Tuesday, September 1, 2015

40 Year Itch : Roll Away the Dew

Deadheads in 1975

Grateful Dead : Franklin's Tower


   This Summer in Chicago the Trey Anastasio-enhanced Grateful Dead surprised fans by playing nearly the entire Blues for Allah album. That probably delighted old school Deadheads who, according to a survey released by DeadBase, have ranked the album released on September 1, 1975 as the third most popular Grateful Dead album of all time ( behind American Beauty and Workingman's Dead).


   Blues for Allah marked the return of Mickey Hart on drums and percussion, who hadn't played on a studio album since American Beauty. Even better news, after taking more than a year of from touring, the band appeared to be waking up from an "artistic coma", as Rolling Stone put it, and was promising to go back on the road in 1976.
   

  To promote the album, the Dead played a nearly secret show at San Francisco's Great American Music Hall on August 13 before 450 radio station reps, Dead family and friends and a handful of press. Some members of the band reportedly took to the stage wearing Henry Kissinger masks.

    The single was "Franklin's Tower" which dispensed classic Robert Hunter wisdom like "When you plant ice, you're going to harvest wind". Sounds like a line straight out of Game of Thrones.

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