Mother American Night

by John Perry Barlow

TWENTY-FIVE

  WORD PROCESSING

  I knew nothing at all about computers until I bought a word processor in 1985. I had started writing screenplays so I could keep the ranch afloat, though I never had any intention of getting any of them made. In those days, the Hollywood studios were paying good money to have screenplays written so they could then retire the intellectual property. So I ended up writing four or five, and I was able to sell them for twenty or thirty thousand dollars each. This is rather ironic considering my subsequent feelings with regard to copyright.

  Even though I saw screenplays as something easy I could do for cash, I was dedicated enough to quality that if I felt like I really had to make a change in a script, I would do it. This was no easy process. I was working on a typewriter, and making a change somewhere in the middle of a screenplay meant having to retype about forty pages of the goddamn thing, which made me feel completely and tragically overwhelmed.

  I kept thinking, Screenwriters have been doing it like this all along? How did they not all blow their brains out? Then I ran across somebody who said, “We now have this thing called a word processor that will allow you to make corrections as you go.” And I said, “I will now have this thing as well.” I think the first one I ever bought was a Compaq luggable that weighed about thirty pounds.

  Around that time I was approached by a crazy, powerful, and mean movie producer named Ray Stark, who had produced Funny Girl, The Way We Were, The Sunshine Boys, and The Electric Horseman. He was quite the old monster from way back in Hollywood, the kind of dragon who comes out from underneath the hill every hundred years and is not pleased by how things are going.

  Ray offered me and a big-time Hollywood television producer named Philip DeGuere the gig of writing a magical realistic musical about Neal Cassady on the road in America. Phil was a serious Deadhead who had helped film the 1972 show that was eventually released as Sunshine Daydream. A lot of the time, I didn’t like him all that much. He often manifested aspects of human nature that set off my squeamishness, and even worse, behaviors that I was only too susceptible to myself.

  But the Dead said they really wanted this movie to happen and were going to give us their music to use in it. So Phil and I started working on this screenplay together and actually had a good time doing it. He would write a scene and I would write either the scene before or after it and then we’d see whether they fit together at all. The working title was “Asking What for Across the Morning Sky.”

  When we finished the script, the Dead decided that they didn’t want to have any of their songs in it after all. Or, as Jerry Garcia said to me at the time, “This is why we call the Grateful Dead the storehouse of broken dreams.”

  My career as a screenwriter went on for some months after that, but it was a really hard time in the cattle business, and the ranch was in absolutely hemorrhagic financial morbidity. I had never thought I could keep it going forever and didn’t want to be forced to sell it on the courthouse steps. So even though I had been offered a lot more for it in the past, I wound up selling the ranch in 1987 for $1.5 million.

  The two guys who bought it were Alejandro Orfila, the former head of the Organization of American States and someone entirely comfortable with the ruling junta in Argentina, and Marshall Coyne, who owned the Madison Hotel in Washington, D.C. I told them both that they couldn’t ranch the Bar Cross as sort of a plaything. It would be like buying a real spirited stud horse and expecting to ride him three times a year and not have him act like a bronco when you did.

  No one could manage a ranch like that from a distance, because it was a very hands-on proposition. So I agreed to run it for them for another year, and that was when I finally got to fix up everything that needed to be repaired. It was kind of a wonderful gig because I had spent so many years thinking about doing just that without having ever been able to afford it.

  As a functioning business, the Bar Cross was entirely valueless and so I thought these guys were going to take a bath on the deal. Between the interest payments and all the improvements, they put a hell of a lot of money into the ranch. I never thought they would get it back. Then, in 2012, the Bar Cross was offered for sale for about $22 million. Just recently, it went back on the block for $38 million and someone snapped it up.

  In 1988, Elaine and the girls and I moved off the ranch into a house in Pinedale. Once we did, I suddenly realized that most of the people now living in the valley were worth huge amounts of money. A whole new class of people had made a lifestyle choice and were coming into Sublette County in business jets. They didn’t give a shit how much money they made from their ranches because they saw them as fishing holes where they could build a $10 million house and have all their fancy friends out in the summer.

  At the time, I had no idea what I was going to do to earn a living. Fortunately, the Grateful Dead finally produced a studio album, In the Dark, for which they actually knew the songs. Previously, Grateful Dead songs had been like infant marsupials that had to be protected in the pouch that formed between the band and the Deadheads during the three or four years it took for them to become real songs.

  From the time of Go to Heaven the band had been too messed up to get into a studio and record an album. But now, they were suddenly all bright-eyed and in possession of a whole album’s worth of songs that were fully ready for life outside the pouch. I wrote three songs on that album: “Hell in a Bucket,” “Throwing Stones,” and “My Brother Esau.”

  As a consequence of the commercial viability of In the Dark, the Grateful Dead were suddenly being asked to fill fifty-thousand-seat stadiums instead of the five-to-eight-thousand-seat venues they had played before. And it occurred to me that now, seemingly overnight, the band was making money like real rock stars, whereas Robert Hunter and I were still scuttling along the bottom of the royalties stack.

