Informant38

.....on the Rucka Rucka Ranch, a dust-pit of a one-horse ranch in the Nicasio Valley of West Marin which Bobby inhabited along with a variable cast of real characters.

These included Cassidy's mother Eileen, a good woman who was then and is still the patron saint of the Deadheads, the wolf-like Rex Jackson, a Pendleton cowboy turned Grateful Dead roadie in whose memory the Grateful Dead's Rex Foundation is named, Frankie Weir, Bobby's ol' lady and the subject of the song Sugar Magnolia, Sonny Heard, a Pendleton bad ol' boy who was also a GD roadie, and several others I can't recall.

There was also a hammer-headed Appaloosa stud, a vile goat, and miscellaneous barnyard fowl which included a peacock so psychotic and aggressive that they had to keep a 2 x 4 next to the front door to ward off his attacks on folks leaving the house. In a rural sort of way, it was a pretty tough neighborhood.....

{that's cyber-statesman JPBarlow on the incarnation of the GDead tune "Cassidy".

among the many little-known facts of my biography are a transformative psychedelic meeting up with Neal Cassady at the Pranksters' barn in Scotts Valley in '66, and a short term residency just over the hills a little (toward SPTaylor) from said Rucka Rucka Ranch in the late 70's.
there's a moment in episode 2 of 'Intrepid Traveler and Friends Look For A Kool Place', the Prankster bus movie, where there's a shot of one of the stunning distaff members' gams (boy those girls were good-lookin) in a swimsuit with her inner thigh exhibiting a little white scar and then the edit cuts to Cassady's permanent monologue and he jump-stutters the first syllable of the word 'children'.
ch-children.

so go read 'The First Third'. it's there, never laid out in stark terms, but it's there. that guy was eminently lovable, supremely lovable. and a dispenser of that full-system compassion that's impossible to imitate.}