March 13, 2019 - The Joe Rogan Experience
01:28:00
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| Five. | ||
| You get less enthusiastic after it's been a few times. | ||
| You're like, you're not really... | ||
| We're live? | ||
| All right, we're live. | ||
| What's up, man? | ||
| How are you? | ||
| Thanks for doing this. | ||
| Thanks for having me. | ||
| My pleasure. | ||
| Sorry for the false starts. | ||
| We've been having issues with our equipment. | ||
| Good to see you, though, man. | ||
| What's up? | ||
| Good to be here and talk Hunter Thompson. | ||
| My pleasure. | ||
| So your book, Freak Kingdom... | ||
| You know, we live in interesting times right now. | ||
| It's kind of a shit show at every single moment. | ||
| Keep this about a fist from your face. | ||
| Pull that sucker. | ||
| There you go. | ||
| What should I do with my hands? | ||
| Should I put them up? | ||
| You can do whatever you want with your hands, man. | ||
| But I shoot with this one. | ||
| What is all this... | ||
| You've got a lot of writing. | ||
| Well... | ||
| When I wrote the book, I wanted to make sure my sentences never sounded like Thompson's sentences. | ||
| So I didn't write out a lot of his sentences, but this morning before coming on, I went and got some of my favorite quotes and just wrote them out longhand to get a sense of what his perspective was and rhythm was again. | ||
| Didn't he do that with The Great Gatsby? | ||
| He did it a few times. | ||
| He did it by hand. | ||
| He typed it out. | ||
| I love that idea that he was trying to find the rhythm of the words. | ||
| That's such a fascinating notion. | ||
| Because comedians do that in the early days of comedy, like a lot of guys... | ||
| Before they ever start going on stage themselves, they'll imitate their favorite comedian's bits. | ||
| Like they'll do a Richard Pryor bit. | ||
| And they'll do it to their friends and they'll get a sense of the rhythm and the timing and get those laughs from doing a Richard Pryor bit to their friends. | ||
| And then they get that bug. | ||
| It's like part of what infects them. | ||
| I mean, that's the hardest thing to steal. | ||
| We're not plagiarizing, but we're trying to understand what decisions they made. | ||
| Beautiful work. | ||
| Yeah, I'm sure he wasn't plagiarizing. | ||
| But it's... | ||
| It's so unfortunate when someone does. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yes. | |
| You know, when you have someone, whether it's Hunter or Richard Pryor, anyone who's just got a truly exceptional and unique mind. | ||
| Or someone who doesn't like our president and decided when he ran in 2016 to plagiarize Richard Nixon's 1968 convention speech in Miami. | ||
|
unidentified
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Did he do that? | |
| Directly. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah, that was the headline in the fucking Times that said, Nixon's inspiration. | ||
| I'm sorry, Trump's inspiration. | ||
| Nixon is the one. | ||
| So the lines about crime and barbarians at the gates, crime, law and order, those were all from Nixon's shitty but successful 1968 Miami Convention speech. | ||
| And Thompson knew how effective that that was. | ||
| Yeah, I wonder if he did that on purpose. | ||
| Because he was so good. | ||
| And one thing that Trump is so good at, he's so good at getting the media to talk about him. | ||
| And one of the best ways to get the media to talk about him was give them something to be angry about that no one else is going to give a fuck about. | ||
| He was like, oh, Melania plagiarized, but I plagiarized much better from Nixon. | ||
| Oh, that's right. | ||
| Trump would have loved it. | ||
| Melania took some lines from Michelle Obama's speech, right? | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| Well, if you plagiarize Nixon, that's okay. | ||
| I mean, so, Freak Kingdom, the book about Hunter S. Thompson, I mean, it's really about taking the fucking emotion of living in this present, looking back at Thompson's career, and then trying to write it like a novel to dramatize all of the experiences he went through that are today so applicable to us, and just show his perspective that's so applicable to us today. | ||
| What do you got here, Jamie? | ||
| From New York Times. | ||
| It's Donald Trump's convention, but the inspiration, Nixon. | ||
| I was like, you're running on Nixon? | ||
| That's what you're running on? | ||
| There are some parallels, you know? | ||
| I mean, do you remember when... | ||
| When Hunter got together with Bill Murray and Bill's brother, and they did that thing where they were trying to get people to, Nixon got a bad deal, we gotta bring him back. | ||
