John Perry Barlow
John Perry Barlow (October 3, 1947 – February 7, 2018) was an American poet, essayist, cattle rancher, and cyberlibertarian[1] political activist who had been associated with both the Democratic and Republican parties. He was also a lyricist for the Grateful Dead, a founding member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Freedom of the Press Foundation, and an early fellow at Harvard University's Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society.[2]
John Perry Barlow
October 3, 1947
near Cora, Wyoming, U.S.
February 7, 2018 (aged 70)
San Francisco, California, U.S.
1971–95 (lyrics)
1990–2018 (essays)
Internet (essays)
Early life and education[edit]
Barlow was born in Sublette County, Wyoming near the town of Cora,[3] the only child of Norman Walker Barlow (1905–1972),[4][5] a Republican state legislator, and his wife, Miriam Adeline Barlow (née Jenkins, later Bailey; 1905–1999),[6] who married in 1929.[7]
Barlow's paternal ancestors were Mormon pioneers.[7] He grew up on Bar Cross Ranch in Cora, Wyoming, a 22,000-acre (8,900 ha) property his great-uncle founded in 1907, and attended elementary school in a one-room schoolhouse. Raised as a devout Mormon, he was prohibited from watching television until the sixth grade, when his parents allowed him to "absorb televangelists".[8][9]
Although Barlow's academic record was erratic throughout his secondary education, he "had his pick of top eastern universities... simply because he was from Wyoming, where few applications originated".[10] In 1969, he graduated from Wesleyan University's College of Letters.[11] He claimed to have served as Wesleyan's student body president until the administration "tossed him into a sanitarium" following a drug-induced attempted suicide attack in Boston, Massachusetts.[8][10] After two weeks of rehabilitation, he returned to his studies.[10] In his senior year, he became a part-time resident of New York City's East Village and immersed himself in Andy Warhol's Factory demimonde, cultivating a friendship with Rene Ricard and developing a brief addiction to heroin.[12]
As he neared graduation, Barlow was admitted to Harvard Law School and was contracted to write a novel by Farrar, Straus and Giroux at the behest of his mentor, the autodidactic Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and historian Paul Horgan.[13] Initially supported by a $5,000 or $1,000[13] advance from the publisher,[10] he decided to eschew these options in favor of spending the next two years traveling around the world, including a nine-month sojourn in India, a riotous winter in a summer cottage on Long Island Sound in Connecticut,[13] and a screenwriting foray in Los Angeles. Barlow eventually finished the novel, but it was rejected by several publishers (including Farrar, Straus and Giroux) and remains unpublished.[9][14] During this period, he also "lived beside Needle Park on New York's Upper West Side and dealt cocaine in Spanish Harlem".[10]
Career[edit]
Grateful Dead[edit]
At age 15, Barlow became a student at the Fountain Valley School in Colorado Springs, Colorado. There he met Bob Weir, who later co-founded the Grateful Dead. Weir and Barlow maintained a close friendship through the years.
As a frequent visitor during college to Timothy Leary's facility in Millbrook, New York, Barlow was introduced to LSD; he later claimed to have consumed the substance over 1,000 times.[10] These transformative experiences led him to distance himself from Mormonism. He went on to facilitate the first meeting between the Grateful Dead and the Leary organization (who recognized each other as kindred souls in spite of their differing philosophical approaches) in June 1967.[15]
While on his way to California to reunite with the Grateful Dead in 1971, Barlow stopped at his family's ranch, not intending to stay. His father had suffered a debilitating stroke in 1966 before dying in 1972, resulting in a $700,000 business debt. Dismayed by the situation, Barlow changed his plans and began practicing animal husbandry under the auspices of the Bar Cross Land and Livestock Company in Cora, Wyoming, for almost two decades. To support the ranch, he continued to write and sell spec scripts.[10] In the meantime, Barlow was still able to play an active role in the Grateful Dead while recruiting many unconventional part-time ranch hands from the mainstream as well as the counterculture.[16] Prior to his death in 2018, John Byrne Cooke intended to produce a documentary film (provisionally titled The Bar Cross Ranch) that documented this era.[17]