J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown - May ’10 #10: “Franklin’s Tower (live)” by The Grateful Dead

I thought about doing some hipster internet bullshit and explain how, "Yeah, I kinda used to like the Grateful Dead but man they suck, plus hippies lololol" or something along those lines, but fuck all that. I always liked the notion of the Grateful Dead, and when life is right, there's nothing better to listen to. But like anything, a bunch of dumbasses busted it up into something less enjoyable. And I could digress into how people going to festivals and fake Dead shows nowadays not only missed the fucking boat, but don't even realize they're not even on water. Shows are all pharmaceuticals now, and even weed is more genetically engineered than your average albino rat having cancer tumors induced in its belly in the basements of every major university in America.
Instead, let me tell you about my first dead show. A dude who was a year older than me in high school and was graduating, plus a dude who had graduated the year before, were going to RFK for a show, and I jumped in on the action, not really checking with my folks. At this point - around 17 - my folks were split up and my dad lived in a trailer half a mile from the cedar-sided home I mostly grew up inside of, so I could bounce obligations back and forth and very easily disappear for weeks at a time so long as my grades got kept up and the cops didn't show up at the house (or the trailer, although most likely my dad would've had a shootout with them... for real too; he was on some anti-aircraft guns in a shed to blow jets out the sky shit sometimes). So I had a ticket to RFK already, and I remember showing up for my middle sister's softball game the day before, and we were kicking it and someone asked me about going to the show, with my dad standing there, and he was like, "WTF!" with his eyes, like a cartoon character that walked off a cliff five steps before he realized there wasn't nothing beneath him no more. So I got a quick rundown with him and my mom about being careful and all that.
Next day, me and the other two dudes, one of whom drove a VW microbus, which naturally we took to RFK because we was small town dudes, went to the big show. We bought a quarter bag of shrooms, plus two peanut butter sandwiches, and split the shrooms up mostly even, except the guy who had just graduated hadn't dabbled in the hallucinogenics too much, so he took it light on the sandwich tip. Let me tell you, peanut butter sandwiches are not the best thing to put earthy ass psilocybin shrooms down your throat with, so we drank a bunch of water and beer. But it didn't kick in fast enough for our tastes either, so we bought five hits of some yin/yang acid. I think the graduating dude took like half a hit, so me and the other dude split the rest, and it was sunshine in the sky and we wandered around the lot for a long ass time.
The show itself I remember being amazing. Deep bass, RFK upper deck rocking to where you had to time your retarded dancing so as to not get thrown off by the concrete shake, some hillbilly New York hippie looking dude grabbing some older gay black dude vendor pretzel guy's entire stack of money and throwing it over the rail onto the floor, creating a buzzish roar, balloons floating through the sky with fishing wire hanging down that cut up my arms (have never been able to verify if this was real or not), all sorts of wild shit. This was 1991, so even though I'm like, "You whippersnappers don't know the real deal, with your disco biscuits and bonnaroos and bullshit!" I'm sure there are many old fucks who would be like, "Hahaha, 1991, you might've well as seen Hall & Oates at that point." But whatever, it blew my young mind wide the fuck open. And we brought acid home and slept on the couches of our boy's apartment a block from where my dad worked on chainsaws, woke up in the afternoon as people started showing up to party, as it was that house in every small town where an older dude has all high school friends so they show up constantly from Friday at 2 pm until Sunday at 9 pm to get fucked up in safety. I remember being groggy as fuck as it was my hardest acid trip to that point, but I played foozball and drank Miller Genuine Drafts, and felt right again.
The show itself, I remember them doing the "Help/Slipknot/Franklin's Tower" thing, as well as "Tennessee Jed", which the Dead seemed to play every show I ever ended up at. I never wanted to follow them because if I could wander, why would I follow the itinerary of someone else? I could see picking a couple select spots out along the way, but to purposely follow someone else, in the form of a band where you sat amongst thousands of people to look up at them... I don't know, it seemed a little off-kilter to me.
To this day though, I love the "Help/Slipknot/Franklin's Tower" thing, except we live in a randomized computer music machine age, so the shit never comes up in order anymore in my life. When I got LOUNGIN' tattooed on my beer belly, the dude that did it was a former Dead road dog type dude whose Ipod was full of nothing but shows, and at that point I had long ass dreads, so he of course showed me pictures of his 4-year-old daughter and some giant weed plants he grew in Colorado, both of which were kept in the same stack of pictures in side his left desk drawer, and as his Ipod played nothing but Dead shows and he butchered me along my ribs but tried to make up for it by putting white highlights on the letters, even though I'm already white so you can't see it at all, I thought it would be quite a thing to just have "Help/Slip/Franklin's Tower" trios as a playlist on your all Grateful Dead show Ipod, and let it play and play and fucking play.
STEAL “Franklin’s Tower”
NEXT UP: A more perfect summer jam than that “Summertime” song by Fresh Prince & Jazzy Jeff!