  So we went to the band and said, “You know, it’s a drag for us that what you’re putting out there is water from our wells.” Their response was kind of a forehead slap: “Jeez, yeah, you’re right! We see your point and we’ll start paying you both a songwriting retainer.” They agreed to pay us a regular fee, and I think I began getting six grand a month from them. This allowed me to be completely experimental about what I was going to do next in my life.

  And then, as a result of a commitment Bobby Weir had made for us both that I knew nothing about, I staggered into the computer industry.

  The Little Red Bull himself, president of the Wyoming State Senate, 1927. Wyoming State Historical Society

  The Barlow family Christmas card, circa 1954.

  Me and Charlie, who was named champion Fat Steer at the Sublette County Fair.

  Smoking a joint on the football field at Wesleyan before I deliver a very earnest speech during an anti-war demonstration. The photo then appeared in the Wesleyan Argus but wasn’t news to anyone. Andy Leonard

  Hanging out with the very elegant Jon McIntire at the Hotel Navarro in Manhattan during a Grateful Dead tour. Andy Leonard

  Wearing leather pants in an apartment in New Haven during my days as a drug dealer in New York City. Andy Leonard

  Bobby and I outside his house in Mill Valley. My back is to the camera and I’m holding a Smith and Wesson Model 19. Andy Leonard

  I think this picture really captures me. That hat actually hung on the ceiling of the Cora Store for years before it was moved along with a bunch of others to the Wyoming State Historical Society. Courtesy of Elaine Barlow

  JFK Jr. and yours truly at the Green River Rendezvous celebration in July 1977 while he was working for me on the Bar Cross.

  Elaine and I on our wedding night on top of the hill where we were married on the Bar Cross. John Byrne Cooke

  We were all supposed to come to a New Year’s Eve concert in San Francisco by String Cheese Incident dressed as sup
erheroes. Since he always wins, I couldn’t think of a more effective one than “The Angel of Death.” But he is an amiable sort. C. Taylor Crothers

  Standing at the Finn Place with a 3840 Winchester repeating rifle and a MacIntosh (which was not nearly as powerful). It was twenty degrees below zero, and the photo was taken for a story in the New York Sunday Times Magazine about the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Ted Wood

  Cynthia and I at the Canadian consulate in New York City about two weeks before she died.

  Me and the Barlowettes about one third of the way up Denali, which was as far as we got by helicopter. The pilot took the photo.

  Bobby and I on the radio in Jackson Hole after having done some drinking together. (May I say in parentheses just how much I still love him after all these years.) Jay Blakesberg

  Backstage in Berkeley with my adviser and deep friend Gilberto Gil, who is pretty damned close to being perfect. Katherine Armer

  Super savvy tech investor Esther Dyson and I try to convince Bill Gates that the Internet is actually greater than the sum of Microsoft’s parts. Getty Images

  Me, more or less the way I have looked for a while. Bart Nagel

  TWENTY-SIX

  WELCOME TO APPLE

  In 1987, I was staying with Weir in Mill Valley and writing songs with him when he said, “Oh, by the way, we’re going down to Cupertino tomorrow to give a lecture to the people at Apple about using Macintoshes for songwriting.” Although Steve Jobs was already gone by then, he had given the Dead all these Macintosh computers that Apple thought were being used for songwriting and other creative purposes. The Dead were actually using them semi-creatively—for accounting in the office.

  I said to Bobby, “That’s ludicrous. What are we going to say? We don’t write songs with a Macintosh. The last time I looked, I write songs with a legal pad and you write them with a guitar.” Weir said, “Yeah, but you can bullshit your way through anything and I’ll just follow your lead.” He had a point. And since I had been around people who used Macintoshes, I figured I could talk a pretty good game.

  We drove down the next day, and everybody was sitting in this big auditorium. Once I got up in front of the room, I realized the audience was full of Deadheads. It is bad for your karma to lie to a Deadhead, especially if you are part of their pantheon. They are hapless and completely credulous and will believe anything you tell them. Lying to them about this would have been like drowning puppies.

  So I said, “The truth is that I don’t write songs with a Macintosh. To the extent that I write songs with a computer at all, I write them with a Compaq luggable, and that’s because it seems like a better form of Wite-Out.” They were hissing and booing but it was pretty mild, the same kind of reaction I had seen when Weir would forget an entire stanza of a song onstage.

  Then I said, “I would use a Macintosh but nobody ever told me you had given them to the band.” Typical Grateful Dead efficiency. They had them, but nobody had ever made me aware of this. Furthermore, I wasn’t actually sure I wanted one because they seemed toylike and promiscuous, so overly user-friendly that it was like they were giving you sloppy wet kisses. To me, the Macintosh really felt like a slut. And, that aside, they were also glacially slow in comparison to the Compaq.

  I had the idea that what I wanted at this stage in my career was a device that would put words on paper that looked more or less like what used to come from a Selectric typewriter. As far as I could tell, the best way to do that was by using an IBM. Nonetheless, Bobby and I did the talk, and everyone seemed to like it all right and that was that.

