Mother American Night

by John Perry Barlow

  In the beginning, there had been basically two steps on the ladder at Apple. You had Steve Jobs and then everybody else, which was why it always took so goddamn long for things to happen there, like them sending me my computer. In any case, they finally said, “Your computer is in the mail, really. And we’ve been getting such a kick out of your letters that we want to know if you would consider coming out here and writing a people’s history of Apple.”

  It took me a while but I eventually wound up getting a contract to write the book from Viking Press. To initiate the project, I moved to Silicon Valley and spent the summer there with my family with the understanding that Elaine and my daughters would go back to Pinedale in the fall so the girls could go to school.

  Within about a month and half of cruising around the valley, I realized I didn’t really want to write a book about Apple, because if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything. And it was definitely not nice in there. Although John Sculley was running the show at Apple, the melody of the culture that Steve had created still lingered on in so many ways.

  At one point, Steve had made everybody at Apple go to est, which stands for Erhard Seminars Training, and take these soul-destroying courses that had been created by Werner Erhard to transform the way in which people interacted with one another. The stated aim of the program was to teach people how to express themselves naturally rather than follow rules, but a lot of those people just became even bigger assholes than they had been before. Can you imagine an entire company that had been turned into est-holes? It was not pretty. I mean, I’ve dealt with East German border guards who were a lot friendlier than most of the building attendants at Apple.

  Something else that made me realize I did not want to write a book about Apple was what they had done to Elmer Baum, the first guy who ever made a loan to Apple. Elmer was a sweet, marvelous guy. His son Allen had been one of Steve Wozniak’s high school buddies, and Elmer had provided the initial startup capital to Apple by taking out a $5,000 loan using Steve Jobs’s VW microbus as collateral.

  Elmer then decided to go to work at Apple, where he became employee number thirty-four. By the time Elmer decided to retire, he was by far the oldest employee there. But Apple had not yet even considered creating a retirement plan, and so instead of taking care of him, they just fired his ass.

  I had been given a wonderful house in San Jose, but that was pretty much contingent on my writing a somewhat fulsome book of praise about Apple and not about est and what they had done to Elmer Baum. By then, I had already gotten totally evangelical about the Internet. Having come to the water of Silicon Valley, I was now bathed in the sea of bits.

  I decided that what I really wanted to do was write about how I thought the information companies were going to be fundamentally different from industrial companies. And so I transformed the book into an account of this great changing paradigm that I was going to call Everything We Know Is Wrong.

  * * *

  —

  At some point during the period after Weir and I had gone to talk at Apple, I participated in an intervention for Bobby, and we sent him off to a place called Crutcher’s Serenity House in St. Helena. By then, just about everybody in the Dead was struggling with drug issues, and Bobby was no exception.

  I was family to him, so to speak, so I went up there to spend family week with him. It was quite an interesting place, supported by the longshoremen’s union. That was appealing to Bobby because he was always saying, “I’m anything but anonymous and so I can’t go to one of those AA places.” But he was putting up with this place, and so I decided to go up there myself. It actually got to me because it was full of people who were really looking at themselves for the first time, and this was when I said to myself, “Yeah, he’s an alcoholic, but what about you?”

  I came to understand that something about my relationship with Elaine had played a big part in my own alcoholism. For the first time, I also began to understand what her role as a codependent had been in my life. This wasn’t all that surprising, because I was then at the peak of my “needs a little work” phase in terms of alcohol use. I could have turned a fire plug into a codependent, and somehow, I had just adapted to her emotional expectations.

  I called Elaine from Crutcher’s and said, “There’s a chance that you and I might have to get more distance from each other so I can get more distance from alcohol.” She was totally suspicious of this, but I started going to AA meetings anyway. I quit drinking and didn’t really take any drugs, with the occasional exception of psychedelics, for about two years.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  A LITTLE LIGHT

  In 1989, the Dead released Built to Last. Although no one knew this at the time, it would be their last studio album. I wrote the lyrics for five songs on the album, four of them with Brent Mydland and just one, “Picasso Moon,” with Weir.

  Although Bobby and I had not exactly split as songwriters, he had gone off and written a song in March 1988 with the actor Gerrit Graham. I couldn’t figure out why Weir had done this, but mostly I thought that it was his form of retribution for my having been unfaithful to him by writing songs with Brent. Bobby knew that I didn’t like Gerrit.

  The two of them wrote “Victim or the Crime,” which is still arguably the worst Grateful Dead song ever. My real problem with it, shared by other members of the band, was that the first line contained the word “junkie.” For the life of me, I could not see Bobby singing that while standing onstage next to Jerry. As it turned out, Jerry didn’t seem to mind at all, but that was just how he could be.

  Did I actually go on the radio to urge Deadheads to write Weir with their objections to this song? I may have done that. I don’t really remember, but I think Weir reacted to what I had said by putting his fist through a wall.