| And people were going along with it. | ||
| Yeah, that's a good, yeah. | ||
| Remember that? | ||
| There's a lot of parallels with Trump in that regard. | ||
| I mean, one of my favorite quotes by Thompson is like, Richard Nixon is – with his Barbie doll family and his Barbie doll wife is like America's answer to – is America's Dr. Jekyll to Mr. Hyde. | ||
| He is the werewolf. | ||
| He speaks to the werewolf in us. | ||
| And Nixon chose to hide that werewolf his whole career until it finally came out because he was insane with power. | ||
| Trump ran on the werewolf. | ||
| He's like, no, I'm not going to hide it. | ||
| That's who I am. | ||
| That's what I'm going to use to try to get elected. | ||
| And like George Wallace did, like other politicians did, it had resonance and it happened with Trump because of our media environment, because of the place we live in now, to amplify him all the way to the most powerful position in the world, which is insane. | ||
| It would be really fascinating to see, if Hunter was alive and in his prime now, how he would... | ||
| I think his take on it would be very similar to Matt Taibbi's. | ||
| Matt Taibbi is, in my opinion, our more reasonable, more put-together version of Hunter Thompson, because he's more disciplined. | ||
| Sustained, more long-career version of Hunter Thompson. | ||
| He's rational and he's there all the time. | ||
| I'm sure you've heard the recently uncovered recording of Hunter calling in to some company that installed a DVD player and he's fucking screaming and yelling. | ||
| It's like 15 minutes long. | ||
| And then he gets lost and he goes, what the fuck? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| my fucking chords I mean that was the 1980s were not the best you know I think what Taibbi does is what Thompson did very well Hunter Thompson was really good at looking at Nixon saying how are you manipulating the way we see you to get a version of you out and Taibbi looks at the way the media gets played he looks at the way that an administration manipulates the media and he dramatizes that while everybody else just gives us the information the administration's giving us and that goes back to Thompson with Nixon Thompson had space when he worked for Rolling Stone | ||
| He could write about how Nixon made everybody watch his speeches, the press, on a closed circuit television. | ||
| And they made the press, just like Trump, off in the corner when the plane arrived, you know, being berated by everybody. | ||
| It's very similar to what is going on now. | ||
| And again, we see people giving hot takes or we see people doing op-eds. | ||
| We don't see people dramatizing how manipulative these corrupt administrations are and were. | ||
| And Thompson did that beautifully. | ||
| Taibbi does that beautifully. | ||
| Trevor Burrus Was Nixon being berated by the press? | ||
| Is that why he chose to have them? | ||
| Well, he thought he was. | ||
| I mean he was a crook, so he doesn't want the press to investigate him. | ||
| He was a crook with San Clemente, like his loans with Bibi Rebozo and all of that. | ||
| He was a crook the way he used the IRS to investigate his enemies. | ||
| He was a crook when he tried to break into the Brookings Institution to destroy and bomb evidence. | ||
| He didn't want the press around him because he had committed very serious crimes. | ||
| I think that's similar to what we see now. | ||
| I mean, as people said on the show, no president wants a journalist digging into their lives specifically because you don't want chumminess with journalists. | ||
| But I think Trump and Nixon both knew they had so much to hide that to actually have a journalist like Hunter Thompson, who was a good investigative journalist, to have a journalist like Matt Taibbi around, that's dangerous for them. | ||
| They'll go to jail, which Nixon should have and Trump perhaps should. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| Well, who knows what's going to happen. | ||
| How did you get involved with writing this book? | ||
| Well, I mean, I've always loved Honor S. Thompson. | ||
| How did you get exposed to him? | ||
| You know, I was 17 years old in Catholic high school at Bellarmine College Preparatory up in San Jose, and we had a counterculture writing class. | ||
| And so I read some of it in there, and then a friend had an audiobook of Fear and Loathing. | ||
| And so I just remember the first time hearing that old audiobook of Fear and Loathing. | ||
| We're somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert. | ||
