Neal Cassady

Neal Cassady surely took the stage with the Dead at a number of Acid Tests and other early dates, including a July 23, 1967 show at the Straight Theater when he rapped while the band noodled behind him. But Cassady’s role in the Grateful Dead family far exceeds a handful of appearances with the boys. 

Of course, Cassady served as the basis for Dean Moriarty, the fascinating character at the heart of Jack Kerouac’s On The Road, which, as the literary guidebook for dropping out, searching for something more than postwar society offered, and simply having fun, helped bring about the counterculture of the Sixties. And it was Cassady that most people in the Dead’s inner circle credit, as Ken Babbs does, of being “the connecting link between the Beats and the Psychedelic movement with a foot in each, his mind and voice guiding the way.”

In the early Sixties, Cassady fell in with Ken Kesey and Babbs, becoming a fixture in the Merry Pranksters. And when the Pranksters took Furthur across the country to New York City and Timothy Leary’s Connecticut mansion, it was cowboy Neal at the wheel. And once they all returned to the West Coast, Cassady and the Pranksters spent more and more time with Jerry and the rest of the nascent Grateful Dead, Neil even living with the band for a time. 

All the members of the Dead looked to Cassady as an inspiration and spiritual brother, Jerry saying years later, “He was a huge influence on me in ways I can’t really describe…attitude…rhythm, you know, motion, timing. He was like a 12th-dimensional Lenny Bruce” and, ultimately that Cassady “had this great combination of physical poetry and an incredible mind. He was a model for the idea that a person can become art himself.”

Cassady passed away on February 4, 1968, at just forty-one after attending a wedding in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. Whether he died of exposure or an overdose, Cassady left this earth far too early. And his death, along with the new arrivals in Haight-Ashbury, the influx of harder drugs into the scene, the commercialization of the counter-culture, and the like, presaged the end of the Sixties and the Dead’s own youthful exuberance, communal lifestyle, and radical experimentation. But not before the Dead dedicated their Valentine’s Day show in 1968 to Cassady.

At the same time that Cassady was dying on the Mexican train tracks, Bob Weir put the finishing touches on the lyrics to The Other One, which not only references Neal, but embodies his spirit. And just two years later, John Perry Barlow wrote Cassidy, alluding to Cassady and Cassidy Law, daughter of Dead family member Eileen Law, who was named for the Prankster.