Berkeley bash celebrates Bay Area beatnik

Celebrating what would have been the 100th birthday of Bay Area icon Neal Cassady on Jan. 17 at the Berkeley Art House is going to be a psychedelically tinged evening of creatives, musicians, deadheads and seekers.

For the uninitiated, Neal Cassady is the Sasquatch of 1960s legends and history. A man so fast he was only glimpsed at some of the most important events of the countercultural revolution. A highlight reel might include him pouring red wine out of a jug at the Six Gallery Reading in San Francisco where Allen Ginsberg first recited Howl. And being Bob Weir’s roommate in the Victorian at 710 Ashbury. He also drove Ken Kesey’s bus full of Merry Pranksters and notoriously appeared as the character Dean Moriarty in Jack Kerouac’s novel, On the Road.

According to beloved Bay Area historian Steve Silberman, “Neal Cassady was the kind of man who was not supposed to exist, basically heterosexual, but willing to fool around if he liked somebody or if the opportunity was there. Neal transcended sexual orientation binaries and shared that sexual awareness with his friend, Jack Kerouac.”

In today’s parlance, Neal Cassady was an influencer.

Playing at this gathering of freaks on Jan. 17 is local band Scarlett Fyre, whose renditions of Dead songs get the good vibes flowing. Guitarist Mark Schwartz got the groove bug early on but spent decades as a scientist, building companies and raising a family.

“I didn’t pick up my guitar for probably 35 years,” Schwartz said. “And one day I told my wife, ‘I want to go play.’ When I picked up my guitar, I sucked. During Covid, for two years, locked in my house, I relearned how to play.” And it paid off, as Fyre covers the music of the Dead with the best of them.

Neal’s daughter, Jami Cassady, holds the key to the estate and legacy, and has been very vocal about preserving the integrity and voice of her father. In late December Jami experienced respiratory ailments that required hospitalization. But don’t fear for her or the event, as her husband Randy will be appearing and telling some as-yet-unheard Neal Cassady stories.

“Nobody really knows what happened when Neal was arrested for having one joint on him. I have all the details,” Randy said from his home in Oakland, where he’s taking care of Jami’s recovery.

In a world of 15-minute-famous individuals, it’s breathtaking to take in an outsider like Neal Cassidy and his effects on culture. There’s an academic argument whether Jack Kerouac made Cassidy famous, or whether it was Cassidy’s ability to write and talk in streams of consciousness that broke down Kerouac’s dogmatic East Coast, Catholic persnicketiness and opened his mind enough to write On the Road.

“Neal was a master at taking the potential in the present moment and making it manifest,” said Silberman, who died in 2024. “He was not waiting for something or someone else to do something. He was always doing it and showing by example how you could live more intensely in the fleeting present moment. This idea can endlessly inspire people who have no idea what it was like to live in the 1950s or 60s.

“Young people have to find new ways that are appropriate to now,” Silberman said. “The worst mistake people make is that Neal was special, that he was a mythical superhero, that he was different from me and my friends, because we were born at the wrong time. Neal would have no patience for that thought.”

Neal Cassady embodied the philosophies of the beats and the hippies, and his writings, books and drawings will be available at the event.

“Go wrong this curve, set up for that, unless you got a flat or some other kind of suspension change, but what really matters is to not go on the other side of the railing unless you of course is really wailing, but they ain’t working against you, remember that, what’s in the way is going to join you, like they say on the railroad, you can always tell by the fear in your belly how limited you are,” he wrote in a letter to his daughter.

Note: Neal Cassady’s actual birthday is Feb. 8, but as they say—Never Trust a Prankster.

The Neal Cassady Birthday Bash happens at the Berkeley Art House and Cultural Center, 2905 Shattuck Ave., 7-10pm on Saturday, Jan. 17. Admission is $15-$25; students $10.