| And then in my 20s, I really got into Strange Rumblings in Ozatlan, which is about a conspiracy within the Los Angeles Police Department regarding the death of Ruben Salazar, a prominent journalist. | ||
| I read that and I'm like, oh my god, dude. | ||
| This isn't somebody that's just dancing on stage or performing a road narrative. | ||
| This is an investigative journalist who's going to the most powerful people. | ||
| Exposing things they don't want us to see, and in a sense, risking his life to do so, because he says in Strange Romalings in Aslan, which is in Rolling Stone in 1970, he says that they're willing to kill Ruben Salazar, who was the most prominent journalist in Los Angeles, you could argue at the time. | ||
| What the fuck is to stop them from killing me, Hunter Thompson, for asking these questions? | ||
| Well, I think that's what a lot of people are saying today with Jamil Khashoggi. | ||
| You know, Jamal Khashoggi's death has got a lot of journalists really freaking out. | ||
| Like, what am I doing if I'm criticizing world leaders and talking about international politics if this could happen to me? | ||
| Political violence is effective because it's used to silence either opposition or journalists. | ||
| For me, writing this book, and I tried to dramatize it like a novel, it's quick, it's like only 220-210 pages, and then it's like 100 pages of notes, so I cited every sight, smell, or sound, so that somebody that knows Thompson really well can be like, where the fuck did you get this information? | ||
| And somebody else can, if they have questions, just go back and look, but Long story short, for me, the crux of the book was in Chicago in 1968, where Hunter Thompson had a press pass. | ||
| He went to the Democratic National Convention. | ||
| On Wednesday night, Mayor Daley gave this order to clear the intersection of Balboa and Michigan because there was a protest going on, five, ten thousand people. | ||
| Thompson was standing next to the Haymarket Inn, which was on the ground floor level. | ||
| It was a plate glass window. | ||
| He was standing with delegates from the Democratic National Convention, standing with their wives. | ||
| And the cops charged. | ||
| They did like a double pincher formation like Hannibal and like Kumai and like fucking 100 BC and they split the protesters in half, beat everybody, hit Thompson over the head. | ||
| He got his motorcycle helmet on just in time so he's not concussed. | ||
| He can see everything that's going on and the entire plate glass window behind him. | ||
| It shatters. | ||
| Everybody falls in. | ||
| Cops jump in, are beating everybody. | ||
| And he's looking around and he's sure that snipers on the roof are going to open fire at any moment. | ||
| So he runs to the Blackstone where he's staying across the way, shows his room key, gets beat up by the cops as he's trying to get in. | ||
| He goes, I live here, goddammit. | ||
| I'm paying $100 a day. | ||
| Let me in my fucking room. | ||
| And he barely gets in. | ||
| And he just sits on his bed afterwards and he says, They knew I was pressed. | ||
| They saw my press pass. | ||
| They hit me because I was pressed. | ||
| And if that's where we're at right now with journalists, you know, if political opponents and journalists are being clubbed to keep silent and to not respond, then this is not the democracy we know. | ||
| Yeah, his ex-wife talked about that as being like one of the only moments where she saw him cry. | ||
| For two weeks. | ||
| He just cried afterwards for two weeks. | ||
| He couldn't stop. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| It was a crazy time, right? | ||
| I mean, that time is very similar in a lot of ways to what's going on today. | ||
| It's just today there's just so much more information and so much more – people have so much more of an ability to communicate. | ||
| Yeah, and I think it's almost easier to coordinate violence. | ||
| I was just talking to the head of the Proud Boys, Gavin McGinnis' group. | ||
|
unidentified
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Mm-hmm. | |
| I'm a victim. | ||
| I can't buy groceries. | ||
| They've taken my bank accounts, my plant forms. | ||
| But when he talks about violence, he's like, who the fuck are you, Antifa? | ||
| Like I'm, you know, you're 120 pounds and wet. | ||
| Like if we have civil war, you're going to lose. | ||
| And I was sitting next to him during the podcast. | ||
| And basically what I said was, if we have a civil war, you're going to be hit by sniper fire from the fucking roof. | ||
| You're not going to be in a fistfight with Antifa across the way. | ||
