gdead.berkeley.edu/gdead.berkeley.edu.tar/gdead.berkeley.edu/pub/gdead/interviews/Barlow-on-Cassidy

Text File | 1994-12-28 | 18KB | 345 lines

                             Cassidy
                             -------
                 By John Perry Barlow with Bob Weir
               Recorded on Ace (Warner Brothers, 1972)
                  Cora, Wyoming  February, 1972

        I have seen where the wolf has slept by the silver stream.
        I can tell by the mark he left you were in his dream.
        Ah, child of countless trees.

        Ah, child of boundless seas.
        What you are, what you're meant to be
        Speaks his name, though you were born to me,

        Born to me,
        Cassidy...

        Lost now on the country miles in his Cadillac.
        I can tell by the way you smile he's rolling back.
        Come wash the nighttime clean,
        Come grow this scorched ground green,
        Blow the horn, tap the tambourine
        Close the gap of the dark years in between
        You and me,

        Cassidy...

        Quick beats in an icy heart.
        Catch-colt draws a coffin cart.
        There he goes now, here she starts:

        Hear her cry.
        Flight of the seabirds, scattered like lost words
        Wheel to the storm and fly.

        Faring thee well now.
        Let your life proceed by its own design.
        Nothing to tell now.

        Let the words be yours, I'm done with mine.
        (Repeat)

   This is a song about necessary dualities: dying & being born, men &
   women, speaking & being silent, devastation & growth, desolation &
   hope.

   It is also about a Cassady and a Cassidy, Neal Cassady and Cassidy
   Law.

   (The title could be spelled either way as far as I'm concerned, but I
   think it's officially stamped with the latter. Which is appropriate
   since I believe the copyright was registered by the latter's mother,
   Eileen Law.)

   The first of these was the ineffable, inimitable, indefatigable Holy
   Goof Hisself, Neal Cassady, aka Dean Moriarty, Hart Kennedy,
   Houlihan, and The Best Mind of Allen Ginsberg's generation.

   Neal Cassady, for those whose education has been so classical or so
   trivial or so timid as to omit him, was the Avatar of American
   Hipness.  Born on the road and springing full-blown from a fleabag on
   Denver's Larimer Street, he met the hitch-hiking Jack Kerouac there
   in the late 40's and set him, and, through him, millions of others,
   permanently free.

   Neal came from the oral tradition.  The writing he left to others
   with more time and attention span, but from his vast reserves flowed
   the high-octane juice which gassed up the Beat Generation for eight
   years of Eisenhower and a thousand days of Camelot until it, like so
   many other things, ground to a bewildered halt in Dallas.

   Kerouac retreated to Long Island, where he took up Budweiser, the
   National Review, and the adipose cynicism of too many thwarted
   revolutionaries.  Neal just caught the next bus out.

   This turned out to be the psychedelic nose-cone of the 60's,  a
   rolling cornucopia of technicolor weirdness named Further.  With Ken
   Kesey raving from the roof and Neal at the wheel, Further roamed
   America from 1964 to 1966, infecting our national control delusion
   with a chronic and holy lunacy to which it may yet succumb.

   >From Further tumbled the Acid Tests, the Grateful Dead, Human Be-Ins,
   the Haight-Ashbury, and, as America tried to suppress the infection
   by popularizing it into cheap folly, The Summer of *Love: and
   Woodstock.

   I, meanwhile, had been initiated into the Mysteries within the sober
   ashrams of Timothy Leary's East Coast, from which distance the
   Prankster's psychedelic psircuses seemed, well, a bit psacreligious.
   Bobby Weir, whom I'd known since prep school, kept me somewhat
   current on his riotous doings with the Pranksters et al, but I tended
   to dismiss on ideological grounds what little of this madness he
   could squeeze through a telephone.

   So, purist that I was, I didn't actually meet Neal Cassady until
   1967, by which time Further was already rusticating behind Kesey's
   barn in Oregon and the Grateful Dead had collectively beached itself
   in a magnificently broke-down Victorian palace at 710 Ashbury Street,
   two blocks up the hill from what was by then, according to Time
   Magazine, the axis mundi of American popular culture.  The real party
   was pretty much over by the time I arrived.

