Mother American Night Read online

  I had already been rendered speechless by Hunter’s incredible songwriting ability, as well as his special relationship with Garcia. The song that Hunter and Bobby were working on in the back room that night was “Sugar Magnolia,” which was about Bobby’s girlfriend Frankie. Weir kept changing the words because he thought he had better ones, and Hunter did not believe in making deals on shit like that.

  All of a sudden, Hunter whirled on me and said, “Why don’t you write with him? At least you like him.” And I said, “I don’t know that I know how to write songs.” He said, “I’ve read your poetry. That’s pretty good. I think you’d be able do this.” And I said, “I suspect songwriting is really different.” And he said, “Oh, it is, but you’ll probably figure it out. In any case, I’m not writing with him anymore.”

  Weir looked at me and said, “What do you think?” And I said, “I’d certainly be willing to give it a try.” At the time, I was still thinking about how listening to “Sunday Morning Coming Down” had affected me when I had been in Mexico.

  After the shows were over, I returned to that nondescript apartment in Middletown and got myself a bottle of Wild Turkey. I drank up most of it and wrote “Mexicali Blues” in a day and sent it to Weir, who was by no means certain that he liked it.

  These days, I know it would be tricky to write a song referring to a presumably physical relationship with a girl who was just fourteen years old. Even though everything in the song was purely imaginary, I did it because Weir had specifically asked me to write a cowboy song. Hoping that maybe something would be there, I just turned on the song faucet. I still like the last verse:

  Is there anything a man don’t stand to lose

  When he lets a woman hold him in her hands?

  He just might find himself out there on horseback in the dark

  Just ridin’ and runnin’ across those desert sands

  I had not sung Weir the melody, and that was the last time that ever happened because he wrote a very different one for it. The original was a lot more like “Sunday Morning Coming Down” and kind of bleak. Weir made it more rhythmic and rapid, which was really pretty surprising to me. I ended up watching him do this in a studio in San Francisco.

  Before any of this happened, I had been sleeping with a woman who was the head of public relations at Warner Bros. Records and musing about how I was going to make enough money to survive. I was talking to her about needing some sort of job, and she said, “You know, we could stand having somebody who is wired into the scene in San Francisco, if you wanted to do that with the Dead for us.” So I said, “Okay. That sounds good.” I would have been an underassistant West Coast promotion man, and what’s not to like about that? All I would have had to do was hang out with the band.

  I was on my way to take the job when I got waylaid at the ranch. My father had suffered a stroke several years before and was in rough shape. He was in a wheelchair most of the time, and my mother was trying to run the ranch without ever leaving the office and the foreman was trying to run it without ever going in there. They had a bunch of debt, because my father was no longer the businessman he had once been and instead had become something of a philistine. He liked flashy bling stuff and going to Las Vegas, and he threw money around because he wanted to be worth a lot more than he could ever make from running a cattle ranch. He also gambled and lost a lot of money on the commodity exchanges. Had my father not done that, he would have been in the black. But by the time I got there in March 1971, we were more than half a million dollars in the red, which was a lot of money back then. It was a mess.

  When I arrived on the ranch, seven people were living and working there full-time. Slowly, I began to realize that I had to stay there. I wanted to put the Bar Cross in order so I could sell it and bail out my parents. I figured it for a short-term affair, but then I got terribly into it.

  I was doing a real estate tour of the ranch one day with a bunch of prospective buyers and agents. At the end of it, one of the Realtors took me aside and said, “John Perry, I think you’ve got to ask yourself if you really want to sell this place, because you just told these people everything that’s wrong with it.” Categorically, I had just made the worst sales pitch he had ever heard. And I thought, You know, he’s right.

  A lot of whether I could turn the ranch around would depend on John Hay, who had been my father’s banker and so was now my banker as well. He was a wise old Scotsman, and I needed him to loan me money. I went down to see him and said, “I’ve decided that I want to go on ranching on the Bar Cross for as long as I can.” And he said, “If you want my opinion, John Perry, it won’t be very long. I mean, I give you a year and a half, two years at the most. Less if your father dies, which I think he will.”

  Then he said, “I’ve got examiners I have to stay ahead of, but I can probably develop enough of a smoke screen so you can do this if you want to for as long as you can and I can.” So we proceeded from there. It was really, really tough, because I was packing all that debt. I was also selling on one of the last free markets that was actually somewhat fixed in favor of the buyers. The only thing I had any control over were the expenses.

  At the Bar Cross, our business model was to put cows up on the forest reserve with the bulls, so they would become pregnant over the course of the summer. Then they’d come back down, and any of them that were not pregnant got shipped to be slaughtered. The mother cows varied from three to fifteen years old. The ones that kept giving birth lived. They were in a competition without ever knowing what the rules were.

  During the calving season, we’d have about eleven hundred mother cows on the ranch giving birth at the same time. In addition to that, another two hundred or so replacement heifers were being brought in as well. It was a pretty big ranch, and the cattle were scattered in various large fields where I was feeding them.

