John Perry Barlow, Grateful Dead Songwriter and Digital Pioneer, Dead at 70

John Perry Barlow, an American creator, rancher, and activist, rabble rouser and principled citizen, poet and songwriter, has died.

Barlow, who suffered a heart attack in 2015, died in his sleep early on February 7.

Deadheads knew him as John Barlow, as his name was stylized in the songwriting credits of the numerous titans of the Grateful Dead songbook that he wrote with Dead guitarist and vocalist Bob Weir. “Estimated Prophet,” “Cassidy,” “Throwing Stones,” “Black Throated Wind,” “Looks Like Rain,” and “The Music Never Stopped” are a mere handful produced from that decades long friendship.

The digital community knew him as John Perry Barlow, the co-founder, in 1990, of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an organization that sought to protect digital rights in a new information age, as well as to proactively define as positively as possible a roadmap of guidelines and mores in order to help shape a new era that would inevitably touch every human across the earth.

His friends simply called him Barlow.

Barlow’s remarkable path steered him through the frenetic heart of beat-inspired 60s counter-culture, later into the deep and spiritual semi-solitude of western Wyoming ranching, by the 80s into a visible and effective pulpit at the dawn of the Internet, and finally, firmly, into the role of shaman-like statesman, guide, and (self-described) peripheral visionary.

That stunning breadth of accumulated experience and wisdom, combined with a relentlessly curious nature and friendly demeanor, made Barlow a frequent talking head presence in film, in documentaries exploring digital concerns (2013’s Downloaded, which examines the consequences of the ‘downloading revolution’) as well as, naturally, the Grateful Dead. Barlow’s final onscreen appearance was to be Amazon Studios’ and director Amir Bar-Lev’s wondrous 2017 documentary Long Strange Trip. Throughout the film’s four hour runtime, Barlow, ever the metaphysical ombudsman, emerges multiple times, as always celebratory, elucidating, luminous, and poignantly insightful.

A lifetime could be spent exploring, and being inspired by, the life and learnings of John Perry Barlow. You can absorb Barlow’s list of 25 Principles of Adult Behavior, written on the occasion of his 30th birthday. You can be dazzled by this remarkable 1995 conversation between Barlow and Buddhist and social theorist Bell Hooks. You can read remembrances from friends and colleagues like Cory Doctorow.

Or you can just listen to his words in song. Fare thee well, Barlow. Safe travels.