  Jerry Garcia wasn’t the only one who thought it was what he called “an idiot song.” During a show one night while the band was doing “Victim or the Crime,” their longtime roadie Steve Parish came up to me and said, “How does it feel to be the guy who wrote the worst Grateful Dead song ever?” And I said, “I didn’t write this song, Parish. Gerrit Graham did. Talk to him about it.” Without saying another word, he just turned around and slunk off.

  * * *

  —

  Over the course of the 1980s, Brent Mydland had become something like the invisible spine of the Dead. I realized this for the first time when I was given the opportunity to experience the onstage mix, and the only person that everyone listened to was Brent. He was a genius piano player who had the best voice in the band. He could sing his ass off and transpose and improvise like a motherfucker, but they were all still treating him like the new guy in the band. They treated him like shit, and it made him feel like shit.

  I knew Brent was shooting heroin, and I knew that it was going to take him out just like it eventually would do to Garcia as well. I saw that Brent was going to die unless I could get the Deadheads to really dig him. I thought that would save him. So I decided to get together with Brent full-time and begin writing more songs with him, which turned out to be unbelievably easy and amazingly different from working with Weir.

  Brent and I had afternoons where we wrote four or five songs together in his house in Martinez in the East Bay. It absolutely helped that he was a piano player, but I also had complete faith in his ability to take my lyrics and sing them in the melody that I had in mind.

  That was what happened on “Just a Little Light,” which is about the gloom that seemed to be gathering around Brent and Jerry and everything that was then going on backstage at Dead shows. I wanted people to notice that there was also still a light left in the world. I was writing about what happens to everyone after a while. Like Hunter’s line in “Scarlet Begonias,” “Once in a while, you get shown the light / In the strangest of places if you look at it right.” Although I wasn’t consciously quoting that, it is one of my favorite Hunter lines
.

  The song I wrote with Brent that I like best is the lullaby “I Will Take You Home.” I wrote the whole thing—melody, words, the works—as I was going up the driveway of his house. Then I sat next to him at the piano as he played it for the first time. It was about his daughters and mine and a promise I needed to make for both of us. That whatever happened, we would be there to take them home. Only Brent didn’t live to do that.

  Writing songs with Brent was the most intimate thing I have ever done with a man. He would go off to do heroin in the bathroom and then come back and sit down on the piano bench. But when he looked at me, his pupils would be wide open. Totally dilated. Usually when someone is smacked out of his head like that, his eyes become pinwheels. But Brent’s would be huge because it was such an emotional experience for him. Brent had a vocabulary of about three hundred words, but when he was connecting with the emotions of a song, he was right on top of it. He was incredible.

  I was doing an interview with John Markoff of the New York Times for an article about the Internet on July 26, 1990, when he told me that Brent had died. I was in my office in Pinedale and I started to cry. And even though I had anticipated it, I couldn’t stop crying for days. I went to the funeral and fully expected to give the eulogy, but Weir insisted on doing it himself. It was okay with me, but it wasn’t okay.

  The pallbearers consisted of the remaining members of the Grateful Dead and me, and while we were waiting in the pallbearer room, they acted like a basketball team that was doing just great at the half. They were being assholes together. I was not crying because you don’t cry around the Grateful Dead. That just ain’t done. By then, we had all adopted a level of emotional availability that ran the full gamut between spite and irony. I have subsequently learned not to gainsay anybody’s way of dealing with grief. But they definitely had a weird coping mechanism.

  Then I got into the limo with Jerry and his girlfriend to go to the cemetery. Talk about a strange ride. I said, “You know I’m probably the only person who’s really able to be a Deadhead and be onstage as well. As such, I think I’m going to go out front for a while because it seems safer there.”

  Garcia looked at me with an expression of colossal melancholy. “I’d do that if I were you,” he said. “Don’t you think that’s exactly what I would do if I could? But that’s the last thing I can do.” Around the Grateful Dead by then, it had gotten just that dark.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  THE IVORY GAVEL

  In 1989, I was transitioning out of the ranch and evolving into my next incarnation, and I decided to run for state senate from Sublette County. Part of the reason I did that was because I had this absolutely exquisite ivory gavel that had two gold butts and a gold band around the middle. After my grandfather had created the county, he immediately ran for its senate seat. They gave him the gavel when he became president of the Wyoming senate. When my father became president of the senate, he had the gold band put in the middle of the gavel and had his name and dates inscribed there, leaving the other butt of the gavel blank. It led me to think that I had some kind of destiny to fulfill by getting my own name on there.

  It was not a race in the usual sense of the term. President George H. W. Bush had appointed my close friend and political buddy John Turner, who had been the senator from Sublette and Teton counties, as the new director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. His senate seat was now vacant, and there was to be a caucus of all the precinct captains of Sublette County to appoint his successor.

  There were a number of candidates, and I decided I would be one of them. If a freely confessed acidhead was ever going to get elected to the senate in the most conservative place in the non-Islamic world, I knew it would require an awful lot of glad-handing on the part of somebody who was also not afraid to take a drink. Because in Wyoming, that was really de rigueur.

