater in Pennsylvania, spotlighting five blues for all of songs alongside favorites like Eyes of the World. Rounding out the set are selections from Bill Graham's snack benefit that students need athletics, culture, and kicks at Keys Art Stadium in San Francisco on March 23, 1975. There are also vinyl variants of the original album available, including a picture disc and a Midnight Fire Red vinyl edition and 180-gram Black vinyl edition. Very cool-looking blues for all of 50th anniversary merch is now also available, and all of these are available at Dead.net. And over at Rhino.com, you can also pre-order the Dolby Atmos mixes of blues for all on Blu-ray disc. They were mixed by Stephen Wilson and are ready to blow your mind. All of these fine releases are out this Friday, September 12th at Dead.net and Rhino.com. Head on over to Dead.net slash Deadcast and check out all of our past episodes, including the complete seasons one through eleven. You can link from there to your favorite podcasting platform so you can listen how, when, and where you like to listen. Please help the good ol' grateful Deadcast by subscribing, sharing us with your friends on social media, hitting that like button, and leaving a review. Thank you very much. Do you have a great story about any of the songs from Blues Ferala? Were you lucky enough to catch the band at one of their very few shows in 1975? Then we need to hear from you. Head over to stories.dead.net and record yourself telling us all about it. You may just hear yourself on a future episode of the Deadcast. We have transcripts from many of your favorite Deadcast episodes available for your reading pleasure. Head on over to dead.net slash deadcast dash index and check them out. Is there another song that feels as good when it hits as Franklin's Tower? The way it drops in after Help on the Way and Slipknot is like getting the biggest warmest hug from a song that you could ever get. It's certainly a fan favorite and for good reason. It's just fun. Jesse's got the details about Franklin's Tower for you right here. With one notable exception, The Grateful Dead didn't really have hits. And in fact, the song we're talking about today was released as a single in January 1976 and didn't chart. But in the reality The Grateful Dead occupied, Franklin's Tower was a smash. In the scope of Blues for A La, Franklin's Tower doesn't have much competition in terms of catchy refrains. And it was one of the Dead's catchiest yet. And not only was it catchy, but especially in the context of Blues for A La, it was harmonically simple and easy for almost any guitarist just starting out. If you spent any regular time in a Dead parking lot, you've probably heard people playing this one. On the album, it's nestled between two of the most complex songs the Dead ever wrote and floating on a groove that earned drummer Billy Kreuzman a songwriting credit. But Franklin's Tower is the unusual Dead song in that the chords go exactly where you'd expect them to go. But just because it's easy doesn't mean it's simple, especially when performed live. Grateful Dead archivist and legacy manager David Lemieux. One of the things I talk about a lot is how much I love the dynamics of Grateful Dead music where you got a song like Stella Blue, very, very quiet explosive ending, morning dew, all those songs that Franklin's Tower reminds me of one of those where they bring it way down, sort of the way they would do it around and around where they bring it way, way down and then build it back up and then explosive ending. Roll away the dew, roll away the dew. With lyrics written by Robert Hunter in England, probably in late 1974, as he thought both of his newborn son and the impending American bicentennial, Franklin's Tower contained some of Hunter's most open-ended and timeless words. We're gonna poke and prod at Franklin's Tower for the next hour and change. But before we do, this story from listener Will Backstrom gets it probably the most important point about the song. Since getting on the bus at the April 1083 show at Morgantown, I often found myself alone in my passion for the Grateful Dead. All through the college in the 80s and beyond, I had to deal with friends, prospective girlfriends, bosses, colleagues, whomever. They would all give me quizzical looks of surprise, mostly frowning surprise when the words Grateful Dead parted my lips. Perspective girlfriends in particular would give me the look of, my parents are not gonna like this and neither do I. But then I learned a trick, and that trick was when no one was looking, I'd sneak the album Dead set onto the turntable and let the needle drop down onto Franklin's Tower and then let it play and act like nothing else was happening. And like clockwork, about two minutes into the song, the following would happen. Whomever was listening beside me, they would look up and they'd say, I like this, what is it? It was always Franklin's Tower that opened the door to their understanding that the Grateful Dead's not so bad and you can like them too. Franklin's Tower wasn't just a classic Grateful Dead song, but provided a shiny portal into the band's world. I bet it was lots of people's first favorite dead tune. Pretty much every song on Blues for Allah developed from an involved process with the band trying to tap into new modes and methods at Bob Weir's Asa's studio in Mill Valley with different drafts and approaches not always resulting in songs that lasted long in the Dead's active repertoire. Franklin's Tower was the exception to almost all of the album's very weird norms and without meaning to it all, it yielded certainly one of Robert Hunter's most cheered for lyrics that not coincidentally also became the launching point for big Jerry Garcia guitar solos. Here's the without a net version. If you get confused, listen to the music. Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter had a variety of collaborative modes. Here's how Garcia described their songwriting to Peter Simon in late March 1975. An interview eventually published in New Age magazine which we've linked to at dead.net slash deadcast. Sometimes we'll take bits and pieces of things, different ideas, stick them together, polish them. I mean we work every different way. Sometimes I think of the changes, the melody, the phrasing, where there should be vowels, where there should be consonants. I can get down to as much musical detail without actually having words and he has enough technique to be able to actually fill out those requirements. That describes the lyric process for Mucho Blues for A La with lyrics written for existing music and definitely how help on the way was worked out as we talked about a few episodes back. But Franklin's Tower came from a different method. Sometimes he has a lyric and I'll read it and it'll just start me up. I'll say this is amazing. I want to set it and I'll take it and work on it. Here's Robert Hunter speaking with WLIR in 1978, just a few years after Blues for A La. For our purposes, the very first sign we have of Franklin's Tower is about two and a half months into the workshop sessions. Though Jerry Garcia took off much of April to tour the east coast with Legion of Mary, regular gatherings resumed in Aces on April 28th and a week later is this remarkable tape dated May 5th. The workshop tapes from the Blues for A La sessions are some of the most fascinating and significant of the band's career, where it's possible to hear them inventing songs in real time. And this May 5th segment is one of the most fascinating and significant bits of those put on a highlights tape by Steve Brown for Jerry Garcia, cutting in with this groove already in progress. We have Jerry Garcia testing a microphone, one of the few times the band was playing at Aces with live vocals. And then a few bars later Garcia starts singing. The freezing isn't quite as emphatic as it would get, but it's Franklin's Tower fully formed. There's some very minor differences. But the kicker comes appropriately at the very end from Garcia. I concur, that is in fact the song right there. This little bit of audio makes it sound to me like Garcia might have been singing the lyrics to the music for the very first time, reading them off a sheet, and by that definition, actually catching the moment the song was created. We'll have plenty to offer about the lyrics of Franklin's Tower shortly, but let's focus on the music first. As I mentioned before, the chords are easy, but even the dead had to do a bit of work to lock in the groove. We'll illustrate this next segment with some slivers of the band working on the song from June 4th and 5th, leading up to the recording of the basic tracks on the latter of those days. As I mentioned before, it's not too complicated from a guitar playing perspective. From the City College of New York, Deputy Dean of the Humanities and Arts, Sean O'Donnell. Yeah, there's something, I don't want to say static, but maybe timeless once you arrive in Franklin's. And it's the loop. It's busy, so some things are happening, but it's not moving forward the way we were just moving forward, like saying, slip not. Music Listening to Franklin's Tower, one might be tempted to say that it sounds similar to certain other songs. I've often seen it compared to Walk on the Wild side, the smash number 16 hit from 1972 by Lou Reed, formerly of the other warlocks. Music Holly came from Miami, F.L.A. Hitchhiked away across USA Music Peace to Holly Woodbaughn and all who hitchhiked with her. Yeah, it's standard rock pattern. There's the tons and tons of tunes that use that grouping of chords. So, and there's very different vibe in those two tunes. A sludgey air, Walk on the Wild side as opposed to a, again, more joy filled Franklin's world. Music Structurally, Franklin's Tower was similar to another grateful bed class I co-written by one of the band's drummers. The two chord wonder of Fire on the Mountain emerged from a session at Mickey Hearts Barn, likely in sometime late 1973, though it took a few years before it made the jump to the Dead's book. Music The Dead played plenty of dance music in the form of cover songs, but Franklin's Tower was their first original that, from a non-vocal perspective, was almost nothing but pure groove. In the way that some bands had their own signature feels, Franklin's Tower might have been one of the Dead's. By contrast to many of the Dead's jams, the one always knows where it is and is virtually shooting up flares. The loop is so tight that you always know when you're on that, like that. The A is the launching point and you always know when you're there. When you get to the one in terms of the pitch, you're never on the one chord, you're on the four chord. It's fairly common in popular music to have this happen this way. The combination of following the very linear music and then freezing in this loop and having that ambiguity suits the text. Music On Blues for Aula, Franklin's Tower was an easy feel that followed the intensely composed help on the way's slipknot and preceded the rhythmically tricky King Solomon's Marble's Stronger than Dirt. Jerry Garcia spoke with Peter Simon about new levels. What we hope to be able to accomplish by not perform, which is get away from our habits, get away from our old repertoire and just, you know, cut ourselves loose from the past, basically, shocking as that might sound, and develop, you know, a new new levels to go off of really to depart from. Just as much as the complicated slipknot or King Solomon's Marbles, I think the two and a half chord bliss of Franklin's Tower qualifies as one of the band's new levels. It's very outside of time in some way, even though it's very much keeping time and danceable and all that. And it maybe has to do with some of the sort of more nerdy theory kind of things. It's