by Travis Mateer
If the title of this post is raising your eyebrows, or ruffling your feathers, good. There’s a figurative mass grave that now exists where the bulk of my counter-culture influences have been unceremoniously delivered by veil-annihilators like Dave McGowan, and today’s post will make the case for sending Hunter S. Thompson to that unmarked location where a less discerning audience of worms and moles can have at him.
For Gen-X kids like myself, who grew up in the 80’s and early 90’s, the counter-culture of the previous generation was repackaged into movies like Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, with Johnny Depp stepping into the GONZO shoes of Hunter S. Thompson in order to sell us the script of drugs as rebellion. It worked quite well.
While I had the basic plot-points of the 60’s in mind as a rebellious youth, with events like the Rolling Stones performance at Altamont, and the death at the hands of the Hell’s Angels, in a neat box with a bow on top, McGowan changed all that with his book (then a web-series) called Weird Scenes Inside The Canyon. When I began to see the darker side of the counter-culture, I primed myself for the eventual tarnishing of Thompson, a tarnishing he damn well deserves.
I haven’t read the book that birthed the Gonzo persona yet, but I picked up a copy recently in Alberton. Here it is alongside a painted plastic skull I bought at the antique mall a few years ago. I’ll explain its significance later in the post.
For a taste of what this book contains, I found a quote that provides a glimpse of what embedding himself into this “motorcycle club” did to Thompson. This comes from a New York Times book review (1967):
Hunter Thompson entered this terra incognita to become its cartographer. For almost a year, he accompanied the Hell’s Angels on their rallies. He drank at their bars, exchanged home visits, recorded their brutalities, viewed their sexual caprices, became converted to their motorcycle mystique, and was so intrigued, as he puts it, that “I was no longer sure whether I was doing research on the Hell’s Angels or being slowly absorbed by them.”
The skull pictured above (to the left of Thompson’s book) is painted by a Hell’s Angels tattoo artist. The man I bought it from is someone my gut told me was into some weird shit. He no longer has a vendor spot at the antique mall, but I have several objects from his collection. I believe it’s authentic, and creepy as hell.
The darker, albeit more speculative side of Hunter S. Thompson, is examined in this blog post where I came across the NYT book review quote. I’m familiar with much of the speculation, so won’t rehash it here. Instead I’ll make note of some early impressions I’m taking away from this book, which I just picked up a few weeks ago.
Peter Richardson has no idea the gem he has provided in the introduction to someone like me who stopped venerating Thompson years ago. Before getting to that gem, it’s important to understand that Richardson wants to essentially canonize Thompson on his literary merits, something the all-encompassing GONZO persona hasn’t allowed other biographers to do, Richardson claims.
To make his case, Richardson makes an important concession that’s obvious to anyone who has tried to help a creative “sculpt” their end-product, and that’s the role of the editors in Hunter’s life who did much of the heavy lifting when it came to making the drug-fueled pages coherent to a wider audience. But that’s not the gem I found.
Richardson obviously has a big affinity for how Thompson communicates, and much of this communication is in the form of letters (note to younger generations: writers used to write something called LETTERS to friends, and this ephemera helped provide insights into the artist’s world). And this is where the gem comes in, because Peter Richardson doesn’t have access to Thompson’s letters. Here is Richardson explaining the barrier to the archive and what that has meant for his argument that Thompson is an accomplished literary force (emphasis mine):
The inaccessibility of Thompson’s archive has made that work more difficult. At the time of this writing, the archive is reportedly housed in a Los Angeles storage facility and contains some eight hundred boxes of material, including a massive trove of letters that Thompson began producing and saving as a youth. Authors often sell or donate their papers to research libraries to enable the scholarly study of their work, but Thompson’s archive was purchased in 2008 and has been held privately ever since.
I had a hunch about the timing of this archive purchase. When did Nick Bryant’s book about the Franklin scandal come out–the same scandal some researchers think implicates Thompson in the production of snuff films?
While this isn’t explicit proof of anything in particular, I find the timing, and inaccessibility of the archive, to be quite curious. Who was the buyer?
