Mother American Night: My Life in Crazy Times

by John Perry Barlow, Robert Greenfield

Overview

John Perry Barlow’s wild ride with the Grateful Dead was just part of a Zelig-like life that took him from a childhood as ranching royalty in Wyoming to membership in the Internet Hall of Fame as a digital free speech advocate.

Mother American Night is the wild, funny, heartbreaking, and often unbelievable (yet completely true) story of an American icon. Born into a powerful Wyoming political family, John Perry Barlow wrote the lyrics for thirty Grateful Dead songs while also running his family’s cattle ranch. He hung out in Andy Warhol’s Factory, went on a date with the Dalai Lama’s sister, and accidentally shot Bob Weir in the face on the eve of his own wedding. As a favor to Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Barlow mentored a young JFK Jr. and the two then became lifelong friends. Despite being a freely self-confessed acidhead, he served as Dick Cheney’s campaign manager during Cheney’s first run for Congress. And after befriending a legendary early group of computer hackers known as the Legion of Doom, Barlow became a renowned internet guru who then cofounded the groundbreaking Electronic Frontier Foundation.

His résumé only hints of the richness of a life lived on the edge. Blessed with an incredible sense of humor and a unique voice, Barlow was a born storyteller in the tradition of Mark Twain and Will Rogers. Through intimate portraits of friends and acquaintances from Bob Weir and Jerry Garcia to Timothy Leary and Steve Jobs, Mother American Night traces the generational passage by which the counterculture became the culture, and it shows why learning to accept love may be the hardest thing we ever ask of ourselves.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781524760205
Publisher:	Crown Publishing Group
Publication date:	06/05/2018
Sold by:	Random House
Format:	eBook
Pages:	288
File size:	11 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

John Perry Barlow was a cattle rancher, a former lyricist for the Grateful Dead, and cofounder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. He was a regular contributor to Wired magazine for many years and one of the founding directors of the Freedom of the Press Foundation.

Robert Greenfield is the award-winning author of biographies of Jerry Garcia, Timothy Leary, and Augustus Owsley Stanley III.

Read an Excerpt

***This excerpt is from an advance uncorrected copy proof***

I am determined to learn how to accept love, which I think may be the secret of life. If you can accept love, you can do damn near everything else. Giving love is easy and so most people go about thinking that they’re fully capable in the love department because they can give it. But as I have learned, that is not the case, and how could it be? If you don’t accept it, where are you going to get love to give?

My mentor in this regard is the only person I’ve ever met in my life who can seamlessly accept love: Gilberto Gil, the great musician and former minister of culture in Brazil. For him, it appears to be effortless. Since I would say that he is the most beloved person in the most loving country on the planet, it’s very lucky for him and them that he can accept it so easily.

On April 16, 2015, Gil was performing at Davies Symphony Hall in San Francisco. On my way back from Huntsville, Texas where I had been lured to give a speech, I spent hours tramping around the Atlanta airport in a brand new pair of cowboy boots while waiting for a flight that would get me back home in time for Gil’s show.

For years, I had been getting my boots from the Olathe boot company in Kansas. They were made of Norwegian elk leather, which is especially pliant and so could accommodate a bunion I have on my left foot that somebody once said should be in the Boone and Crockett big game trophy book of bunions if there had been one.

I already had about ten pairs of these boots that had been kept in walking condition by a wizard in San Francisco who said he could re- store any cowboy boot that had ever been made and by golly, he could. But I had not been to see him for a while and in an act of desperation, I bought a pair of Norwegian elk boots from another company. Although they were not pliant, I said to myself, “How bad could they be during a short trip?”

Although I arrived in San Francisco too late to see him perform, Gil and I did then go back to the Mark Hopkins hotel where the two of us sat up all night long talking in the lobby by ourselves. It was a rich moment, and an ironic one as well, because at the time, I had no idea whatsoever that I was about to embark on the greatest experience I could ever imagine in terms of teaching me how to accept love.

