John Perry Barlow obit

John Perry Barlow, open internet champion and Grateful Dead lyricist, dies at 70

News of the death of John Perry Barlow, co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, sparked an outpouring of grief from artists and technology types alike.

 He was not on the list.

John Perry Barlow, the cantankerous poet, lyricist for the Grateful Dead and fighter for a free and open internet, died overnight at age 70, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which he co-founded in 1990, confirmed Wednesday.

Amir Bar-Lev, the filmmaker who directed "Long Strange Trip," the 2017 Martin Scorsese-produced documentary about the Grateful Dead, first reported Barlow's death, writing on Twitter that Barlow died in his sleep. The cause of death wasn't reported, but he was known to have been is poor health since he suffered a heart attack in 2015.

To music lovers, Barlow, who met Grateful Dead co-founder and guitarist Bob Weir in high school in Colorado, was known as the man behind the words on such Dead anthems as "Cassidy" "Estimated Prophet," "Black-Throated Wind," "Hell in a Bucket," "Mexicali Blues," "The Music Never Stopped" and "Throwing Stones."

Weir, Barlow's frequent co-writer, traced the origins of the Dead hit "The Music Never Stopped" to describe their songwriting process in a 2008 interview with Jeffrey Pepper Rodgers of The JPR Band:

"I played this over the phone to John, and he just started spitting stuff at me. The first line came out, 'There's mosquitoes on the river / Fish are rising up like birds.'"

A successful song "depends on how closely the lyric marries the music," Weir said. "With Barlow or Gerrit Graham or whoever, there's a lot of back and forth." (Graham, an actor and songwriter, is another frequent Weir collaborator.)

In Silicon Valley and the halls of government and academia, however, Barlow was best known as the intellectual force behind the Electronic Frontier Foundation, or EFF, which he co-founded in 1990 with Mitch Kapor, the founder of Lotus, the software company behind the spreadsheet Lotus 1-2-3.

"It is no exaggeration to say that major parts of the Internet we all know and love today exist and thrive because of Barlow's vision and leadership," Cindy Cohn, the EFF's executive director, said in a statement Wednesday. "He always saw the Internet as a fundamental place of freedom, where voices long silenced can find an audience and people can connect with others regardless of physical distance."

Barlow wrote in 1990 that he met Kapor through The Well, the original online community. The EFF was "started by a visit from the FBI," which wanted his help tracking down a band of "info-terrorists" believed to have stolen some Apple code, but Barlow quickly concluded that the agent who visited him "was hardly alone in his puzzlement about the legal, technical, and metaphorical nature of datacrime," he wrote.