that sort of grouping of chords where one person say it's an A, one person say it's a D kind of ambiguity. It definitely means A, but every time you land on the A in the vocal part, you're on the D chord already. So you're getting home in the voice, but you're not getting home in the harmonies. And it kind of gives this floaty, free-willing space. It was a different kind of ambiguity for an ambiguous year of ambiguous compositions. There's something particularly slinky in the knot world and in the feel of that riff. And again, that ties to me how to wear Jerry's exact placement. So I'm not talking about like the, what would be the sort of the notated notation, but like where in the beat he's putting things as a very slinky kind of feel that feels elusive in that way. On the rehearsal tapes, you can hear the band trying to declutter the song to get back seemingly to the purity of the original groove. It still seems it's like it's too busy compared to what the original flash of it was, or the original one I knew was. It just seems too big to be. As we've been saying, the dating on the workshop sessions for Blues for Olas sometimes kind of provisional, but it seems like the dead spent much of June 4th and 5th working on Franklin's Tower, as well as help on the way in Slipknot. It isn't until late in the tape labeled June 5th that we hear this for the first time, with the transition riff at the end of Slipknot and Franklin's Tower attached. And if the tempo's any indication, they're pretty excited about it. They stop Franklin's just before the vocal starts, almost as if they're just testing out the transition to see if it works. There's a tape labeled June 7th, too, where they play through Help on the Way, Slipknot, Franklin's Tower, and I enjoy hearing Garcia's assessment at the end. Stunning. Definitely stunning. But someone should maybe remind the band that Franklin's Tower still needs an ending. Still, separate even from the achievements of Help on the Way, Slipknot, and Franklin's Tower by themselves, the few bars that connect them turn it all into something grander. But I think the June 7th date is probably wrong. There's no session in Steve Brown's datebook for June 7th for one. And for another, the Master Studio recording of Franklin's Tower is dated June 5th, reel number 126, take number 2. I think this means maybe that it was only just before they recorded Franklin's Tower, maybe even that same day, that they figured out how it would attach to Help on the Way and Slipknot, which wouldn't be tracked for nearly another full month, and eventually spliced together on the album. Welcome back, Associate Professor from the City College of New York, Chadwick Jenkins. It feels like an apotheosis. You've gone through all this, think about it as a narrative. You started in F minor with Help on the Way, and it's kind of jazzy slipperiness, especially in the refrain, which by the way is another use of diminished chord, but this time a half diminished chord in the most typical jazz way. Slipknot moves you up to G minor than A minor. And then you get to Franklin's, which is a major, A mix lydian really, but that A major sound, and so it just feels like things open up and that simplicity then works within the context of Arrival. The dead had finished off their first suite for the album in progress, whenever that tape was from. So let's visit reel number 126, take number two. Unusually, though it's the core of the song, Jerry Garcia's original guitar track was wiped from the final mix with a different guitar part recorded on June 29th, run through a Leslie rotating cabinet, another unifying sonic feature of Blues for Allah. For one of the rare times, Bob Weir holds down the primary rhythm part on a Jerry Garcia song. They did a lot of part replacing on Franklin's Tower. Unlike their previous few albums, there were no room microphones used for the studio takes, and it's actually pretty amazing how good the separation of instruments is considering how small Aces was. All of which is to say, the very beginning of the song is physically spliced off, so it could be attached to the rest of the suite. I assume that Billy Kreuzman, or maybe even Garcia, counted them in, but since they're credited as co-writers, it could be either. The only original tracks left on the final studio version are Billy Decay's drums, Bobby Weir's rhythm guitar, labeled Aces on the tracking sheet, and Phil Lesh's stereo bass. Let's listen to the rhythm section. As always, the bass moves the groove along without doubling the song's rhythm. In between the basic studio tracking and the rest of the overdubs, though, the song made its live debut, June 17th at Winterland at the Bob Freed Memorial Boogie. You were supposed to remind them to write an ending. For what I think might be the only time in the band's history, the band recorded the basic tracks, debuted the song live, then went back for overdubs. A lot of asterisks around here. We'll go in the order of overdubs. Jerry Garcia recorded a scratch vocal on June 5th, which didn't get erased, and which we'll use for a few of our segments. And I promise, like really, we'll talk about the lyrics, but not yet. On June 29th, Garcia recorded a new guitar part through the Leslie. They hadn't wiped the original yet, which was on a different track, so he was probably using it as a guide. Here's the first verse into the chorus. On July 3rd, someone overdubbed a harmonica part. I'm going to guess Bobby Weir's Kingfish bandmate, Matt Kelly. But it got over overdubbed a few days later, as did a track of backing vocals. Hold those tracks, though. On July 4th, Keith Gottschow celebrated Independence Day 1975 by adding a road's part, where Jerry Garcia's original guitar was. There's a cigarette burned directly in the middle of track 6 on the tracking sheet. As far as I can tell, there's almost no variation in the keyboard part for the song's nearly 