Having worn a gigantic hole in the index toe of my left foot by walking for hours through the Atlanta airport in those brand new boots, I woke up the next morning, which also happened to be the twenty-first anniversary of the worst day of my life, with a raging staph infection in my bloodstream. One thing led to another and I then contracted a second bacterial infection that set up camp in some hardware in my back. Suddenly, I couldn’t walk. I was also not producing any red blood cells, and so they transferred me up to UCSF in San Francisco, where they stabilized my bone marrow.

While I was at UCSF, the doctor who had installed that hardware cleaned out the bacteria that had attacked it. I had no way of conveying to him that I was on an heroic amount of blood thinners to prevent a pulmonary embolism, and in the process, he created a hematoma that put a large blood clot about the size and shape of two golf balls between my spinal cord and the epidural sheath. They had to open me right back up at four o’clock in the morning to get it out of there. I had gone under the knife with him several times before, so I just had to be positive and trust him.

Before he did this, he said, “John Perry, I gotta tell you. I don’t know what I’m going to find when I get in there, but I think unfortunately that there is a pretty good chance that I’m not going to be able to save any of your functions below T11.” In other words, I would be paralyzed from my belly button down. I said, “You mean I’ll never dance again?” And he said, “I’m not sure, but I think if you had one working eyelid, you’d still dance.” Which remains one of the best compliments I’ve ever received.

So I went in there knowing there was a good chance that I was going to come out unable to walk again. When I woke up in the recovery room, my doctor was standing at the end of my bed and he said, “John Perry, move your toes.” I did. And he started to cry. Because he had no idea if I was going to be able to do that and there was the only way to find out.

I was recovering from that when they decided they needed to be on the outlook for pulmonary embolisms, so they installed a filter in my vena cava to remove all the phlebitis-style clots from my blood- stream. In what I later learned was yet another iatrogenic failure, they displaced something that lodged itself in what had previously been my main coronary artery.

Later that evening, I was in the middle of an extremely stressful phone conversation with my business partner, who had been instrumental in getting us the money for our pure water project, when I started feeling pain in my chest. I didn’t know what to do about it at first and finally said, “I believe I’ve got to get off this call, I may be having a heart attack.”

And in fact, the lower two ventricles of my heart had just stopped dead in their tracks and I had no heartbeat. So they hauled me off from the company of my daughter Leah and several other folks who had a pretty hard time taking in this spectacle. They took me to a side room and hit me with the paddles. Just like on TV. Nothing. They hit me again with the paddles with twice as much voltage. Nothing. Then they hit me the third time with so much energy that they burned my chest. But it still didn’t start my heart.

Then an amazing thing happened. A young resident grabbed my arm, yanked me off the gurney, flung me to the floor, and jumped on my sternum with both of his knees. And my heart kind of went, “Well, if you’re going to be like that about it, I guess I’ll start beating again.” It was like the cowboy heart reaction. “You hit me, you son of a bitch!” If people code out for eight minutes like I did and then come back, they usually do so as a different person than the one who left. But I guess my brain doesn’t use all that much oxygen because I appeared to be the same guy, at least from the inside. For eight minutes, however, I had not just been gratefully dead, I had been plain, flat out, ordinary dead. It was then I decided the time had finally come for me to begin working on my book. Looking for a ghost writer was not really the issue. At the time, my main concern was to not be a ghost before the book itself was done.

What amazed me most about this entire incident was that after so many years of thinking I really understood what happened when you died, I had not seen a goddamn thing. No upwardly sweeping rivers of light, no angels, no cherubim, no seraphim, no celestial beings. It all just went black. I’d gone down the tunnel of eternity and it had turned out to be nothing more than a cheap carnival ride to nowhere.

When I told my old friend and songwriting partner Bob Weir about this, he looked at me and said, “Well, it could be that you just weren’t dead enough.”

