When I first met John Perry Barlow, we became instant soulmates. While that sentence is true for me, it also applies to probably 10,000 other people. That was Barlow—whether you were a world-famous avatar of LSD, a stuffy CEO, or the Vice President of the United States, he would win you over with his affable demeanor, arresting observations, and a mordant take on the human condition.

He had a unique and compelling credential—“junior lyricist of the Grateful Dead” was the way he put it—and he wielded it like an all-access laminate to the concert hall of life. His rock and roll bona fides was only one strand of a web of myths he pulled out of his suede jacket like a well-rolled joint: cowboy, poet, romantic, family man, philosopher, and ultimately, the bard of the digital revolution. He was an influential voice and an intimate participant in the early days of Wired, a co-founder and spiritual inspiration for the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), and the guy who promoted cyberspace as deftly as Steve Jobs hyped Apple. By the time he was done, he was more famous for proselytizing the internet than he was for co-writing “Cassidy” and other Dead classics.

Done he is—Barlow died in his sleep last night in San Francisco. He was 70 years old.

Barlow’s impact is such that even those who aren’t familiar with his name have long been grappling with his vision of the networked world, one where speech and creativity flow unfettered, and truth targets power with the speed of a bullet. But Barlow won’t be remembered only for the way he rustled prose, ideas or lyrics. IRL, he was bigger than life.

Barlow was never shy about sharing his biography. He hailed from Pinedale, Wyoming, where his family had lived for generations. He fatefully went off to a Colorado boarding school, where his roommate (and, naturally, soulmate) was future Dead guitarist Bob Weir. Barlow went to college in the liberal arts enclave of Wesleyan, where by his own description he cut a troubadour-ish figure with his motorcycle and ten-gallon Stetson. Back in Wyoming, he helped with the ranch, which seemed to have a function beyond raising cattle—a place where rich kids would go to get straightened out. One of those kids was John F. Kennedy Jr., who became a close Barlow friend. Meanwhile, as his former roommate Bob Weir found himself in a celebrated rock and roll band, Barlow began helping him put words to music, at first for a Weir solo album and then for the Dead in general.

I’m not sure how Barlow became interested in technology—maybe it was just his highly tuned zeitgeist antenna. Somehow he wound up at a Hackers Conference in 1989, where I met him. As a sometimes Deadhead, I had a fan-boy attraction to someone who was part of the family. But he was keenly interested in the world of hackers and we spoke endlessly about that. A few weeks later, when I scored a couple of tickets to the Bay Bridge World Series, I offered one to him. Twenty minutes before the starting time, the Earth shook—the Loma Prieta earthquake. It wasn’t until well after midnight that we found a working telephone to report ourselves alive to our respective wives.

Over the next few years, I watched with fascination as Barlow became a leading voice in technology. With no engineering experience whatsoever, he became a great explainer, turning his gift for bullshit into a force for comprehension. He could hang around a bunch of cryptographers for a while and two weeks later explain public key crypto (pretty much) to a room of bankers, diplomats, and corporate managers. Even more important, he grasped the soul of the technology, whether the transporting aspects of virtual reality or the glorious disruptiveness of friction-free distribution. In this current era of digital remorse, his Panglossian take on the net is sometimes mocked. But as he explained to Andy Greenberg a couple of years ago, he was all too aware that the possibilities he celebrated would be the artifacts of an ideal outcome, a scenario worth working for. One still worth dreaming about.