Franklin's Tower
Lyrics: Robert Hunter
Music: Jerry Garcia, Bill Kreutzman

Reprinted with permissions: copyright Ice Nine Publishing




In another time's forgotten space
Your eyes looked from your mother's face
Wildflower seed on the stand and stone
May the four winds blow you safely home

Roll away the dew
Roll away the dew
Roll away the dew
Roll away the dew

I'll tell you where the four winds dwell
In Franklin's tower there hangs a bell
It can ring, turn night to day
It can ring like fire when you lose your way

Roll away the dew
Roll away the dew
Roll away the dew
Roll away the dew

God save the child who rings that bell
It 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

Roll away the dew
Roll away the dew
Roll away the dew
Roll away the dew

Some come to laugh their past away
Some come to make it just one more day
Whichever way your pleasure tends
If you plant ice, you're gonna harvest wind

Roll away the dew
Roll away the dew
Roll away the dew
Roll away the dew

In Franklin's tower the four winds sleep
Like four lean hounds the lighthouse keep
Wildflower seed in the sand and wind
May the four winds blow you home again

Roll away the dew
Roll away the dew
Roll away the dew
Roll away the dew
_________________________________________________
First performance: June 17, 1975 at Winterland, San Francisco. This was the "Bob Fried Memorial Boogie".
_________________________________________________
Grateful Dead Recordings

studio 1975 Blues For Allah
13 Aug 1975 One From The Vault
22 May 1977 Dick's Picks Vol 3
25 Oct 1980 Dead Set
31 Oct 1980 Dead Ahead (video)
30 Mar 1990 Without A Net
14 Jun 1991 View From The Vault II
5 Jun 1999 Love Will See You Through (Phil Lesh & Friends)

Other Recordings

1985 Live '85 Robert Hunter
1990 Box Of Rain Robert Hunter
1990 Fast Food For Thought Henry Rollins and Wartime
1996 Fire On The Mountain Vol 1 (Reggae Celebrates The Grateful Dead) (Steel Pulse)
1996 Blues For Allah Joe Gallant and Illuminati
1996 Live Medicine Mighty Manatees Medicine Show
1998 Blue Light Rain Jazz Is Dead
1999 Tie-Die Yippie Ki Yay McEuen and Salazar
1999 Meat Puppets Meat Puppets (yes the Meat Pupets)

In response to an essay on David Dodd's excellent Annotated Grateful Dead Lyrics Robert Hunter gives us a rare Rosetta Stone by reveling the meaning of the lyrics.

What's it about?

EXPLICATION:

In another time's forgotten space
your eyes looked through your mother's face
Wildflower seed on the sand and stone
may the four winds blow you safely home.

< 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. Borne 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.]

< deeper intent >
"In another time's forgotten space your eyes looked through your mother's face." [Relative immortality of the human species is realized through reproduction. Dominant traits inherited from an ancestor, the lyric suggests, share more than 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 are 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.]

You ask me where the four winds dwell
In Franklin's tower there hangs a bell
It can ring, turn night to day
Ring like fire when you lose your way

[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. 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 vicissitude. Individual and collective freedom, liberty, conscience, all that is conjured by those concepts, is suggested in the image of the tolling bell.]

God help the child who rings that bell
It may have one good ring left, you can't tell
One watch by night, one watch by day
If you get confused just listen to the music play

[The Bell, rung 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 peal 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.]

Some come to laugh their past away
Some come to make it just one more day
Whichever way your pleasure tends
if you plant ice, you're gonna harvest wind

[This verse scarcely needs commentary in light of the above remarks. The precursor to the 1st couplet is "I Come for to Sing" as performed, possibly written, by Pete Seegar. The 2cnd couplet source is the biblical "Who sows wind reaps the hurricane."]

In Franklin's Tower the four winds sleep
Like four lean hounds the lighthouse keep
Wildflower seed in the sand and wind
May the four winds blow you home again

[We assume a bell tower for the great bell. By the trope of simile, we see the bell tower (the day watch) turned 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. cummings in his familiar lyric "All in Green Went My Love Riding" (Poem 6 from TULIPS & CHIMNEYS) "four lean hounds crouched low and smiling . . ." By the use of quotative allusion the lyric attempts to borrow some of the emotive spark of cumming's 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 allusion, 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." The line is appropriated from a fairly well known sea chantey whose chorus goes: "Roll away the morning dew and sweet the winds shall blow." 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 nuclear war. 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 at Jeffersonian democracy. With the song's sub-allusion to "[Roll away the Stone," an anthem of joyous Eastertide 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 effected, are enjoined. Should this hyper-allusive 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.]

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.


Sources: http://arts.ucsc.edu/gdead/agdl/
http://www.dead.net/RobertHunterArchive/files/Essays/fauthreply.html

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