5 minute runtime, like a piece of funky minimalism hidden beneath the chattering, churning dead. At the very end of the track, it gets cut off like it kept going. Maybe it's still going now. On July 4th, Garcia recorded vocals again, trying again on July 6th with the keeper take. On July 6th, Keith Gottschow added some organ. I guess the B3 went back to aces after the snack benefit. On July 7th, he wiped over it with a new B3 part. It goes through the song, generally staying in the lower register in the beginning, and getting it into higher tones in the end. On July 8th, they wiped Garcia's second vocal take with the backing vocal track, described on the sheet as a stack, possibly bounced down alongside an earlier session from July 3rd, featuring Weir, Garcia, Donah Jean, and maybe even Keith Gottschow and Phil Lesh, both credited on the album with vocals, and I'm not sure where else they'd be. On July 8th, Weir tried a new rhythm part, which he abandoned in favor of his original take, his amp mic'd up, but also run direct, which will combine and isolate here. It's a little more varied than what Keith is playing on the roads, but not by much. There's an undated stereo percussion overdub too, which could be a late edition by Mickey Hart. So, heard together, the blues for all a version of Franklin's Tower. And as we noted, no ending, just a fade out. In the studio, it finished up sort of like this. Here's Bob Weir, Phil Lesh, and Bill Kroytman's original ending. One of the fun bits of the new expanded Blues for Alla 50 is getting to hear the August 12th sound check for the Great American Music Hall show the next night, and you can hear them rehearsing Franklin's Tower's newly written ending, really just the ending to Slipknot adapted slightly, finished before the album was out, and yet not on the album. Sounds like there was a chomper in the house. So, Franklin's Tower obviously became a live staple. One of the places where the bands revived double drummer lineup could easily find a groove. We'll spend more time at the Lindley Meadows show from September 1975 later this season. Franklin's Tower appeared separately from Help on the Way in Slipknot, but I think only because somebody popped a string. Jeff Gould, founder of Modulus, was there, and he immediately got a blast of the moment that became a joyous peak at mini-dead shows for the next 20 years to come. I know what you call it. I think it's kind of a chord, metallic shard. It's just wonderful sound. That's now on the 30 Trips box set, and there's definitely some spectral guitar happening. The live takes on the new expanded Blues for A la 50, recorded in Philadelphia in June 1976, has the distinction of the dead's most bicentennial song being played in Philadelphia during the bicentennial year, just a few weeks short of Independence Day, and about six miles from the Liberty Bell as the crow flies, closer maybe for the round records crow. By the end of 1976, the band started experimenting with playing Franklin's Tower without Help on the Way in Slipknot before it, and by the end of 1977, made that arrangement semi-permanent, putting the beginning of the suite away for a half-dozen years. The not-Franklin's Tower. Like Eyes of the World, by the later 1970s, the tempo and feel of Franklin's Tower could be pretty radically different from night to night. Here's an especially fast, high-altitude version, about 10 beats per minute faster than the usual, from Red Rocks, July 8th, 1978. There's some really fun versions during Brent Midland's early tenure with the band, where very occasionally the song would appear in the second set jam suite and float higher and higher, featuring the chiming sounds of Midland's Dineroad's keyboard, like this one from December 4th, 1979, in Chicago. Now on Dave's Picks 31. The dead were pretty committed to Franklin's Tower, and I can see why. Chuffed enough with how it sounded with Brent Midland to include it on the live album Dead Set in 1981. I think one of the first ones I heard that was not with help on the way was Dead Set. Franklin's Tower, yeah, I call it a free agent. Whenever it was not with help on the way in Slipknot, I call it a free agent because it could appear anywhere in a set. There was that period where Half Step would often say again to Franklin's. It's from an audience tape, but here's one from March 24th, 1981 in London. The transition from Mississippi Half Step into Franklin's Tower wasn't always as smooth as this, but I love the way it snaps from the end spiral of Half Step into the opening gallop of Franklin's. Garcia discovered the easy linkage between Mississippi Half Step and Franklin's Tower in 1978, playing the two together 40 times through 1987. If we think of Mississippi Half Step as having its own two-part structure, which we discussed during our wake of the flood season, it creates a new kind of Garcia suite with Franklin's Tower. Also, the chords for the across-the-real grandiose Coda are A to D. Insert a passing G chord in the middle and it becomes Franklin's Tower. And instead of a release after a rhythmically and harmonically dense piece of music like Slipknot, it's an upshift from the lazy river into a joyous boogie. Not only that, as Sean O'Donnell points out, the vocal melody for the last line of Mississippi Half Step and the first line of Franklin's Tower are pretty eerily similar. Exhibit A. Across the real grandiose. Exhibit B. In another time's forgotten space. Franklin's Tower presented a rich text no matter how the band framed it, but perhaps especially if it was inside of its original form, following the naughty perambulations of Help on the Way in Slipknot and the almost claustrophobic Robert Hunter lyrics. Max Richie left us this story. The first time I heard Franklin's Tower live was at Autzen Stadium in Eugene in the summer of 1993. They opened the second set with Help on the Way Slipknot and I always thought that