Grateful Dead lyricist Robert Hunter explains “Franklin’s Tower,” in a reply to Jurgen Fauth’s essay: “The Fractals of Familiarity and Innovation: Robert Hunter and the Grateful Dead Concert Experience,” available at http://www.uccs.edu/~ddodd/jurgen.html. The essay is so great that I’m stealing it and reprinting it here.
Fractures of Unfamiliarity & Circumvention in Pursuit of a Nice Time
Meaning is not an irreducible Ur-language. A good lyric is allusion, illusion, subterfuge and collusion. A poor lyric is information about its own paucity of resource. That doesn’t mean the latter cannot be a great song. There is nothing inherently better about a dumb song than one which calls attention to the intelligence of its writer. It’s a matter of taste, but meaning is often a subterfuge to distract the listener’s attention from a writer’s lack of multiple resources. This is often true of blatant “message” songs.
How does a song mean?
As long as allusions can be codified, the semiotician is content, knowing that “meaning” is a case-sensitive term with scant referentiality outside implementation of primitive needs. When the semiotician suspects allusiveness 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.
Photo stolen shamelessly from the Marin Independent Journal and the great Jay Blakesberg.
“The repair sad mutthead forkbender orange in the how are you, did they?” is nonsense without reference, hence not allusive. Had it discernible rhythm, it might be termed ‘rhythm allusive’ but my example lacks even that. The only way on earth such a sentence would likely get written is as an example of a null allusive set. Bingo! An allusion! To Set Theory! The exception that proves the rule.
How does a song mean?
The meaning(s), or lack thereof, ascribed by others to an example of lyric work are not part of the work. The interpretations are separate “works.” The manner in which an audience receives the work, what they, collectively and individually, make of it, can indeed provide potential data for the allusiveness (referentiality)of future lyrics, gainsaid, but cannot be ascribed as a characteristic of the particular work, per se, with validity without “insider information” which is, in any case, no part of the song. That way lies true nonsense, even unto deconstruction. Yet the little bugger of a jingle persists and seems to move hearts. Why? Is there something which semiotics, by its nature and presuppositions, must exclude from the sphere of “meaningfulness” due to the limited nature of its tools?
How does semiotics mean?
Since the concluding remark of your essay stated that the Grateful Dead songs are “meaningless,” 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 allusions are, admittedly, often not immediately accessible to those whose literary resources are broadly different than my own, but I wouldn’t want my listeners’ 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.
How does the song go? [I’ve changed it to match Garcia’s minor alteration of Hunter’s original lyrics. —PB]
FRANKLIN’S TOWER
In another time’s forgotten space
Your eyes looked from your mother’s face
Wildflower seed and the sand 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
Ring like fire when you lose your way
Roll away... the dew...
God save the child who rings that bell
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...
Some come to laugh the 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...
I’ll tell you where the four winds sleep
Like four lean hounds the lighthouse keep
Wildflower seed and the sand and wind
May the four winds blow you home again
Roll away... the dew...
You’d better roll away the dew
WHAT’S IT ABOUT? AN EXPLICATION:
In another time’s forgotten space
Your eyes looked from your mother’s face
Wildflower seed and the sand and stone
May the four winds blow you safely home
I’ll tell you 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 save the child who rings that bell
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
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 the 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 first couplet is “I Come for to Sing,” as performed, possibly written, by Pete Seeger. The second couplet source is the Biblical “Who sows wind reaps the hurricane.”
I’ll tell you where the four winds sleep
Like four lean hounds the lighthouse keep
Wildflower seed and 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 (Poem 6 from Tulips and Chimneys): “All in Green Went My Love Riding, four lean hounds crouched low and smiling...” By the use of quotative allusion the lyric attempts to borrow some of the emotive spark of cummings’ 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, Tim Rose’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 that 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 just to “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.
Attempts by language to overdetermine language are doomed out the door, so I content myself with providing these clues for threading the maze of “Franklin’s Tower” and as a grudging key to my methods. I feel that much of what you’ve said in your essay is rich, correct and thought-provoking and appreciate your accurate estimation of the concert context as adjunct to the lyric, and vice versa. The contextual sub-meaning (the way the song manifests itself in concert) is certainly a factor that occasionally determines certain choices in subsequent material. Too much of that would be a striving after sameness of effect, though (even if it does all sound the same to an uninitiated ear.)
Oh, one other thing: you labeled “what a long, strange trip it’s been” as “cliched.” Aren’t you putting the cart before the horse? “Truckin’” was the originating vehicle of the phrase, which had not, to my knowledge, been coined before. The fact that it has entered the catchphrase banks of the language in a ubiquitous way may render subsequent usage cliched, but surely not the invention itself, unless all widely adopted phrases are deemed trite by virtue of their durability.
You also mentioned that the “What in the world ever became of Sweet Jane? / She’s lost her sparkle, you know she isn’t the same” verse was probably an in-joke not meant for a broad audience to grasp. The intention was a parody of the ‘40’s warning-style of singing commercial, specifically: “Poor Millicent, poor Millicent / She ne-ver used Pep-so-dent / Her smile grew dim / And she lost her vim / So folks don’t be like Millicent / Use Pep-so-dent! “ I’m sure that the allusiveness, not that entirely outré in the ‘60’s, is well lost here in the ‘90’s. So, it’s perhaps an in-joke, but not one meant for private consumption. Just a bit of black humor that fails to fire and emerges, instead, as an enigma. I guess the question here is whether an allusion must be blatantly perceivable as such in order to avoid the uncharitable label of “nonsense.”
Thank you for taking my work seriously enough to spend considerable effort in explicating it according to your lights.
Robert Hunter 3/4/96