  One of the precinct captains at the caucus was a close friend of mine, a marine who had also been a SEAL and had been in combat ops in both Korea and Vietnam. We had spent a lot of time together, and it seemed to me that healing over what had happened in Vietnam had taken place in us. I really thought that we respected each other a lot.

  In the middle of the proceeding, though, this little voice inside my head alerted me to the fact that something weird was about to happen. The guy I thought was my friend stood up rapier straight and denounced me as though he was Cicero and I was Catiline. Because of my anti-war position on Vietnam, he said, I was a traitor. People like me had lost that war for America. People like me had turned their backs on people like him.

  There were at least fifty people there, and even though he had just given this incredibly denunciatory speech, I still lost by only one vote. I knew the guy they wound up choosing instead of me very well and the last I heard, he was still in the Wyoming senate leading a life little better than incarceration in a maximum security prison. But he was the kind of guy who liked that sort of thing.

  When I found out what the results were, I was out in front of the courthouse with my old friend Alan Simpson. Alan looked at me and said, “One vote. That’s gotta mean something. That’s no accident.”

  In fact, it was providential as shit. If I had received that vote, so many things that are the great milestones in my life, both good and bad, would never have happened. There would have been no Electronic Frontier Foundation. And I would still be married, I suspect.

  TWENTY-NINE

  A CALL FROM THE WHITE HOUSE

  Harper’s Magazine periodically created forums in which they asked a number of wise people to sort out the issues of the day. In what strikes me even now as something close to magic, a pair of Harper’s staffers named Jack Hitt and Paul Tough had the prescience of mind to convene a forum on freedom of expression and forbidden information on the Internet.

  Almost randomly, they asked a number of prolific WELL beings to discuss where we should draw the line in what can be known, and who should draw that line and how. At one point, with my usual idiotic flair, I had said that I could imagine a future in which it would not only be all right but in fact a moral obligation to hack into the White House computer system. Harper’s printed this quote with my name attached to it on the flyleaf of their December 1989 issue.

  Shortly after that, I picked up my phone in Pinedale one day and someone said, “Hello, this is the White House.” And I said, “Oh God, I’ve been waiting for this call.” And the guy said, “Why do you say that?” And I said, “Because of that forum that was in Harper’s.” And he said, “It’s kind of about that.” And I said, “How could it be kind of about that?”

  He said, “That was how we found out that there was somebody who was basically a member of the Grateful Dead and also a recently retired Republican county chairman. We wouldn’t have thought that was possible. So we hoped you might be the person to arrange something we want to have happen.”

  By this time, I was looking at the phone like it was an object I’d never seen before. It was one of the moments in my life when reality had looped back up on me. I said, “What would you like me to help engineer?” And he said, “We’ve been trying to figure out how to address global warming, and we think one way to do so would be to get people to plant a lot of trees. We also think that if the president,” who was then George H. W. Bush, “and Jerry Garcia could be seen planting a tree together, a lot of people would plant trees.”

  I said, “I don’t know. But I could certainly run it by him.”

  So I called up Jerry and after I had told him about this, he said, “You mean the president of the United States?” And then he did the Garcia cackle. Ha-ha-ha. Jerry thought it was really funny, but he didn’t exactly say no. Instead, he said, “Let me think about it for a couple of hours.”

  So he did and when he got back to me, he said, “I’ve been thinking about that picture of Sammy Davis, Jr., hugging Nixon onstage during the 1972 Republican Convention. And how it didn’t do e
ither one of them any good.”

  Jerry was definitely right about that, but I said, “Wait. This could be an opportunity. Because this guy seems willing to do any goddamn thing for us. He could also bring a whole bunch of people to the table that we don’t usually get a shot at that I would really like to take a shot at.” Jerry said, “But we don’t know anything about this.” I said, “I kind of do.” And then he said, “Then we better have a meeting with them.”

  The Dead were going to do a gig at RFK Stadium in Washington, D.C., on July 12, 1990, and so I helped arrange a big powwow in the Georgetown Four Seasons Hotel. As it turned out, we got everybody we wanted to be there: the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, the assistant secretary of agriculture, and the guy in charge of the U.S. Forest Service. I saw this as an opportunity to get whatever we could from them. I didn’t have any specific goals in my mind, but I figured we could all put our heads together and come up with something positive.

  And then Garcia came in there looking like God with a hangover. He was using at that point, and all of his hair was flung to one side of his head. He was also in an ugly mood and not about to plant a tree with anybody. All these heavy guys in suits took their fair share of abuse from him. He said, “We know how much you know about what we do, but we can’t imagine we all know enough about one another for us to do much good together.”

  So the photo op with Garcia and President Bush never happened. But I had a few other things I thought I would ask for during the meeting. One that stuck was that prior to this point in time, there had been no market for recycled paper. Everybody was throwing tons of paper into recycling bins, but it wasn’t actually getting recycled because there wasn’t a big enough demand for it to make building a recycling infrastructure worth the trouble.