the trip tick was a very powerful journey from dark to light. And even though it was still daylight at that time, it was just that, that afternoon. As Jerry starts strumming the first notes of Franklin's Tower, I turned around from my position on the field to take in the stadium. And what I witnessed was 35,000 of my friends in a collective moment of bliss and release and a unified bounce, just as it, the energy, kind of circulated in the stadium. It was an incredible moment that I will never forget. There was a depth to Franklin's Tower when the dead played it live, in part because of how they framed it as the destination of a journey. But the destination was also coded into both the lyrics and the music itself. We've once again posted a link at dead.net slash deadcast to Melvin Backstrom's piece in Grateful Dead Studies, Spring from Night into the Sun, Metaphors of Dark and Light in the Music of the Grateful Dead, in which he discusses the movement from the minor key emotional confusion of Help on the Way to the reassuring major key bounce of Franklin's Tower. A song that continuously pointed home, both harmonically and lyrically. But starting by 1980, there was one line of Franklin's Tower that got special attention. You can hear the cheer on Deadset, but here's an audience tape from a few days before that at Radio City Music Hall. It's a line that punctuates countless Deadhead stories, and it's the lyric at the center of the story we're about to tell, but in a pretty unexpected way, even by Deadhead standards. Please welcome to the deadcast, Jürgen Foth. I was an English grad student in the early 90s in Mississippi, and I was taking a poetry class, and we have to pick a poet to write on, and I had just recently gotten on the bus, and I'm going to write about Robert Hunter. He's okay. He translated, he counts. I had studied semiotics, theater semiotics in Germany, and the professor there was a student from Beirut of Echoes, and her whole thing is to look at the whole experience of a play, and see all the different channels information comes on with the play. You have the lyrics, but you also have the movement on the stage, you have the costumes and everything else, and those are all channels of information you get. And I thought, oh, I can use this framework to look at great Deadshows, in which you have the lyrics, but you also have the music, you have the lights, you have the people. You have all these different ways meaning is created. So, our argument of the paper really was that the lyrics, there's something familiar about the Deadshows and something unfamiliar always. There's a ritual part, and there's a part that's a mystery, a part that's new and different every time. And that's in the music, you have the written parts, and you have the jams. And my point was, you also have this in a way in the lyrics, where some of the lyrics we understand what they mean, or we think we understand what they mean, but then there's also a mystery, and they're indeterminate, and we don't quite know. And so, the lyrics can mean something else on any given night to you, because of the music, because of the location you're in, because of the jam that went before, because of the headspace you're in. Seems solid to me. Juergen passed his essay along to David Dodd, the editor of the wonderful, and now sadly defunct, website, The Annotated Grateful Dead Lyrics, launched in February 1995, perhaps the first truly collaborative lyric annotation site on the web, and an important precursor to Genius and lots of other online projects. David Dodd's subsequent collection, The Complete Annotated Grateful Dead Lyrics, belongs on every Deadhead bookshelf. We've posted links to both the original site and the book at Dead.net slash Deadcast. And after I wrote the paper and got my grade back and everything, I, uh, I sent it to him and he put it up on Annotated Grateful Dead Lyrics. Juergen's essay was titled The Fractals of Familiarity and Innovation, Robert Hunter and the Grateful Dead Concert Experience, and we've obviously posted a link to that too. The music of the Grateful Dead and the lyrics of Robert Hunter open up spaces within the work of art they form together that make textural interpretation of the lyrics futile. The lyrics function not as an absolute that is stated, but as a tool for semiosis. At every concert, they can and do mean something different according to how the variable parts in the music change. Every time a song is performed, a different set of potential meanings that are inherent in the piece will be actualized for a different audience. But I think for, for the, for sort of a flourish, I wanted to end the piece on a, on a big note or something, and I completely overstate the case in that last line, where I say they don't mean anything at all. Like that's not what the, I think that's what you meant. That's not what the paper says before. That's not at all. And it was this flourish that caused something pretty extraordinary to happen. The result is one of an ever-changing, fluctuating whole that contains familiar parts, but never completely yielding to reason. Robert Hunter's lyrics are a vital part of this experience, providing the mind-searching music with an incessantly fascinating imagery that both underscores and counterpoints its meaning by not meaning anything at all. Juergen's essay was posted in late 1995 or early 1996, and by March it elicited a response. I think David sent me an email and said, check it out, you know, Hunter responded to your essay. Hunter took offense to the idea that his lyrics might be heard on any level as meaningless, and churned out a 2000 plus word response, fractures of unfamiliarity and circumvention in pursuit of a nice time, obviously linked to dead.net slash deadcast. I'll be reading some excerpts. We'll be using the alternate take of the vocal, by the way. If you prefer not to know what Robert Hunter