   But Cassady, the Most Amazing Man I Ever Met, was still very much
   Happening.  Holding court in 710's tiny kitchen, he would carry on
   five different conversations at once and still devote one
   conversational channel to discourse with absent persons and another
   to such sound effects as disintegrating ring gears or exploding
   crania.  To log into one of these conversations, despite their
   multiplicity, was like trying to take a sip from a fire hose.

   He filled his few and momentary lapses in flow with the most random
   numbers ever generated by man or computer or, more often, with his
   low signature laugh, a *heh, heh,  heh, heh: which sounded like an
   engine being spun furiously by an over-enthusiastic starter motor.

   As far as I could tell he never slept.  He tossed back green hearts
   of Mexican dexedrina by the shot-sized bottle, grinned, cackled, and
   jammed on into the night.  Despite such behavior, he seemed, at 41, a
   paragon of robust health.  With a face out of a recruiting poster
   (leaving aside a certain glint in the eyes) and a torso, usually raw,
   by Michelangelo, he didn't even seem quite mortal.  Though he would
   shortly demonstrate himself to be so.

   Neal and Bobby were perfectly contrapuntal.  As Cassady rattled
   incessantly, Bobby had fallen mostly mute, stilled perhaps by
   macrobiotics, perhaps a less than passing grade in the Acid Tests,
   or, more likely, some combination of every strange thing which had
   caused him to start thinking much faster than anyone could talk.  I
   don't have many focussed memories from the Summer of 1967, but in
   every mental image I retain of Neal, Bobby's pale, expressionless
   face hovers as well.

   Their proximity owed partly to Weir's diet.  Each meal required hours
   of methodical effort.  First, a variety of semi-edibles had to be
   reduced over low heat to a brown, gelatinous consistency.  Then each
   bite of this preparation had to be chewed no less than 40 times.  I
   believe there was some ceremonial reason for this, though maybe he
   just needed time to get used to the taste before swallowing.

   This all took place in the kitchen where, as I say, Cassady was also
   usually taking place.  So there would be Neal, a fountain of
   language, issuing forth clouds of agitated, migratory words.  And
   across the table, Bobby, his jaw working no less vigorously,
   producing instead a profound, unalterable silence.  Neal talked.
   Bobby chewed.  And listened.

   So would pass the day.  I remember a couple of nights when they set
   up another joint routine in the music room upstairs.  The front room
   of the second floor had once been a library and was now the location
   of a stereo and a huge collection of communally-abused records.

   It was also, at this time, Bobby's home.  He had set up camp on a
   pestilential brown couch in the middle of the room, at the end of
   which he kept a paper bag containing most of his worldly possessions.

   Everyone had gone to bed or passed out or fled into the night.  In
   the absence of other ears to perplex and dazzle, Neal went to the
   music room, covered his own with headphones, put on some be-bop, and
   became it, dancing and doodley-oooping a Capella to a track I
   couldn't hear.  While so engaged, he juggled the 36 oz. machinist's
   hammer which had become his trademark.  The articulated jerky of his
   upper body ran monsoons of sweat and the hammer became a lethal blur
   floating in the air before him.

   While the God's Amphetamine Cowboy spun, juggled and yelped joyous
   *doo-WOP's,: Weir lay on his couch in the foreground, perfectly
   still, open eyes staring at the ceiling.  There was something about
   the fixity of Bobby's gaze which seemed to indicate a fury of
   cognitive processing to match Neal's performance.  It was as though
   Bobby were imagining him and going rigid with the effort involved in
   projecting such a tangible and kinetic image.

   I also have a vague recollection of driving someplace in San
   Francisco with Neal and a amazingly lascivious redhead, but the
   combination of drugs and terror at his driving style has fuzzed this
   memory into a dreamish haze.  I remember that the car was a large
   convertible, possibly a Cadillac, made in America at a time we still
   made cars of genuine steel but that its bulk didn't seem like armor
   enough against a world coming at me so fast and close.