| And I think there's this idea on the right that we can push towards violence and we can get very close to it with our rhetoric or with our actions, but that it won't spread, like the conflagration won't keep going. | ||
| Yeah, I don't know if that's isolated to the right. | ||
| I mean, with Antifa on the left, too. | ||
| And that's why I love Thompson was as hard on the left as he was on the right when he wrote. | ||
| And that was so important for his intelligence as a writer. | ||
| Well, I think just even the left and the right in general for a lot of these people is just an identity and a gang that they belong to. | ||
| And I don't think they really understand violence. | ||
| You know, you want to talk about violence, talk to a military guy. | ||
| You know, talk to someone who really understands what violence actually is. | ||
| And they don't We don't have this empty rhetoric like these fools do. | ||
| There's a lot of these people that are calling for violence. | ||
| You should be calling for camaraderie. | ||
| You should be calling for communication. | ||
| We should be calling for some way we could all work this out, where the civilians, the civilization that we live in, that we all can get along together, and most people don't want to impede you from living your life and doing what you want to do. | ||
| Most people. | ||
| The vast majority. | ||
| Hunter Thompson believed in working within the system. | ||
| He believed it might be a fucked up system, but you can still run for sheriff in Aspen. | ||
| And he believed once you resort to violence, that means the conversation is stopped. | ||
| And it disfigures you. | ||
| So he cried for two weeks. | ||
| That was the most surprising thing for me, researching this book and writing it. | ||
| Was to see how much the violence affected him that he experienced at Chicago. | ||
| And you can speak to someone who's done MMA fighting, who's been punched in the face as hard as somebody can punch you. | ||
| Most Americans haven't had that. | ||
| And that changes your ability to articulate something back in that moment. | ||
| It means if that's political, if it's a police officer or a political opponent that uses violence instead of an argument to respond to you, we've left the realm that we recognize and we're not going to be able to communicate even in the limited way that we're communicating right now. | ||
| And Thompson knew that. | ||
| So that's why after Chicago, I love that he went back to Aspen. | ||
| And he's like, I'm going to run for fucking sheriff. | ||
| I'm going to do a mayoral campaign in Aspen. | ||
| And that was brilliant because it was his way to control his environment knowing that Mayor Daley is not listening to his nonviolent protest. | ||
| Richard Nixon is not listening to his nonviolent protest. | ||
| Thompson needed to find another avenue. | ||
| To try to work within the American system to make things happen. | ||
| A great contrast is his good friend Oscar Zeta Acosta. | ||
| There's a wonderful PBS documentary, Rise and Fall of the Brown Buffalo, by Philip Guadarrigas, a great director, and it's Acosta's life. | ||
| That's who Dr. Gonzo is based on. | ||
|
unidentified
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Sure. | |
| In Fear and Loathing, you know, Thompson had more advantages than Acosta, and Acosta was being pursued by the LAPD, was eventually set up by them. | ||
| And for him, working within the system, he ran for sheriff. | ||
| It wasn't an option. | ||
| The cops set him up for a high-speed bust. | ||
| You know, like the cops had undercover agents from something called the Special Operations for Conspiracy, which is a fucking department in the LAPD at the time. | ||
| And they were trying to use those provocateurs to incite violence against the plainclothes police so that – or the normal clothes police so that lethal violence could be used to silence civil rights movement in the Brown Barrett. | ||
| So they used agent provocateurs to make it look like they were part of the protest? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| That is an age-old tactic. | ||
| Right? | ||
| That's how you destroy a civil rights movement because the most effective weapon in silencing civil rights is the lethal force. | ||
| And you can do that in another country as the U.S. has done, but the U.S. can't use tactics like My Lie, like Thompson writes about this, in the U.S. unless you have a provocative reason, unless somebody that's undercover attacks a cop. | ||
| And so the cops then, like what happened on August 29, 1970, during the moratorium riots, can just flood East L.A. and kill whoever they want. | ||