meant by Franklin's Tower, you might want to skip ahead. Let's rewind the music slightly. Music Dear Juergen, meeting is not an irreducible ear language. A good lyric is illusion, illusion, sub-refuge, and collusion. When the semi-autician suspects of luciveness without corresponding exact reference, he charges the poet with nonsense. Nonsense is a loaded word, the meaning of which is unclear. If it is understood as intentional multi-referentiality without predetermined hierarchy, rather than meaningless blather, one would find no fault with the term. But it isn't, so the charge of nonsense and meaninglessness levied by a scholarly and plausible source does much to put people off exploring further. At first I was really embarrassed because he's making fun of me, yeah? He's like the whole academic thing, he's messing with the title, making it silly and ridiculous. But then I came to realize, no, no, this is fantastic, he's explaining the song, and he's never done anything like this anywhere else that I know of. Like somehow this paper must have hit the right combination of, it must have been interesting enough to read through, but stupid enough in the last line to take him off. Hunter zeroed in on one particular part of Juergen's essay. Certain catchphrases within Hunter's lyrics seem to yield an especially enthusiastic response by the audience. A good example for this is, if you get confused, listen to the music play from Franklin's Tower, a line that taken by itself offers guidance to a perplexed listener. Yet it is embedded within a song that is as obscure as a lot of second-set lyrics. Franklin's Tower is a vocative, yet of undeterminable meaning. The above mentioned catchphrase line is almost hidden within the song and has to be read out of context to prompt the joyful response it usually gets. I choose to reply by explicating one of your examples, Franklin's Tower. I do this reluctantly because I feel that a straightforward statement of my original intent robs the listener of personal associations and replaces them with my own. I may know where they come from, but I don't know where they've been. My illusions are, admittedly, often not immediately accessible to those whose literary resources are broadly different than my own, but I wouldn't want my listener's trust to be shaken by an acceptance of the category meaningless attached to a bundle of justified signifiers whose sources happen to escape the scope of simplistic reference. In another time's forgotten space, your eyes looked from your mother's face. Surface intent. You have your mother's eyes, child, the very shape, color, and intensity of the eyes that looked through her face so long ago. Born on the varied winds of chance and change, like a dandelion seed, you may find yourself deposited on barren soil. My wish for you is that the forces that brought you there may sweep you up again and bear you to fertile ground. In another time's forgotten space, your eyes looked from your mother's face. Deeper intent. Relative immortality of the human species is realized through reproduction. Dominant traits inherited from an ancestor, the lyric suggests, share more than a mere similarity with those of the forebear, but are an identity endlessly reproducible. In other words, when someone says, you have your mother's eyes, they're not speaking in simile, nor would it be incorrect to say that your mother has your eyes, if in fact possessiveness is an appropriate term in the context. Poetic license will assume it is, if only for the sake of moving on to the next couplet. I'll tell you where the forewinds dwell, in Franklin's tower the hangs a bell. Note that this song appeared in 1975, the year after my son was born, and the year before the American bicentennial. Both facts are entirely relevant. Hey, me again. I'm also going to annotate the annotation occasionally. Bicentennial fever was everywhere in the mid-1970s, a theme that's come up in other contexts, like US blues, and acted as a current in the culture. Even if you were born after the bicentennial, material remnants could be spotted throughout the culture for the next decade and change. Americana was a deep theme of Robert Hunter's lyrics during the dead so-called Bakersfield period, so it's worth observing how few obvious Americana themes can be heard on Blues for Allah. Anyway. The allusion to the Liberty Bell, and the situation of the Philadelphia Congress in the hometown of Ben Franklin, has not gone unnoticed by other commentators. This song is a birthday wish, both for my son and for my country, each young and subject to the winds of vicitude. Individual and collective freedom, Liberty Conscious, all that is conjured by those concepts, is suggested in the image of the tolean bell. The bell, wrong once, cracked, and could not be safely rung again. From an actual bell, it therefore became a symbol of the potential to ring. The single toll, signaling birth, can now be heard only in its reverberations in our history and ideals. Some have had to bear those ideals in difficult circumstances. War, the Great Depression, and general benightedness. Others have had the more enviable task of keeping watch, eternal vigilance, during periods of conscious and dynamic change, the full light of day. The sixties, the writer assumes, were such a time. You can't tell if ringing that bell a second time would destroy it in the act of producing another mighty peel, and it might be foolish, if courageous, to try. Perhaps the music of the original ideals symbolized by the first and only toll should be taken to heart and implemented, rather than obviated by a new source of ideation, communism, anarchy, religion-based governmental apparatus, etc. To resolve this confusion, pay attention to the original inspiration, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, collectively, individually, maintain awareness of conscience and one's own early ideals. I