   Nevertheless, I recall taking comfort in the notion that to have
   lived so long this way Cassady was probably invulnerable and that, if
   that were so, I was also within the aura of his mysterious
   protection.

   Turned out I was wrong about that.  About five months later, four
   days short of his 42nd birthday, he was found dead next to a railroad
   track outside San Miguel D'Allende, Mexico.  He wandered out there in
   an altered state and died of exposure in the high desert night.
   Exposure seemed right.  He had lived an exposed life.  By then, it
   was beginning to feel like we all had.

   In necessary dualities, there are only protagonists.  The other
   protagonist of this song is Cassidy Law, who is now, in the summer of
   1990, a beautiful and self-possessed young woman of 20.

   When I first met her, she was less than a month old.  She had just
   entered the world on the Rucka Rucka Ranch, a dust-pit of a one-horse
   ranch in the Nicasio Valley of West Marin which Bobby inhabited along
   with a variable cast of real characters.

   These included Cassidy's mother Eileen, a good woman who was then and
   is still the patron saint of the Deadheads, the wolf-like Rex
   Jackson, a Pendleton cowboy turned Grateful Dead roadie in whose
   memory the Grateful Dead's Rex Foundation is named, Frankie Weir,
   Bobby's ol' lady and the subject of the song Sugar Magnolia, Sonny
   Heard, a Pendleton bad ol' boy who was also a GD roadie, and several
   others I can't recall.

   There was also a hammer-headed Appaloosa stud, a vile goat, and
   miscellaneous barnyard fowl which included a peacock so psychotic and
   aggressive that they had to keep a 2 x 4 next to the front door to
   ward off his attacks on folks leaving the house.  In a rural sort of
   way, it was a pretty tough neighborhood.  The herd of horses across
   the road actually became rabid and had to be destroyed.

   It was an appropriate place to enter the 70's, a time of bleak exile
   for most former flower children.  The Grateful Dead had been part of
   a general Diaspora from the Haight as soon as the Summer of Love
   festered into the Winter of Our Bad Craziness.  They had been strewn
   like jetsam across the further reaches of Marin County and were now
   digging in to see what would happen next.

   The prognosis wasn't so great.  1968 had given us, in addition to
   Cassady's death, the Chicago Riots and the election of Richard Nixon.
   1969 had been, as Ken Kesey called it, *the year of the downer,:
   which described not only a new  cultural preference for stupid pills
   but also the sort of year which could mete out Manson,
   Chappaquiddick, and Altamont in less than 6 weeks.

   I was at loose ends myself.  I'd written a novel, on the strength of
   whose first half Farrar, Straus, & Giroux had given me a healthy
   advance with which I was to write the second half.  Instead, I took
   the money and went to India, returning seven months later a
   completely different guy.  I spent the first 8 months of 1970 living
   in New York City and wrestling the damned thing to an ill-fitting
   conclusion, before tossing the results over a transom at Farrar,
   Straus, buying a new motorcycle to replace the one I'd just run into
   a stationary car at 85 mph, and heading to California.

   It was a journey straight out of Easy Rider.  I had a no-necked
   barbarian in a Dodge Super Bee try to run me off the road in New
   Jersey (for about 20 high speed miles) and was served, in my own
   Wyoming, a raw, skinned-out lamb's head with eyes still in it.  I can
   still hear the dark laughter that chased me out of that restaurant.

   Thus, by the time I got to the Rucka Rucka, I was in the right raw
   mood for the place.  I remember two bright things glistening against
   this dreary backdrop. One was Eileen holding her beautiful baby girl,
   a catch-colt (as we used to call foals born out of pedigree) of Rex
   Jackson's.

   And there were the chords which Bobby had strung together the night
   she was born, music which eventually be joined with these words to
   make the song Cassidy.  He played them for me.  Crouched on the bare
   boards of the kitchen floor in the late afternoon sun, he whanged out
   chords that rang like the bells of hell.

