“If you get confused, listen to the music play.”
— Garcia/Hunter
Reflections
In my personal experience, this small fragment of Franklin’s Tower, the third song in the conjoined triplet that is Help > Slip > Franklin’s, is one of the most meaningful lines penned by Grateful Dead lyricist Robert Hunter. There may be other lines with more poetic presence and other phrases that tug at the heartstrings or cut to the bone. However, for me this is the seed syllable of the Dharma of the Dead project. And one that has likely kept many of us from going off the deep end or down some rabbit hole of a bad trip. On brighter days it just sits there as a reminder that there is something which serves as a balm to the confusion that clouds the darker ones.
I first heard Franklin’s Tower played by The Grateful Dead live on March 30th, 1990. My second show ever. We’ll come back to 3/29/90 at another time. These two and the one I saw later this year in Foxboro, Massachusetts will likely resurface more than once in this series, with good reason.
Granted, I had listened to the Dead as a child. My parents were not heads but I do recall them having Skeletons from the Closet and American Beauty on vinyl, as many folks of their generation surely did. And while I did get into the Dead early in my college career, it wasn’t until that fateful Nassau Coliseum run that I got the full depth of the experience — the anticipation, the electricity, the joy, and the confusion of this circus of merry pranksters.
Commentary
Confusion is often framed as a samsaric state, losing touch with our innate wisdom. This in turn makes us more susceptible to what are known as the three poisons of greed, hatred, and ignorance. From there, it’s so easy to slip into less‑than‑enlightened activity.
Awareness serves as the medicine that cures us of our confused state. As Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche said, even confusion carries the seed of wisdom the moment we notice it. At the very least awareness is a first step in grounding ourselves to the present moment and realising the true nature of our experience. Awareness of what? The senses. Because in our human capacity, what other reference point do we have? Even in the most basic meditation techniques, we return to the “feeling” (sense perception) of our breath and our bodies in space. Many Western psychologists teach a similar practice called sensory grounding — naming what we see, hear, or feel to bring the mind back into the present moment.
And so, if you get confused; if you feel unbalanced, stressed out, anxious, or maybe a little bit too high because you doubled down at set break – listen to the music play; touch in with your senses; what do you hear, feel, see, taste, smell, or intuit?
Let the phenomenal world and your perception of it be that safe space — just like the incredible joy and comfort of those first chords of Franklin’s Tower coming out of the controlled chaos of a wild and wooly Slipknot!
Welcome home.
P.S. If you haven’t already, check out (Tuning)… the first post in this series that sets the stage and settles you in.
Lojong #1
༄༅། །མ་རིག་འཁྲུལ་ན་སྒྲ་ལ་རང་བཞིན་དུ་ཞོག། །།
(When confusion arises, rest naturally in sound.)
Song Details
| Song | Franklin’s Tower |
| Lyricist | Robert Hunter |
| Composer | Jerry Garcia |
| Primary Singer | Jerry Garcia |
| First Time Played | June 17, 1975 / Winterland, San Francisco, CA |
| Last Time Played | June 22, 1995 / Knickerbocker Arena, Albany, NY |
| Album / Era | Blues for Allah (1975) |
| Notable Versions | 6/9/77; 5/9/78; 10/14/80; 3/27/88; 3/30/90 |
| Additional Notes | As noted above it only appeared as a first set opener once. It also was played as an encore once, and appeared without Slipknot! a couple of other times, primarily as second set openers. |