have always taken, for face value, this is what it means if you're confused at the show, for whatever reasons, listen to the music play, and it saved me many a time, you know. But he's saying, no, it's the music of the bell being rung for the first and only time, and it means if you get lost, connect back to the thing that, your original inspiration, to the thing that sent you on your way, like the U.S. Constitution, I think he's talking about, and that was something I'd never before understood. So there's, again, there's layers and layers to it. This verse scarcely needs commentary in light of the above remarks. The precursor to the first couplet is I Come For To Sing, as performed, possibly written by Pete Seeger. That, perhaps obviously, was not Pete Seeger. As much as I'd love to cram in a Pete Seeger connection to Franklin's Tower, he didn't write, and as far as I can tell never performed, I Come For To Sing, which was written by Chick Young and Dennis Wright, and first performed by one of the many musicians that Seeger influenced, the folk singer Bob Gibson. Hunter probably knew this 1957 version around the time he was president of the Folk Music Club at the University of Connecticut. The second couplet source is Biblical. Who's So's Wind Reeps The Hurricane? That'd be Hosea 8-7 from the King James Version, for they have sown the wind and they shall reap the hurricane. We assume a bell tower for the Great Bell. By the trope of Simile, we see the bell tower, the day watch, turn to a lighthouse, and the four winds become sleeping hounds, the night watch, worn out by the events of such a metaphorical day as related by E.E. Cummins, in his familiar lyric, All in Green Went My Love Riding. Let's let Joan Baez demonstrate. By the use of quotative illusion, the lyric attempts to borrow some of the emotive spark of Cummins' poem, providing a kind of link button into a different but complementary space. Allusion here functions as a sort of shorthand cross patch into a series of metaphoric events, which, with a double-clutch shift of Simile, access a downloadable description of the kind of day it's been for a wildflower seed in its adventures in the wind. There may be some objection to the elastic interchangeability of the similes of hounds and winds in this set of couplets, but the test of the illusion, as I see it, is whether or not the appropriate emotions are evoked to lead to satisfying closure and an opening door on other possibilities. Now, to the real stretch. Roll away the dew. Roll away the dew. The line is appropriated from a fairly well-known sea shanty. Roll away the morning dew. The dew at the dew. Roll away the morning dew. How sweet the birds they sing. That's Joni Mitchell performing Blow Away the Morning Dew in 1965. Child ballad number 12, a ruid ballad number 11 to use more modern numbering. Of course, it has a dead connection to Hunter Observes. As surely everyone knows by now, Bonnie Dobson's song Morning Dew, made famous by Garcia's singing of it, is set in the aftermath of a nuclear war. The reason he can't walk you out in the morning dew, my honey, is because of fallout, though Garcia has wisely dropped the verse containing this denouement, allowing the song a heightened romantic mystery achieved through open-ended ambiguity. For generations now alive, the nuclear specter personifies the forces which most threaten our attempt to Jeffersonian democracy. Roll away the dew. Roll away the dew. With the song's sub-illusion to Roll Away the Stone, an anthem of joyous, Easter-tide resurrection, a resultant combination message of dire necessity, as in the final You've Got to Roll Away the Dew, and promise of renewal, in case resolution is effective, are enjoined. Should this hyper-illusive train of thought become too confusing to process, the invitation to just listen to the music play acknowledges both the melody and performance context of the lyric and the metaphoric bell described above. Roll away the dew. You better roll away the dew. Roll away the dew. You better roll away the dew. Well, now that you know what I meant by it, it's no great shakes, is it? Mystery gone, the magician's trick told, the gluttony for meaning temporarily satisfied, one can now take issue with my intent and avoid the song itself, substituting the assignable significance for the music. Roll away the dew. Roll away the dew. I mean, for Christ's sake. There are lots of ways in which Robert Hunter was an innovator, and one under song one was that he was an early personification of a meme. Are you coming to bed and out of frame voice calls? I can't, this is important. What? Someone is wrong on the internet. A few weeks after posting his response to Jurgen, Robert Hunter launched his very own proto blog. If Jurgen's essay was an inspiration, Hunter never mentioned it, but it's certainly a marker of Hunter's early internet adventures. And certainly Hunter never did it again, though it occasionally dropped nuggets about various tunes when he saw fit. But mainly stuck to the mode he displayed in a Mir Bar Lev's long strange trip. We go unite while we can through the transitive nightfall of diamonds. What is unclear about that? I mean, it says what it means. This wouldn't have been possible in the age of Twitter. You wouldn't write a response this long. You know, he must have taken some time to do this. On Twitter, I just would have gotten a quick smackdown or something. Franklin's Tower is almost certainly the most covered song from Blues for Allah. It's certainly the most malleable. One of the earliest I know about was from 1982, though not officially released until a bit later. Ladies and gentlemeats, will you welcome please, The Meat Puppets. And for that matter, Henry Rawlins did it in 1991 with his project, War Time, his collaboration with longtime Wean partner Andrew Weiss. But it just as easily became a reggae song, like on the 1996 Fire in the Mountain