Cassidy Law was one month old when I first met her in 1970 on a flea-bitten little ranch called the Rucka Rucka that Weir had out in the headwaters of the Nicasio Valley in west Marin County. He was living out there with Cassidy’s mother, Eileen, the patron saint of the Deadheads, his girlfriend Frankie, Rex Jackson (after whom the Rex Foundation was named), and Sonny Heard, also known as the world’s most hated person.
The Rucka Rucka was thirty-seven acres of pure dust. There was a ranch right across the highway where all the horses came down with hydrophobia. I mean, can you think of anything scarier than a rabid horse? Weir had an absolutely useless hammerhead Appaloosa stud and a psychotic peacock that would attack you whenever you came out the front door. Bobby kept a two-by-four right next to it so you could fend off the peacock. But he advised you not to kill it. Just hit it.
By the time I got to the Rucka Rucka after my Easy Rider motorcycle journey across America, I was in the right raw mood for the place. I remember Eileen holding her beautiful baby girl and hearing the chords Bobby had strung together on the night that Cassidy had been born. Crouched on the bare boards of the kitchen floor in the late afternoon sun, he whanged them out for me, and they rang like the bells of hell in my head for the next two years.
At the Rucka Rucka, Bobby and I put together the melody scheme of “Cassidy,” but I wrote the lyrics in February 1972 while bulldozing snowdrifts out of stockyards on the ranch in a cloud of whirling ice crystals. Hypnotized by the steady howl of the bulldozer’s engine and the repeating chords of “Cassidy,” I thought a lot about my father and what we were and had been to each other.
For some reason, I also started thinking about Neal Cassady, who was then four years dead but still charging around America on the hot wheels of legend. Somewhere in there the words to the song arrived, complete and intact, and I found myself singing the song as though I’d known it for years.
My father was then in a hospital in Salt Lake City. It looked like he was going to die, so I knew I had to be there with him. My good friend Alan Trist, who ran Ice Nine Publishing for the Dead for years, had been staying with me on the ranch, and he decided to come along with me. It was snowing like crazy, but we were in my Chevy Blazer and I knew I could always put it into four-wheel drive if I had to.
When we got to La Barge, Wyoming, a godforsaken town about sixty miles south of Pinedale, we learned the road had been closed because of all the snowdrifts. I decided we just had to bomb our way through. It got extremely hairy. There were no other cars on the highway and I couldn’t see the lane markers, but I could see the reflector posts. And so I drove in these conditions all the way from La Barge to Interstate 80. Alan is very English in the best sense of the term. At one point, he said, in his classic fashion, “You know, it occurs to me, Barlow, that we could die out here.”
When I finally managed to get to my father’s bedside in the hospital in Salt Lake City, he was actually doing pretty well. The thing about my dad was that he had seven brothers and all but two of them died of the same genetic degenerative cardio ailment. What happens eventually with this condition is that the person suffering from it goes into ventricular fibrillation. One of his brothers had dropped dead that way at seventeen. There was one living brother who hadn’t made it there to see him yet, and I felt like that was the reason my father didn’t die that night. By then, he had already made his peace with it and was well prepared to do so.
I stayed there with him, and the next night at about four-thirty in the morning, his heart monitor went steady and my father died. I would have let him go, but because I knew he wanted to see his brother, I ran to get the nurses and they got the doctor to hit him with the paddles.
It takes a while for someone to return from death. Longer than two minutes, shorter than three days. So there was a period when I was looking deeply into my father’s face for what seemed like a long time waiting for him to come back. And then he opened his eyes and looked up at me with a radiant smile and said, “Why, John Perry, are you still alive?”
I could tell that my father had been somewhere because he had a completely different light in his eyes. The next day, his heart self-regularized and went back to beating normally. And so I was inclined to think some kind of miracle had taken place that would allow me to go out to California so I could work with Bobby.
I did this and then spent the next five days or so writing the balance of Bobby’s solo album Ace. Jerry Garcia and Phil Lesh were working with David Crosby on his solo album in the same studio, and so Ace is essentially the Grateful Dead studio album of that period, because both Jerry and Phil as well as Bill Kreutzmann are on many of the tracks.
My father finally passed and so I had to head back to Salt Lake, but Bobby still needed one more song for the album. I stayed up all night with Frankie Weir, who fed me Wild Turkey and cocaine and made me write the fairly dreadful “Walk in the Sunshine.” I also wrote a song based on Pär Lagerkvist’s The Dwarf called “The Dwarf” that included the lyrics “I’m not a tall man / I’m a small man.” It was about a horrible little Renaissance court dwarf who had no one’s interests at heart. I gave it to Bobby, and so he was greatly relieved when I showed him the only slightly less terrible “Walk in the Sunshine,” and I was free to go.
My father was sixty-eight years old when he died on February 24, 1972. We buried him in Pinedale on February 29, 1972, a leap day. The funeral itself was a little tricky because the cemetery was covered by four feet of snow. There was a service in the high school auditorium that about 1,200 people attended in a town where only 1,200 lived. My father was widely mourned. People came from all over Wyoming and beyond.
I didn’t speak at his service, which seems funny to me now. I think I was in a daze. To a large extent, I was just letting it all happen around me. A lot of people seemed to have a passionate interest in having the service done in a certain way, and I was okay with whatever they wanted. But for some reason I didn’t want to get too involved myself.
I took it all pretty hard, because after the stroke had taken out the rational part of my father’s brain, there was all this stuff going on in the irrational part that was really lovely. I felt I’d had what now seemed an all-too-short time of actually knowing who he was and being able to talk to him about things that were not absolutely material and literal. What he had always wanted to talk to me about before the stroke was money, business, cattle, and water. But once the filter was gone, he was willing to talk to me about what it really meant to be alive.
He apologized for having made fun of me when I told him that I was still trying to find myself, because he had now finally found himself. And he told me that he loved me, which he had never said before, and I told him that I loved him. That this did not make either of us uncomfortable was truly amazing to me.