Dead Songs in Depth

    
Indeed it is!
  

    
<masonskids> wrote http://jlovkay.web.wesleyan.edu/ftreal.html

and as <ddodd> noted also at 
http://artsites.ucsc.edu/GDead/agdl/fauthrep.html

(note: the second link has much more written on the first verse and
changes the attribution from Tim Rose to Bonnie Dobson)

That 1996 writing by Hunter (in the links above) does sort of match
what their historian Dennis McNally writes (without a source
reference) in his 2003 book A Long Strange Trip p. 483 about
Franklin's Tower as “a lullabye birthday wish for Hunter for both
his one year old son Leroy and the United States, then approaching
its bicentennial. For it is Benjamin Franklin’s tower and the bell
of Liberty he addresses.” “And it is the atomic morning dew of
modern America that he would like to see roll away, like the stone
of Gethsemane.” 

According to internet searches, Gethsemane is the place of the rock
of agony in the garden where Jesus prayed on his fate knowing he
faced a sequence of arrest, torture, and crucifixion starting later
that night. And that is different than the rock that sealed the tomb
of Jesus as Hunter describes in the 1996 posting in the link above.

In McNally’s 1990 interview of Hunter, Hunter told him that in 1962,
at the point of confrontation during the Cuban missile crisis, he
came outside and just stared at the sky waiting for the mushroom
cloud to appear. I think that event made an impression on him and he
used it in writing Franklin's Tower.

In the 1996 writing, Hunter is responding to an academic critic who
wrote that his lyrics are "not meaning anything at all." I believe
Hunter is just messing with him in his reply. Near the end Hunter
wrote: "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". I did not get a satisfying
meaning from reading it and found parts of it confusing, but that is
how many of his songs are. The Franklin as FDR still fits the lyrics
better for me. As I quoted in a prior post, Hunter in regards to
Franklin's Tower said the “lyrics were elusive, not because they
were meaningless, but because the associative patterns produced a
surfeit of meaning." 

I think few people (including me) listen to the song with Franklin
as FDR, just like few probably listen to other songs whose meanings
were initially fixed such as Morning Dew (as the end of the world),
New Speedway Boogie (as a response to critics of Altamont), or He's
Gone (about Lenny Hart). Franklin's Tower is just a fun dance song.

In Going Down the Road, Blair Jackson, 1992 p 225-226, Hunter says
in general “These songs are amorphous that way, What I intend is not
what a thing is in the end” and Jerry says “We don’t create the
meaning of the tunes ultimately. They re-create themselves each
performance in the minds of everyone there.”
  

    

> Hunter told him that in 1962, at the point of confrontation during the
> Cuban missile crisis, he came outside and just stared at the sky waiting
> for the mushroom cloud to appear.

David Browne's book SO MANY ROADS tells a story of Jerry and Sara Garcia on
at that same moment.
  

    
Hey, great minds think AND fear alike, no?
  

    
> A good lyric is allusion, illusion, subterfuge and collusion.

This should be fun. 
  

    
Thankfully, I find that even after reading Hunter's explanations, my
own subjective meanings of these lines, forged in the heat of show,
remain intact. Yes, from what Hunter says, the songs means, more or
less, what I suspected, except he left out the part about "roll away
the dew" being about "making love in(till) the dawn" and "one good
ring" being the conception of the beloved child alluded in both the
essay and the first couplet of the song: 

In another time's forgotten space
Your eyes looked from your mother's face

Personally, I never once imagined or considered the connection to
Morning Dew. Goes to show, you don't ever know.
  

    
This might be my all-time favorite song in the GD canon...I say
might be becos there are several others which come close...Cryptical
Envelopement...Born Cross-eyed...The Eleven...Viola Lee Blues... And
finally, of course, Dark Star and St. Stephen..And on and on...once
I read Hunter's long letter about this song, my mind and eyes were
opened to some of the imagery that was opaque to me b/4...some of
the lyrics in this song are timeless and in some very deep ways very
comforting to me
  

    

I think "In another time's forgotten space / Your eyes looked from your
mother's face" is one of Hunter's greatest achievements - moreso as the years
go by and the Deadheads reach into their fourth generation.
  

    
Yes, it is a masterpiece, the lyrics and the musical setting are
both extraordinary, even in this great canon.
  

    

I first heard it at Winterland on 6/17/75, coming out of that amazing in-
strumental version of "Help on the Way." Those two opening lines just rang
out beautifully.
  

    
In another times forgotten space 
Your eyes looked from your mother's face

Always has a deep and particular resonance for me. Franklin's Tower
was playing (by design) in the delivery room during my son's birth.
I could see him in her eyes as he emerged and then a moment later
saw his eyes looking at me from her birth canal.

Now when my wife and I talk about Flynn and she is taking his point
of view, I can see his eyes looking from his mother's face every
time.

Also, since his birth, for me, "roll away the dew" has referred to
the gentle wiping away of afterbirth from a newborn and the removal
of the crust form his eyes to allow the first glimpse of the world
(I know newborns can't see much, but it works for me)






Anyone who has been present at a birth knows that "another times
forgotten space" describes the extraordinary timelessness of those
elemental moments, both as they happen and in memory.
  

    
Great post, thanks! I have always loved that opening line, too.
  

    
Samesies WRT to the opening lines
  

    
And reading my post #36 I realize that, within that subjective
neonatal cleansing interpretation of "roll away the dew"  is the
same/related concept as "wake up to find out that you are the eyes
of the world"
One follows the other.