  Winter on the Bar Cross would begin in October, but it could snow as early as July because the elevation is so high. I saw it happen. All these calves were born in February and March, which was awful because it would be freezing cold and I’d be bumping around on feed trail tracks in the middle of the night trying to make sure that all the calves were coming out all right.

  The heifers that had never calved before were pretty sensitive about getting the first one out, so I had to get up at two or three o’clock in the morning to check on them. If the birth was not going well, I would run them into the calving barn and go find my foreman, and then we’d put them in a stanchion and pull the calf out ourselves, unless the heifer needed a Cesarean, in which case I would call the vet. But I even had to do several of those myself and somehow managed to deliver the calves successfully.

  We’d always start vaccinating and branding in the spring. Our biggest branding event was held in May, when, over the course of three days, we would brand about six or seven hundred calves. Then we’d have another one-day session in June, where we’d brand another couple hundred, and a third session in July, where we’d brand sixty to a hundred.

  On branding day, we’d usually get up at about four-thirty or five so we could take the cows out of the meadows at sunup. By about seven-thirty, we’d be running them through the chute. Vaccinations would take a good part of the morning, but we would try to brand several hundred before lunch and then another couple hundred in the afternoon.

  Just about everybody in the Cora Valley would come to help us brand in May. We would usually do it on Mother’s Day weekend, which gave it a kind of perverse quality that I really liked. This was when we would move all our cows out of the meadows and onto their pastures out in the sagebrush. We always did the big May branding down at the Finn place, because it was centrally located to all of the meadows and various pastures and had a good chute system. We’d usually eat lunch down there as well, rather than going all the way back to the main house.

  I don’t think I have ever gone to a completely sober branding. There was
a lot of variation between one ranch and another as to just how un-sober it got. At some ranches everyone would start out drunk, but that was never the way we did it. Still, I can remember years on the Bar Cross when, by the end of the day, every single person there was drunk.

  Just how drunk people got while they were branding always depended on whether or not hard liquor was being consumed. There was almost always a lot of beer around, but sometimes there would also be several bottles of whiskey sitting on the front seat of a pickup truck, and that would give the undertaking a whole different flavor. I still associate alcohol with branding because, back then, alcohol and gasoline were pretty much the two substances that Sublette County ran on.

  While we were branding, a lot of other things would be going on as well. Some young guy on the crew would take a liking to a girl who had just come to cook in the main house. They’d want to wrestle calves together, and I’d have to split them up. Somebody would pass out in the front seat of his pickup or fall off his horse and break his arm. A great big hailstorm would hit right in the middle of everything, or someone would get themselves in a major wreck on the highway. So it was never exactly dull.

  While I was living on the ranch, I always kept a diary. Here’s a typical entry for a branding day:

  We emerged mounted at five-twenty A.M. The morning was cool, even cold and damp. The main event of the rodeo occurred as we were trying to corral the Finn bunch. Because of the narrow gate and other factors unknown to us but worrisome to the bovine mind, this is always a tough job. But never have we had the entire bunch come back at us like they did this morning. They scattered like dandelion fluff in a gale and weren’t contained until eight A.M. After that, however, things improved. With five sets of wrestlers, we went through them like shit through a frog and were done by eleven-thirty. The count was two hundred and seven cows and two hundred and five calves, of which a hundred and two were steers. A hundred and forty-three were crossbreds. The beer consumed during the hour before lunch made us all too listless to be useful after it was over. I then went down and fixed a loose bolt on a friend’s tractor in the afternoon.

  Around the end of October, I’d ship all the calves to whomever I’d sold them to, and they would be finished out on grass on another ranch because that was what the market had started to demand. It became a lot cheaper to grass-feed beef than it was to grain-feed them. I would get paid when I delivered the calves to whomever would raise them to full-grown yearlings and then they would turn them over to somebody else who also would keep them for another six months and finish them out. I was at the mercy of the free market in terms of fuel, of which the Bar Cross burned a lot.

  But it felt right for me to be living there again. The land itself was hilly, and about 15,000 acres of it was government land to which we had exclusive grazing rights. The Bar Cross itself was 7,500 acres of fairly steep hills that were bare but for sagebrush and a large open alluvial plain through which the New Fork River runs.

  Our deeded property included the head of the creek, and there was a dam on New Fork Lake, which my grandfather had built, that irrigated a much larger area. There were 17,000 acre-feet of water on top of that lake, and I sat on the commission that adjudicated those water rights. It was one of the most interesting things I ever did because it turns out people will kill one another over water. They really will. So we had to be judicious in how we allocated it all.

  A lot of folks there had looked at me as an outsider back when I had first left to go off to Fountain Valley, and their feelings had not changed in the ensuing period of time. Once I was back living on the Bar Cross, I made matters somewhat worse by publicly going out with a seventeen-year-old girl from Pinedale High School. She was a wonderful person and her father liked me, but everyone else in town just thought of it as further evidence that John Perry Barlow was not like them. Which I most certainly was not.