tribute, produced by our pal Henry K, performed by Steel Pulse. Jesse McRenalds, an influence on Jerry Garcia as part of the McRenalds brothers, recorded it in 2009. In as much as there was a scene of bands that followed the Grateful Dead, Franklin's Tower became something of a standard, largely because of its simple elegance. When Jerry Garcia died in 1995, Dickey Betts of the Allman Brothers began to pay tribute by using Franklin's Tower as a lead-in to Blue Sky. Truly one of the most flexible dead songs, Franklin's Tower lent itself to the Senegalese groove of Orchestra Baobab on 2016's Day of the Dead benefit album. They found a new path through the changes. Nothing ever replaced the original Help on the Way Slipknot Franklin's Tower. In the Dead songbook, it was an almost classical form and a technical feat for younger bands to prove their metal, as well as a ready-made ploy to crack the suite open and play with that tension. As a very young band, Fish never played Franklin's Tower, but they did play Help on the Way Slipknot into their own ACDC bag. Virtually every successor band to the Grateful Dead has played with it in some ways, from Rat Dog and Phil Leshin friends to Further, Fairly Well, and Deadenco. In the 21st century, it's rarely a given that Help on the Way and Slipknot will go into Franklin's Tower. Hannah Grabenstein left us this story. Ahead of the story, she was there to support him and hang out. They played Help Slipknot and I was so tense because I was worried it wasn't going to go into Franklin's Tower. I think that transition from Slipknot into Franklin's Tower is the most relieving moment. It's such a sigh. Oh, thank God. It has resolved so beautifully. When Deadenco's company did go into Franklin's, I just lost my shit and I was dancing and I'm out of arms outstretched. I was in church and the woman behind me was like, I've never seen anybody so happy and enjoying the music so much. I was like, yeah, that's what the Help Slipknot suite will do for you. Anyway, I love this song. I love Franklin so much that I named my puppy Franklin and he's my best friend and he does the song Justice. Franklin's Tower has traveled a long way from Robert Hunter's song to the United States and to his newborn son. It's not a folk song in the traditional sense, especially because we can run down its history and even the ethereal intent. But the rate at which Franklin Tower became a folk object was pretty astounding. A rolling stone might gather no moss, but it does collect meaning. We'll end our visit to Franklin's Tower with David Lemieux's first meeting with Blues for Awa. And so I put it on and I knew all the songs, or most of them. I couldn't believe how great this album sounded and it kicks in to Help on the Way and I was like, oh my God, unbelievable. Slipknot. Incredible. And I'm hearing these sounds and it's just blowing me away. Franklin's Tower starts as it gets to the line One Watch by Night, One Watch by Day. The album started skipping. On the line, One Watch by Day. So it kept so One Watch by Day, One Watch by Day. So I finally, after like hoping it would, you know, sometimes you hope the needle's gonna kind of, the weight of it will move on, literally. It didn't. So I probably went for about 30 seconds, 46 seconds, and I nudged the needle. If you get confused, listen to the music play. And for every single time I listened to this record, which was often, I had a lot of live tapes, but I still, I listen to the dead records all the time. And every time this album I put it on, it got to One Watch by Night, One Watch by Day, One Watch by Day. And it repeated over and over until I got off the couch and nudged it a little bit. One Watch by Day, One Watch by Day. One Watch by Day. You get confused, listen to the music play. So this went on for years. And to this day, when I hear the record, that's what I hear. When I hear live versions, I anticipate it coming up. And then one day, many years later, in the, I'm gonna say in the 90s, and I look at the pressing and I look very closely and right at that spot, there's a little white bit of schmutz, just, just visible. So it's like, well, that's interesting. So I took a little soft cloth, wet at the tiniest bit, and popped it off. And I popped this little piece of schmutz off. I said, that can't be it. Put the record on for the first time, for after over a decade of listening to this record, I got to hear it for the first time. And voila, just what we always want. New music from the Grateful Dead. Well, we can't reintroduce you to Franklin's Tower entirely. We can offer the super cut of the studio version, where you can clearly hear all the parts that make the whole. You can't unring or uncrack a bell. But if you listen hard enough, you might be able to still hear it echoing. In another time's forgotten space, your eyes looked from your mother's face. Roll away the dew. Roll away the dew. God save the child who rings that bell, and may have one good ring, baby, you can't tell. One watch by night, one watch by day. If you get confused, listen to the music play. Thanks very much for tuning in to the Good Old Grateful Deadcast, friends. While it's hard to deny the genius that is help on the way, Slipknot Franklin's Tower, I would put my goosebumps money on the feels like a stranger into Franklin's from dead set any day of the week. Man, that one always gets me. We'd like to thank our special guests in this episode, David Lemieux, Jeff Gould, Jurgen Falf, Sean O'Donnell, Chadwick Jenkins, Will Backstrom, Max Richie, and Hanna Gravenstein. Extra special thanks to friend of the deadcast, David Gans, for his ongoing contributions of audio from his interview archive. Executive producer for the Good Old Grateful Deadcast, Mark Pinkas. Produced for Rhino Entertainment by Rich Mayhem Promotions and Jesse Jarno. Special thanks to David Lemieux, Brian Dodd, and Doran Tyson. All rights reserved.