“This is a song about necessary dualities: dying & being born, men & women, speaking & being silent, devastation & growth, desolation & hope. It is also about a Cassady and a Cassidy, Neal Cassady and Cassidy Law. (The title could be spelled either way as far as I’m concerned, but I think it’s officially stamped with the latter. Which is appropriate since I believe the copyright was registered by the latter’s mother, Eileen Law.) The first of these was the ineffable, inimitable, indefatigable Holy Goof Hisself, Neal Cassady, aka Dean Moriarty, Hart Kennedy, Houlihan, and The Best Mind of Allen Ginsberg’s generation. Neal Cassady, for those whose education has been so classical or so trivial or so timid as to omit him, was the Avatar of American Hipness. Born on the road and springing full-blown from a fleabag on Denver’s Larimer Street, he met the hitch-hiking Jack Kerouac there in the late 40’s and set him, and, through him, millions of others, permanently free. In necessary dualities, there are only protagonists. The other protagonist of this song is Cassidy Law, who is now, in the summer of 1990, a beautiful and self-possessed young woman of 20. When I first met her, she was less than a month old. She had just entered the world on the Rucka Rucka Ranch, a dust-pit of a one-horse ranch in the Nicasio Valley of West Marin which Bobby [Weir – Ed] inhabited along with a variable cast of real characters. It was an appropriate place to enter the 70’s, a time of bleak exile for most former flower children. The Grateful Dead had been part of a general Diaspora from the Haight as soon as the Summer of Love festered into the Winter of Our Bad Craziness. Thus, by the time I got to the Rucka Rucka, I was in the right raw mood for the place. I remember two bright things glistening against this dreary backdrop. One was Eileen holding her beautiful baby girl, a catch-colt (as we used to call foals born out of pedigree) of Rex Jackson’s.”John Perry Barlow (814)

“I guess it was written for a young man whose father was dying.”Robert Hunter (1123)

“At that time my dad was dying of cancer and I would drive out and visit with him in the hospital and also at the nursing home that he spent his final days in. After Bob gave me the lyrics, on the way up there I would practice singing the song and I identified that song with my dad and his approaching death. The lyrics that he produced were so apt, so very moving. [Phil wrote the music for this song – Ed].”Phil Lesh (1123)