  A couple of weeks down the line, I got a letter from somebody at Apple saying they would be happy to provide me with a Macintosh as well as all the fixings, which in those days weren’t much. I was supposed to use it and tell them what I thought of it. As it turned out, though, Apple did not send me a Macintosh right away. In fact, they took so long to do so that I started sending them letters asking when it was coming.

  Because I knew this big toy was on the way, I started thinking about the Macintosh and obsessing about everybody else’s Macintosh. Every time I got around one, I would be fucking with it and screwing it up and then leaving it in a wreck. It was really fun for me to be able to get into the operating system and fool around with it. It turned out that I was, in fact, a computer nerd.

  * * *

  —

  As I was contemplating the end of my time on the Bar Cross, I began to wonder what was going to happen to the idea of community in the absence of little agricultural towns such as Pinedale, which contained in them a spiritual nutrient that was like the sourdough starter for society. I looked out at television land and the suburbs and I saw little of the sense of shared adversity, willingness to accept differences without suspicion or rancor, or general capacity for samaritanism that had been lovingly commented on by Tocqueville and other early observers of budding American culture.

  It dawned on me that one of the substrates that might become the foundation of a new community was the strange and mysterious culture of the Deadheads. But they didn’t seem to have a central gathering place that was reliable. They also didn’t seem to have the ability to talk casually about community affairs among themselves. And they had no economic focus. At least not until they all became lawyers.

  But I found it difficult to study the Deadheads in person. Whenever I tried do so, I found I was up against the sociological equivalent of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle: As I would go roaming through the parking lot before a show, the Deadheads would eventually figure out who I was and then begin asking me questions, which meant that my ability to observe them objectively was gone because they were now behaving differently in my presence.

  My friend Betsy Cohen, who was then at the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics at Stanford, said, “One way you could study them would be on the Internet.” I said, “What’s the Internet?” She then explained to me what that was, taking a quantity of time and language that embarrasses me to contemplate today.

  At the end of her explanation, I still wasn’t quite sure what it was. But she helped me get a 300 baud modem complete with a rubber suction cup to attach to my phone receiver (for which I would have paid a considerable fine, had it been discovered, because it was an alteration of AT&T equipment). In addition, she got me a Tymnet dial-up number and an Internet address through Stanford. After that, I was on my own.

  It was assumed that people who had modems with rubber suction cups knew all about the AT command set that one needed to operate modems. I had to learn how to do this the hard way because back then nobody else in Sublette County, Wyoming, even had a modem. I would be dialing the Tymnet number and eventually one sacred day, I heard the strange, seductive warble and boop that means you have connected to modems.

  I immediately tried to log in my Stanford address and lo, I was on the Internet. I then followed Betsy’s instructions to get myself to the vast terrain of Grateful Dead–oriented Usenet groups where I could see people at all hours of the day or night rendering judgment about me and my closest friends in a condition that was entirely innocent. But it did suffice to teach me a lot about the culture of the Deadheads.

  What was much more interesting to me was the Internet itself. Immediately, it became clear to me that this was the nervous system of the noosphere—a postulated sphere dominated by consciousness and the mind and interpersonal relationships—that I had been thinking about ever since I first encountered the notion in the works of Father Pierre Teilhard de Chardin while in college.

  Teilhard de Chardin was a Jesuit renaissance man and a world-class paleontologist. He discovered Peking man and wrote a lot about the idea that the evolutionary process had reached a point of self-awareness and was now occupying a new layer of the relational ecology, which was the collective organism of mind.

  I had sp
ent fifteen years riding around the Bar Cross thinking about the noosphere, and suddenly after all that time, I had evidence that this was not just Teilhard’s pipe dream but was in fact real and growing its own nervous system. Indeed, it had been doing so since 1844, when Samuel F. B. Morse had tapped out the first telegraph message—“What hath God wrought?”—in Washington, D.C. Which is earlier than most people think of cyberspace being born. I knew then and there that without any plan or execution, I wanted to be part of making this particular concept happen.

  It was about that time that I discovered the WELL, the Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link, which had been founded in 1985 by Stewart Brand, Larry Brilliant, and Kevin Kelly. Though not connected to the Internet, the WELL was still a fabulous digital salon filled with people who knew about Teilhard de Chardin and who were Deadheads and so open to all forms of wild inquiry. And it was also just about the right size for a small town to be.

  All this gave me the ability to see what other people had not yet seen, which was that there was a space there and a community of people who identified with that space. I didn’t have a name for that space yet, but neither did anybody else. Back then, nobody called it anything. I’m pretty sure I was first person to identify the nature of that community and space and then start trying to write about it in what I suppose you might call a somewhat literate fashion.

  I had also begun thinking about Apple as the new foundational corporate form of gathering. It was going to be horizontal rather than vertical, organic rather than mechanical, and very flat in assembly. As I continued writing letters to Apple asking where my computer was, I began including musings about Apple as a company.