Table of Contents

Prologue Not Dead Enough 1

1 The Little Red Bull 7

2 Norman and Mini 13

3 Home on the Ranch 17

4 Fountain Valley 23

5 Getting into College 31

6 Wesleyan 35

7 Good Old Grateful Dead 43

8 Summer of Love 49

9 Harvard Yard 55

10 Fair-Haired Boy 61

11 An Incredible Week 65

12 The Journey East 69

13 Coming Home 75

14 New York, New York 81

15 Mexicali Blues 89

16 Sugar Magnolia 93

17 Looks Like Rain 101

18 Cassidy 105

19 John F. Kennedy, Jr. 109

20 Heaven Help the Fool 115

21 Adult Behavior 123

22 Eminence Grise 127

23 Global Sociopath 131

24 Feel Like a Stranger 137

25 Word Processing 141

26 Welcome to Apple 145

27 A Little Light 153

28 The Ivory Gavel 157

29 A Call from the White House 159

30 Phiber Optik and Acid Phreak 163

31 A Visit from the FBI 173

32 EFF 179

33 Timothy Leary Redux 185

34 Who's NeXT 191

35 Meeting Cynthia 197

36 Living with Her 203

37 Losing Her 207

38 Rehab 215

39 A Gold Rush of the Heart 217

40 He's Gone 219

41 Timothy Leary's Dead 225

42 Kennedy-Nixon 231

43 Two Funerals 237

44 Brazil 243

45 The Pure Water Project 247

46 The Freedom of the Press Foundation 253

47 Hell in a Bucket 259

Epilogue Love Forgives Everything 265

Acknowledgments 269

Editorial Reviews

★ 05/15/2018
Barlow, who died in February 2018 after lengthy battles with various health problems, was a modern-day Renaissance man: Grateful Dead lyricist, cattle rancher, political campaign manager, digital rights pioneer, and much more. It also turns out that he's a great storyteller, with a tendency toward "stretchers" (Mark Twain's shorthand for stretching the truth). Though this reviewer came to this debut memoir knowing the author primarily as one of the Grateful Dead's lyricists, the most fascinating parts turn out to be Barlow's chronicle of his association with early hacker culture and cofounding of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a sort of ACLU for the Internet. Stories about the Dead do appear throughout; however, Barlow's musings on love frame his narrative and it becomes clear that for him, love means accepting what the world has to offer, not simply passion and romance and loving others. VERDICT Though the style is breezy and doesn't go too deep emotionally, Barlow's memoir tells such riveting stories on a variety of topics that it's hard to resist. Essential for Deadheads, fans of Wired, and Internet technology mavens.—Derek Sanderson, Mount Saint Mary Coll. Lib., Newburgh, NY

Library Journal

06/04/2018
In his entertainingly unruly memoir, the late Barlow (1947–2018) takes stock of his maverick life as a cattle rancher, counterculture spokesman, and songwriter for the Grateful Dead. Scion of a prominent Wyoming ranching family, Barlow had an independent streak that served him well in the tumult of the 1960s counterculture. Encounters with Timothy Leary and psychedelics diverted him to India, the Summer of Love in San Francisco, and a musical partnership with fellow prep school misfit Bob Weir. In 1978, he got involved in local politics after moving back to the family ranch, and eventually became the campaign coordinator for Dick Cheney’s successful 1978 run for Congress. Self-aware and self-aggrandizing, dynamic and indolent, Barlow embodies the triumphs and failures of his baby boomer cohort. Shrewd insights into Leary and Jerry Garcia (whom he almost persuaded to do a photo shoot with President George H.W. Bush) mingle indiscriminately with observations of JFK Jr., Daryl Hannah, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, and other celebrities. Barlow, however, barely touches on his family life: his wife and three daughters rate no more ink than his insistence that the administration and the radicals at Wesleyan thought he was cool. Barlow’s blend of charisma, ability, and dissipation makes for a great narrative from a complex public figure. (May)