  SEVENTEEN

  LOOKS LIKE RAIN

  In January 1972, Weir came out to the Bar Cross so we could write songs together for his first solo album. That was when he saw the ghost.

  Actually, it was his dog who first discovered the ghost. Bobby had brought with him a young malamute named Moondog who wasn’t even a year old. They were both staying with me in an old homestead ranch house at the Finn place, across the ditch from the cabin where I had gone to school. Suddenly, at about three in the morning, the dog did a couple of revolutions around the kitchen and left a dog-high line of liquid shit around the full circumference of the room. The dog had been completely freaked out by something so we got up and dealt with that, got the dog situated outside, and went back to sleep.

  The ghost itself had deviled me ever since I had moved into the Finn place. It was the practice of this ghost to manifest itself invisibly but palpably at the end of my bed and look at me in a stark way. It seemed like a man, and I had experienced it many times while sleeping. After the first few times, I had come to the conclusion that the damn thing wasn’t going to do anything but stand there and look at me.

  On this night, though, Weir encountered the ghost at the end of his bed. He woke up in horror and as soon as he was out of its thrall, he called up Rolling Thunder, a shaman to the Eastern Shoshone, who was living in a trailer house on an Indian reservation near Carlin, Nevada. By then, Rolling Thunder had decided that he liked being the darling of rock stars, and so he was more than happy to talk to Bobby, even at such an ungodly hour of the night.

  Weir said, “I’ve just experienced a ghost and it scares me. What should I do?” Rolling Thunder said, “You can exorcise this ghost. I would bet that if it’s a ranch you are on, there are cedar fence posts somewhere nearby because they last a lot longer than regular fence posts.” Rolling Thunder told Weir that he should get a drawknife and peel the fence posts and then take all the bark peelings and put them in a coffee can. After he had punched holes in the side of the can and set the bark peelings on fire, he should go around the house with it and begin singing a Shoshone chant that Rolling Thunder started teaching him.

  Now, it was true that there were cedar fence posts nearby, but they were all under about three feet of snow. So Bobby said, “No, no, no. Is there something I can do with less work?” And Rolling Thunder said, “You could take a box of stick matches and get a plate and burn the entire box and then grind them up until they are a fine carbon powder and then smear it all over your face.” And Weir said, “That sounds doable.”

  So he went and got a box of stick matches from the kitchen and did just that. I only found out about what he had done when I went into his bedroom at six-thirty in the morning to wake him up so we could go feed the cattle together. Weir came up out of bed looking like Al Jolson about to break into “My Mammy.”

  It was one of those rare moments in my life when I was totally speechless. I had seen him earlier in the night when he was dealing with the dog, and he sure as shit hadn’t looked like that.

  We were feeding about eight hundred cows every morning and then writing songs in the afternoon and evening. We were still trying to figure out how to do this together. Bobby would sit there with a guitar and I would sit there with a legal pad.

  We began with “Black-Throated Wind.” Oddly enough, I had written the chorus while riding on a bus to the airport in Kathmandu and not anywhere near drowning in the Mother American night. If anything, I was drowning in the weird Nepali night. It was the first thing that ever showed up that seemed like it might be part of a song and not a poem.

  I sang those lines for Weir, and he perversely put them into a different melodic setting than I’d just sung. I then wrote the rest of the lyrics. The last few verses were like a dental extraction. They have grown on me over the years, but at the time, it was all perspiration and no inspiration and wretchedly painful. I do think the line “You ain’t gonna learn what you don’t want to know” is actually pretty good.

  Weir and I were drinking Wild Turkey one night, which
we did all the time because I don’t think Bobby and I ever wrote a song together when we were not drinking Wild Turkey, and up on the wall of the cabin, I had this old-timey N. C. Wyeth print of an Indian with his hands out. Weir looked at the print and said, “You know what he’s saying, right?” I said, “No, what?” And he said, “Looks like rain.”

  I thought that was hilarious. Only Weir would say that. It was a total Weir-ism. And it led to “Looks Like Rain.” He planted the seed, even though at that point my experience with “being in love” was pretty much restricted to Shakespeare, opera, and novels by women with three names from the southern states in which someone would swoon. I had often thought about what actually being in that sort of love would be like and had concluded that it was a fiction humans had created to make us all feel more painfully aware of our limitations.

  In a sense, the lyrics were fraudulent because I was not writing from experience. But I was writing from a kind of foreknowledge, and it all came to me relatively easily. I then did something that I had sworn after “Mexicali Blues” I would never do again, which was just give the lyrics to Bobby without any sense of where they ought to go or what the song should sound like. But Bobby did an incredibly beautiful job of writing the melody, and I was delighted when I heard it.

  Many years later, the Dead were playing “Looks Like Rain” in Nassau Coliseum, and I was snuggled up against a woman with whom I actually was in that kind of love. I suddenly realized who this song had been composed for and who it was that I felt this way about. I started singing it to her and said, “I swear I wrote this for you many years ago.”