Boulder is a Stoopid Place

The Insanely Eventful Life of Grateful Dead Lyricist John Perry Barlow – Reason.com

If you’d encountered Barlow as a child—by his account, he was raised primarily “by drunken cowboys and farm animals” on his parents’ ranch in Wyoming—you wouldn’t have guessed there were any awesome mutant genes at work. Young Barlow finished his freshman year of public high school with a straight-F average. “A root vegetable could have done better,” he writes. “But I didn’t give a fuck.” As he explains it, “I was in such a spiteful little mood back then that I was intentionally giving the wrong answers to questions both in the classroom and on tests.” Barlow joined other disaffected teens to form a laughably minor-league motorcycle gang. (They had met in the Boy Scouts, they rode tiny Hondas, and their idea of terrorizing the straights was blowing up Coca-Cola vending machines.)

Barlow’s father, state Sen. Norman Barlow, eventually decided it would be politically expedient to send his wayward son away to boarding school. Barlow finished his secondary education at the Fountain Valley School in Colorado Springs, which he says “specialized in admitting bright miscreants.”

It was at Fountain Valley that Barlow’s uncanny gravitation toward cultural singularities began to manifest itself. He quickly befriended the musically inclined dyslexic kid who roomed across the hall—Bob Weir, who would become a founding member of the Grateful Dead.

Barlow did well enough in his classes to earn admission to all six of the colleges he applied to, including Yale and Columbia. He opted for Wesleyan, which at the time was an all-male college. For Barlow, this meant frequent motorcycle trips to New England’s all-female colleges. “I always tended to keep some kind of relationship going with a student at Sarah Lawrence,” he writes, “so I could attend Joseph Campbell’s lecture every Monday morning.” A lapsed Mormon, Barlow missed religious faith; Campbell’s studies of comparative religion and mythology attracted him.

So did LSD. At a Vassar mixer, Barlow learned about a communal group in Millbrook, New York, headed by the psychedelic guru Timothy Leary and funded by Leary disciples who happened to be heirs to the Mellon fortune. Barlow visited Millbrook and thought it interesting, though he was put off by Leary himself. After some fast and furious research, he decided to take his first LSD dose back at Wesleyan. “From then on,” he writes, “I was permanently rewired.”

Most likely not a life for most, but no doubt a life well lived.