Publishers Weekly

"In Mother American Night: My Life in Crazy Times, a tender, scattershot memoir co-written with Robert Greenfield, the fact that Barlow, who died in February at 70, 'nearly became America’s first suicide bomber' is presented as a (thankful) near miss in a remarkably 'Zelig-like life.' It is probably time to retire that shopworn conceit, which invariably nudges biography toward name-dropping. Besides, the original Zelig’s curse was that he helplessly assumed the characteristics of whomever he was with. Barlow was always Barlow, whether he was out on the road with the Dead, teaching JFK Jr. to fly, silk-screening at Warhol’s Factory, helping manage Dick Cheney’s first congressional campaign, dating the Dalai Lama’s sister, or inventing the ways we think about the digital frontier that he christened 'cyberspace.'"
—WALL STREET JOURNAL

"Breezy, connected by ceaselessly mind-blowing anecdotes, and bubbling over with psychedelic wisdom, Mother American Night will become the crucial document for understanding the life and work of the internet pioneer and Dead collaborator. The fun is infectious... Where Mother American Night excels is channeling Barlow's restless, celebratory spirit, pulsing with a sense of constant movement. Any visions of, say, feeding this book and Barlow's many megabytes of text, abandoned manuscripts, and unmade screenplays into a neural net and generating a Barlow AI to reoccupy @jpbarlow are dashed by stories like these. John Perry Barlow was—and is—too real and too unpredictable to be reanimated by algorithm, a spirit in the system too lifelike to be a ghost in the machine."
—WIRED

"The first thing I noticed in reading Mother American Night was Barlow's voice... his incredible gift of language, combined with his habit of manicuring his anecdotes to carefully calculated rough-hewn perfection, shining through with unmistakable glory. Barlow is one of the world's greatest storytellers... This is an essential, beautifully written book that is full of humor and tragedy and revelation."
—CORY DOCTOROW, Boing Boing

“Barlow, a man of many identities (the single most famous of which is probably songwriter for the Grateful Dead), has lived the kind of life it would normally take a handful of people to live, and this autobiography… contains one fascinating story after another, a glorious exploration of America’s counterculture, its political underpinnings, its spirit of adventure. Barlow takes us behind the scenes of the Grateful Dead at the height of their popularity, Dick Cheney’s first gubernatorial campaign, the childhood of John F. Kennedy, Jr., and Andy Warhol’s famous Factory (among other things); his stories are full of laughter and bittersweet memories and—occasionally—some dark moments. Readers will be swept up in this man’s amazing life.”
—BOOKLIST (starred)

“[Barlow] was a modern-day Renaissance man: Grateful Dead lyricist, cattle rancher, political campaign manager, digital rights pioneer, and much more. It also turns out that he’s a great storyteller… The most fascinating parts [of Mother American Night] turn out to be Barlow’s chronicle of his association with early hacker culture and co-founding of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a sort of ACLU for the Internet… Barlow’s memoir tells such riveting stories on a variety of topics that it’s hard to resist. Essential for Deadheads, fans of Wired, and Internet technology mavens.”
—LIBRARY JOURNAL (starred)

"Wondrous tales of the hippie highway by Grateful Dead lyricist and internet pioneer Barlow. The author died recently after a long series of illnesses that form a moody counterpoint to the general anarchist fun of his memoir. That may be a good thing considering that the statute of limitations may not yet have run out for various of the hijinks he recounts here... [Barlow] writes with rough grace and considerable poetic power... [Mother American Night] is a yarn to read, with pleasure, alongside Ringolevio and The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test."
—KIRKUS REVIEWS

“One of [Barlow’s] X-Men superpowers seems to have been to unerringly locate centers of the American zeitgeist and discover some pivotal role he could play in them… With the publication of Mother American Night (co-authored with Robert Greenfield, a veteran journalist and biographer), we now have [the narrative of Barlow’s life.] If it sometimes seemed to those of us who knew Barlow that he had a tendency to exaggerate, this book pulls together all the threads of his life in a way that suggests, maybe, he’d been understanding things.”
—REASON
 
