How John Perry Barlow once roasted Steve Jobs

By

John Perry Barlow
John Perry Barlow passed away earlier this year.
Photo: Crown Archetype

Given his influence and notorious temper, hosting a celebrity roast of Steve Jobs would have been pretty darn scary. But that’s what EFF co-founder, Grateful Dead lyricist and cyberlibertarian John Perry Barlow was once asked to do.

Even worse, it came at a time in Jobs’ career when seemingly everything was going wrong. The results earned Barlow — who passed away earlier this year — a severe telling off from Jobs’ wife, Laurene.

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Barlow’s new memoir

The anecdote comes from a new autobiography of Barlow, titled Mother American Night, which he completed work on just before his death in February. The book, which was co-written with Robert Greenfield, is a “must” for any Barlow fans, but it also contains a few choice stories about Steve Jobs, who Barlow met on several occasions.

Barlow writes that: “Steve made you care about what he thought of you, and even though you could pretend that you didn’t, you were kidding yourself.” Elsewhere, he notes that Jobs was “charismatic to the tits.”

The roast in question came in early 1993 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. Barlow recalls that:

“Roasts are usually meted out to people who are doing well, but the somewhat hollow quality of this roast might actually have been the nadir of Steve’s career. The NeXT was already failing as a hardware ploy, which was really sad because it was far and away the greatest computer ever made … My roast of him consisted mainly of gallows humor about the state of the company. I was aware of the pall hanging over the event, and I was trying to make light of it in a dark way.”

Facing off with Laurene Powell-Jobs

Afterwards, however, Barlow recalls that he was approached by Laurene Powell-Jobs, who had fairly recently married Steve. “She came at me with both spike heels right down my throat and lathered me up and down,” he wrote. “Like, ‘How dare you say that stuff? We thought you were a loyal partisan.’ I said, ‘I am a loyal partisan, but if NeXT is still manufacturing hardware next year at this time, [I will be very surprised.]”

Powell responded that Jobs wouldn’t be happy to hear him say that, although Barlow turned out to be quite correct with his prediction. “Laurene in full dudgeon was nobody to mess with,” he concludes — although he notes that “to his credit” Jobs never said anything negative to him about the roast.

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