| They blew Ruben Salazar's head off with a tear gas gun. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Yeah, those are darker days when you couldn't communicate as well, and I think that's one of the reasons why Hunter decided to run for sheriff in Aspen, is that he felt like he could control that area, like it would have a direct impact on his life. | ||
| The local politics have a real impact on your day-to-day existence, whereas what's going on in Washington, for the most part, it's not affecting you if you're living in Woody Creek. | ||
| I mean, there were people that had Nixon's point of view in Aspen who were like, let's develop this valley beyond what it can hold in terms of its environment. | ||
| Let's imprison hippies because they are going to take away from our tourist economy. | ||
| Let's not adhere to normal civil rights laws. | ||
| And so Thompson, you know, in a participatory democracy, almost a Jeffersonian democracy way, ran for sheriff by emphasizing personal agency and most of all trying to get out the youth vote, like people who had left the political system but were living in Aspen. | ||
| A lot of people like hippies who had fled the cities in the late 1960s and were living, you know, in the West. | ||
| And he got them involved and they should have won the mayoral campaign with Joe Edwards. | ||
| Thompson was the director of that and they lost by like six votes. | ||
| And when he ran for sheriff, it got really bad. | ||
| And he talks about this in Fear and Living on the campaign trail later, is that a few nights before, both parties, the Democrats and the Republicans, freaked out. | ||
| And so the Democrats said, all right, we'll kind of throw our weight behind you, the Republican sheriff, and then you Republicans will throw your weight for county manager behind our candidate. | ||
| And so Thompson ended up losing by like 200 or 300 votes. | ||
| And so in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas on the campaign trail in 1972, he's at the Nixon campaign. | ||
| Nixon's giving his acceptance speech at the convention. | ||
| Thompson's with the Nixon youth who are about to do a demonstration. | ||
| And he says, like, you know, I'm not a journalist. | ||
| You can't kick me out. | ||
| Like, I'm a political observer. | ||
| He's like, have you ever run for office? | ||
| And the Nixon guy is like... | ||
| No, have you? | ||
| And Thompson's like, Sheriff. | ||
| And I would have won. | ||
| But the liberals stuck it to me. | ||
| And he was right. | ||
| I love how he shaved his head, too, so he could refer to his long-haired opponent. | ||
| My long... | ||
| I mean, that was a great... | ||
| That debate... | ||
| So in the book, I recreate that debate a lot, because there's transcripts of it. | ||
| That debate is brilliant. | ||
|
unidentified
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It is brilliant. | |
| Thompson is amazing at that. | ||
| The guy's like, I've only used my gun once in 10 years, but I like to have it. | ||
| And Thompson's like... | ||
| Well, if you've used it once in 10 years, maybe you don't need it. | ||
| We could try not having it. | ||
| You know, and his gun rights views were very complex and changed after Bobby Kennedy's death. | ||
| But he was so intelligent on stage with this sheriff who's like, I just want this job real bad, like gulping, like, you know, it couldn't. | ||
| This was eviscerated by Thompson. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, it's a really interesting, the documentary that follows the campaign and when you get to see him, you know, heart fallen when he loses. | ||
| You got a sense of what, there was real hope back then, like that if these guys could do that. | ||
| And what's interesting now is, you know, back in the 70s, they really did have a freak community in Aspen. | ||
| That shit's gone now. | ||
| I don't know what happened. | ||
| The millionaires have replaced the millionaires, is what I was told when I went out to do research. | ||
| That's a weird place, man. | ||
| You go to Aspen, you see these, like, $20 million houses, and people, like, it's one of the rare places where people still wear fur coats, you know? | ||
| Not ironically, or fake, but real fur coats. | ||
| Well, if you wear a fur coat in LA, first of all, it's never cold enough for a fur coat. | ||
| But if you did, you might get fucked up. | ||
| You're gonna get blood thrown on you. | ||
| Some shit could go down. | ||
| You know, like, most likely nothing's going to happen, but there's a possible chance, which is really weird, because if you wear a leather jacket, you have no problem. | ||
| It's weird, you know? | ||
|
unidentified
|
It is weird. | |