“John Perry Barlow was the dawn of digital rights for so many—including me. Mother American Night leaves no doubt why he is remembered as the first ‘Poet Laureate of Cyberspace.' Optimistic, beautiful, and often hilarious, this memoir not only recounts some of the most important battles in the first two decades of the internet, but also Barlow’s indelible footprint on American art, politics, and culture over the last fifty years."
—EDWARD SNOWDEN
 
“It is a privilege to read the story of John Perry Barlow’s life in his own words. The topology of his tropology was utterly unique; the man was part Socrates, part John Wayne, part Loki, part Lord Byron, part Tesla, part Kennedy, part Reagan, part Internet Guru and bonafide Acidhead. That his diminutive frame managed to contain the vast infinity of his being is its own kind of miracle.”
—SEAN ONO LENNON

“Mother American Night is one of those books where you sit down to read the opening chapter, but then can’t put it down until you finished it cover-to-cover. The colorful and (almost) unbelievable stories that John Perry tells, weaved together with his trademark prose, make you feel like you were there with him at the center of so many cultural touchstones since the 1960s. However, it’s his tales of fighting against injustice and fighting for free speech and privacy that I cherished the most. Reading Mother American Night reminds me of everything that made him such an American Original in the first place.”
–DANIEL ELLSBERG
 
“Imagine you are hitchhiking and an ancient Mustang pulls up and the most interesting guy in the world beckons you to hop in. He's driving 100 miles per hour all night long and for the next three days he’s telling you tales, each one bigger and badder and more profound than the one before it. This is a hilarious, rhetorical, and soul-prodding book. I never feel so alive as when Barlow is telling me a story, and here are a life’s worth.”
—KEVIN KELLY

“John Perry Barlow unmoored us from the clay of Earth and delivered us into a place of digital freedom. He leaves us with this kaleidoscopic necklace of colorful vignettes painted in his unique and poignant way.”
—VINT CERF, Internet Pioneer
 
“Reading John Perry Barlow’s book is like a spirited visit with him. He was a Rebel, having almost mystical and cosmic gifts of communication, wisdom and awareness. Mankind was his cause. His book confirms the solace he found when he learned to love and be loved.” 
—ALAN K. SIMPSON, United States Senator, Wyoming, retired
 
"I loved this book. I am a slow reader but I read it twice in three and a half days. I have since gone back and begun reading chapters in no particular order which seems fine to me as well. I first met John about forty years ago and we have been fast friends ever since."
—RAMBLIN’ JACK ELLIOT

From the Publisher

2018-04-03
Wondrous tales of the hippie highway by Grateful Dead lyricist and internet pioneer Barlow.The author died recently after a long series of illnesses that form a moody counterpart to the general anarchist fun of his memoir. That may be a good thing considering that the statute of limitations may not yet have run out for various of the hijinks he recounts here. The son of a prominent Wyoming rancher, Barlow was packed off to a Colorado prep school, where he met a classmate named Bob Weir, later to become renowned as a Dead's guitarist and singer. Later, at Wesleyan, Barlow came into the orbit of Timothy Leary, who inducted him into the mysteries of LSD. These and many other confluences make for the narrative bones of a story that the author tells with zest and no small amount of self-congratulation—in part for having survived where so many others fell, such as pal Neal Cassady, who died of exposure in Mexico. "Exposure seemed right to me," writes Barlow. "He had lived an exposed life. By then, it was beginning to feel like we all had." A lysergic pioneer, Barlow initiated young John F. Kennedy Jr. into the cult; had the young man not died in a plane crash, as Barlow warned him it was all too easy to do, he might have changed the shape of American politics. The author was steeped in politics, renegade though he might have been; he was a friend of Sen. Alan Simpson, a sometime associate of Dick Cheney, and a confidant of Jackie Kennedy. The storyline is a bit of a mess, but so was Barlow's life, the latter part of which was devoted to internet-related concerns. But he writes with rough grace and considerable poetic power, as when he describes a 1993 Prince concert: "the place was full of all these bridge and tunnel people who were swaying in their seats like kelp in a mild swell."A yarn to read, with pleasure, alongside Ringolevio and The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.

Kirkus Reviews