   And rang in my head for the next two years, during which time I quit
   New York and, to my great surprise, became a rancher in Wyoming, thus
   beginning my own rural exile.

   In 1972, Bobby decided he wanted to make the solo album which became
   Ace.  When he entered the studio in early February, he brought an odd
   lot of material, most of it germinative.  We had spent some of
   January in my isolated Wyoming cabin working on songs but I don't
   believe we'd actually finished anything.  I'd come up with some
   lyrics (for Looks Like Rain and most of Black-Hearted Wind).  He
   worked out the full musical structure for Cassidy, but I still hadn't
   written any words for it.

   Most of our time was passed drinking Wild Turkey, speculating
   grandly, and fighting both a series of magnificent blizzards and the
   house ghost (or whatever it was) which took particular delight in
   devilling both Weir and his Malamute dog.

   (I went in one morning to wake Bobby and was astonished when he
   reared out of bed wearing what appeared to be black-face.  He looked
   ready to burst into Sewanee River.  Turned out the ghost had been at
   him.  He'd placed at 3 AM call to the Shoshone shaman Rolling
   Thunder, who'd advised him that a quick and dirty ghost repellant was
   charcoal on the face.  So he'd burned an entire box of Ohio Blue Tips
   and applied the results.)

   I was still wrestling with the angel of Cassidy when he went back to
   California to start recording basic tracks.  I knew some of what it
   was about...the connection with Cassidy Law's birth was too direct to
   ignore...but the rest of it evaded me.  I told him that I'd join him
   in the studio and write it there.

   Then my father began to die.  He went into the hospital in Salt Lake
   City and I stayed on the ranch feeding cows and keeping the feed
   trails open with an ancient Allis-Chalmers bulldozer.  The snow was
   three and a half feet deep on the level and blown into concrete
   castles around the haystacks.

   Bobby was anxious for me to join him in California, but between the
   hardest winter in ten years and my father's diminishing future, I
   couldn't see how I was going to do it.  I told him I'd try to
   complete the unfinished songs, Cassidy among them, at a distance.

   On the 18th of February, I was told that my father's demise was
   imminent and that I would have to get to Salt Lake.  Before I could
   get away, however, I would have to plow snow from enough stackyards
   to feed the herd for however long I might be gone.  I fired up the
   bulldozer in a dawn so cold it seemed the air might break.  I spent a
   long day in a cloud of whirling ice crystals, hypnotized by the
   steady 2600 rpm howl of its engine, and, sometime in the afternoon,
   the repeating chords of Cassidy.

   I thought a lot about my father and what we were and had been to one
   another.  I thought about delicately balanced dance of necessary
   dualities.  And for some reason, I started thinking about Neal, four
   years dead and still charging around America on the hot wheels of
   legend.

   Somewhere in there, the words to Cassidy arrived, complete and
   intact.  I just found myself singing the song as though I'd known it
   for years.

   I clanked back to my cabin in the gathering dusk.  Alan Trist, an old
   friend of Bob Hunter's and a new friend of mine, was visiting.  He'd
   been waiting for me there all day.  Anxious to depart, I sent him out
   to nail wind-chinking on the horse barn while I typed up these words
   and packed.  By nightfall, another great storm had arrived.  We set
   out for Salt Lake in it, hoping to arrive there in time to close, one
   last time, the dark years between me and my father.

   Grateful Dead songs are alive.  Like other living things, they grow
   and metamorphose over time.  Their music changes a little every time
   they're played.  The words, avidly interpreted and reinterpreted by
   generations of Deadheads, become accretions of meaning and cultural
   flavor rather than static assertions of intent.  By now, the
   Deadheads have written this song to a greater extent than I ever did.

   The context changes and thus, everything in it.  What Cassidy meant
   to an audience, many of whom had actually known Neal personally, is
   quite different from what it means to an audience which has largely
   never heard of the guy.

   Some things don't change.  People die.  Others get born to take their
   place.  Storms cover the land with trouble.  And then, always, the
   sun breaks through again.