| I mean, Aspen's weird because a lot of Thompson's friends, like Lauren Jenkins, a great journalist, they've moved down to Basalt, let's say Down Valley. | ||
| So I was out there with his son. | ||
| Juan Thompson is a fantastic writer. | ||
| He wrote a book called Stories I Tell Myself about his relationship with his father. | ||
| Yeah, I've been in contact with Juan through email. | ||
| He's a really good writer. | ||
| And he's a really honest and brilliant writer. | ||
| He seems like a good dude, and he seemed like a really good dude in the Gonzo documentary as well. | ||
| That was a great documentary. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Yeah, I'm a big fan of Gibney. | ||
| He always kills it. | ||
| I went to the tavern in Woody Creek when I was in town. | ||
| I felt like, if I'm here... | ||
| You gotta go. | ||
| I gotta go there. | ||
| It's weird. | ||
| It's weird being there, man. | ||
| When did you go? | ||
| How long ago was that? | ||
| I guess it was a year ago, a year and a half ago. | ||
| Were people on bicycles just riding their bikes by the whole time? | ||
| It's on this huge bike route now. | ||
| Oh, it was cold as fuck. | ||
| It was the winter. | ||
| We were there for a ski trip. | ||
| What did you think of it? | ||
| Well, it was just cool. | ||
| You know, it's like there's places you go to where you just... | ||
| I was with my family. | ||
| They didn't give a fuck. | ||
| My kids have no idea who he is. | ||
| The children listening here need to know who he is. | ||
| My kids will learn eventually, but they're just eating enchiladas. | ||
| To me, it represented a big part of who he is. | ||
| This is his home base. | ||
| Dude, he came out. | ||
| So he's in San Francisco. | ||
| There's a picture of me there. | ||
| I think there's a picture of me there on my Instagram. | ||
| That was a special place for him. | ||
| When he was in San Francisco, it was like being on the central nerve. | ||
| He was there from 64 to 67 or 66. And he saw the first Jefferson Airplane concert. | ||
| He was right next to the Matrix. | ||
| He went out every night until like 5 a.m. | ||
| He was with the Hells Angels. | ||
| That's awesome. | ||
| Yeah, I got hammered there too. | ||
| Out of respect. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Quite a few margaritas. | ||
| But here he could divide his life up. | ||
| Look, the freak power. | ||
| If you haven't seen the background, that freak power. | ||
| Yeah, the sheriff's campaign symbol. | ||
| But he moved to Woody Creek and he suddenly had – you see it in his – you see it when you interview people that know him. | ||
| You see it in his letters. | ||
| He had space again. | ||
| And being in the city was hard for him because he could write beautifully about the Hells Angels, about the countercultural scene. | ||
| He was at war protests and the free speech movement with Mario Savio. | ||
| He was there, but it was burning him up. | ||
| You know, it was using him up. | ||
| And I think when he went to Woody Creek, he learned that, all right, I can take a plane to Chicago, get my ass kicked, but I can come back. | ||
| And if I want to have a drink, I can go to that tavern or I can go to the Jerome Hotel. | ||
| And that's a good space. | ||
| And I think that was a good space for him. | ||
| Well, I think that's probably a very intelligent move on his behalf. | ||
| And a lot of us, I think, that are involved in day-to-day chaos would probably benefit from something similar. | ||
| I mean, I just don't think he gets enough credit for his effort. | ||
| You know, one thing I found when writing the book, I interviewed Bob Geiger, who Fear and Loathing is dedicated to, and who was a doctor that was a friend of his in Sonoma. | ||
| And Geiger initially was the one who prescribed him dexedrine. | ||
| And so people think Thompson was just doing acid in writing or Whatever. | ||
| And maybe later as a caricature or whoever he became, that might have been part of his persona. | ||
| But when he was writing from – the book is from Kennedy's assassination to Nixon's resignation. | ||
| He was working so fucking hard. | ||
| Like he was working harder than we can ever imagine. | ||
| Douglas Wrinkley is the presidential historian who does his – Literary Estate talks about Thompson wasn't as fun as he seemed during that time. | ||
| He took dexectrine to write and he had a drinking problem. | ||
| Dexectrine is some sort of an amphetamine? | ||
| It's Adderall. | ||
| It's Adderall that's cut differently with salt. | ||
| So it's a little bit like you go a little higher and when it comes down, it's a little harder. | ||