Oddly the book doesn’t name the famous actor who bought the archive. Why not name Johnny Depp as the person who is keeping scholars from perusing Thompson’s letters and other materials? I don’t know, but Johnny Depp didn’t just buy the archive for shits and giggles. Depp is deeply enamored with the man he played on the big screen, going so far as spending 3 million dollars on a custom cannon to shoot Thompson’s ashes into the air for funeral attendees, which included John Kerry. From the link:
The reason the Hunter S. Thompson cannon story is so funny is that of course the ashes being shot out of the cannon belonged to Hunter S. Thompson, and not, say, Peter Jennings, or even David Foster Wallace. Hunter S. Thompson’s influence on modern journalism and pop culture looms over us like the 153-foot-tall tower Depp had constructed to house the cannon he shot Thompson’s ashes out of; it is not surprising that luminaries like then-Senator John Kerry and Jack Nicholson were there to witness his cannon-ash ceremony.
I don’t want to think that Hunter S. Thompson was bestowed with the ability to deploy his GONZO persona because he was a part of a depraved network of elites, but everything I’ve learned about the counter-culture during the course of my research over the years points to Thompson’s involvement in some very dark stuff. I hope I’m wrong.
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There is only one flaw to your hypothesis: it’s without a shred of specified evidence. HST a participant in production of snuff films? Really? “Some people” believe this….which reminds me of pathological liar Trump’s oft-invoked preface to a whopper accusing someone of despicable conduct: “Some people are saying that…”.
Hell’s Angels: the Sad and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs (if I got the subtitle correct from memory) was, and is, a journalistic *masterpiece.* It was the Big Bang that created the New Journalism Universe with Gonzo at its center. Gonzo was influenced by the writings of Beats such as author Kerouac, poet Ginsburg, et al but HST made it into a form all its own. Nominally, Gonzo simply connotes the relation of experiential information through the first-person, unfiltered perspective of one participating in the experience. As such, it is quite maleable. The tone of Hell’s Angels is far, far different from that of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, or even Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72 (which period political science academics with unfettered minds deemed one of the best works written about U.S. Presidential electoral politics, notwithstanding its hilarious fabrications, which served as caricatures of the actual, hidden trurh). Those two F & L works, unlike Hunter’s comparativeiy serious endeavor in Hell’s Angels, exploit Hunter’s innate comic genius and propensity for inciting laugh hysteria via envelope-pushing utilization of shocking allusions. In this, Hunter appropriated the Acid Tests of Kesey, the Dead, et al and turned it into cash.
The progenitors of mid-late 20th Century U.S. counterculture did not comprise and did not unleash something that was/is “the” counterculture. The “counterculture,” like Cubism or Dadaism, manifested in innumerable mostly disconnected facets. Much of the publicly perceived ‘counterculture’ was the invention of Madison Avenue. The 70s were ushered in by momentous counterculure art, music, poetry and sexual freedom, recreational drugs of all types according to personality, but by mid-decade the 70s had so coopted, packaged and monetized the “counterculture” that it ceased to be real.and instead was a gargantuan caricature hawked by hip capitalists, giving us the likes of Sonny Bono and Tony Orlando.
Damn, wish I had more time and space. HST, who honed his writing by producing a base.newspaper while in the Air Force, was both a serious journalist in his way, and what some might call either a “victim” or a mind-expanded beneficiary, of the Timothy Leary/Ken Kesey LSD guru-ism that changed Everything. But would you classify HST as a Head and counterculturist in the same vein as say, Jerry Garcia? Fuck no. Hunter loved to.shoot big fucking guns. Jerry would’ve wished away all the world’s guns, if he could have.
Yet in innumerable passages, even in F & L in Las Vegas, HST utters some abaolutely inaightful.and resonating Truth about The Human Condition. I was a high school sophomore when I first read Las Vegas, which was urged on me by the late Gonzo attorney at large Robert J. Campbell. This was a major turning point in my youth that in myriad ways set the general course of the rest of my life. The book was like a sort of bible and I went through many copies, as I gave them to my chums after rereading them over and over. Now, a half century later, I can’t read Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas for more than a few minutes, as I get nauseous or cataplectic after a while.
The Depp film was spot on with the book. Nobody but Depp ever played HST like only Johnny Depp could. If anyone has a penchant for recreational drugs, edgy sexual frolics, cult of personality and loud gunfire, it’s Johnny Depp.
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