John Perry Barlow, who wrote...

...lyrics for "some 30 Grateful Dead songs in all" including "Hell in a Bucket," died at age 70.

I had never heard of Mr. Barlow, but from reading his obit in the Times he must have been a veritable Zelig (my emphasis):

As a student at Wesleyan University in Connecticut, Mr. Barlow took LSD trips with the Harvard psychologist Timothy Leary in Millbrook, N.Y., where Dr. Leary and others were living in a grand Georgian house.

In 1972, after his father died, he returned to Wyoming to manage the family’s debt-ridden ranch, the Bar Cross Land & Livestock Company. (Jaqueline Onassis sent John F. Kennedy Jr. to work as a wrangler there in 1978.) 

In Wyoming, he was chairman of the Sublette County Republican Party for a time and a coordinator for the 1978 congressional campaign of Dick Cheney, whose conservative politics Mr. Barlow later disavowed.

His preoccupation with the internet dated from the mid-1980s, when he began using a computer to manage the ranch’s finances. In 1986 he became a director of the WELL (the initials stand for Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link), an online community that drew members from the worlds of music, publishing and technology.

Mr. Barlow, an emeritus fellow of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, was also a founder of the Freedom of the Press Foundation in San Francisco, which promotes adversarial reporting and internet advocacy. The foundation’s president is Edward Snowden, the former government intelligence analyst who leaked secret documents to journalists in 2013.