| Well, Adderall was Obitrol, which was an old diet drug that was repurposed in like 96. That is a little bit smoother in that sense, but it's very similar to what... | ||
| To what Thompson took. | ||
| He had a great editor named Margaret Harrell, who was his editor on Hell's Angels. | ||
| And he didn't know she was 27 when he was 29. He thought she was like 55 because they would talk on the phone every day to edit the book. | ||
| And he sent her, she still has the letter. | ||
| I've done some events with her. | ||
| She still has the actual letter. | ||
| He sent her a five milligram dexedrine. | ||
| He's like, hey, it's going to be hard the last 10 pages to edit. | ||
| Take this and focus. | ||
| So she still has it, this orange little five milligram dexedrine for 40, 50 years. | ||
| She's had it. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| Yeah, that Gibney documentary is really fantastic. | ||
| It's probably one of the best introductions that anybody could have to try to get a grip on why, after all these years, Hunter resonates with so many people. | ||
| I mean, I think that the Gibney documentary is brilliantly and perfectly done. | ||
| I think that Thompson means something different with Donald Trump as president of the United States. | ||
| To me, people could see it before Gibney saw it before. | ||
| Other brilliant writers saw it before Taibbi did. | ||
| But when Donald Trump became president of the United States, it was a lens. | ||
| On to the past, I felt like. | ||
| I mean, I'm a bitch-ass liberal. | ||
| I was fucking upset. | ||
| And so one of the ways I dealt with it was to just remove myself to 1968, 1967, 1969. And I took the emotion I had in the present. | ||
| And I realized that Thompson is such a voice right now for people that maybe don't know him, only know him through Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Terry Gilliam's film. | ||
| I would like freaking to be a lens that now, if they read that, They could then read his work and perhaps, you know, what his timelessness will come through more. | ||
| It was an attempt to focus that timelessness. | ||
| And what helped was the fucking terror of our present. | ||
| Yeah, you can see, you definitely see the parallels in his work. | ||
| You know, who also rings true like that is a lot of Bill Hicks stuff on the first Gulf War, you know, and Bush as a president and, you know, which obviously people today would probably be dying to have Bush as president. | ||
| He seemed so smart. | ||
| He carried his book around for two weeks. | ||
| At least he carried a book. | ||
| Well, Herbert Walker, the older bush, was much more of a reasonable gentleman. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, that's our discourse today, too, where there couldn't be anything said reasonably about him when he passed away or even about his wife. | ||
| I mean, I think he's not very favorable right now, but one of Hunter Thompson's main influences was Norman Mailer. | ||
| And I don't think Norman Mailer writes well about women. | ||
| I think Thompson wrote better about women. | ||
| Thompson didn't just often write about women. | ||
| What's the criticism? | ||
| I'm not familiar with... | ||
| Well, Mailer, whenever he writes about a woman, it's like he's watching the Nixonettes get off the Nixon airplane, and he's like, there were 33 redheads, like five head long legs like this. | ||
| It's like, Mailer, you didn't need to write that fucking passage. | ||
| You're writing about power and people... | ||
| I think Miller writes beautifully about men that have more power than him. | ||
| And so he writes about 1968 in Chicago where Thompson didn't because Thompson was beat up. | ||
| And he writes about that moment of where Thompson's being beat up. | ||
| I'm confused. | ||
| But what is the criticism of the way he's writing about women? | ||
| Just he's describing them physically? | ||
| The male gaze. | ||
| He stabbed his wife in the heart. | ||
| Did he really? | ||
| Yeah, with a penknife. | ||
| What? | ||
| Yeah, he went to Bellevue for 14 days. | ||
| It was in 1960. That's it? | ||
| He missed it. | ||
| Yeah, no, he did a psychiatric evaluation instead of going to jail. | ||
|
unidentified
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What? | |
| I think they stayed married. | ||
| What? | ||
| Boy, what a reasonable lady. | ||
| We can dialogue on gender politics later. | ||
| But I would say that Thompson wrote well, better about women because he understood that writing about people with more power than you is really important. | ||
| And when Mailer writes about people with more power than him, when he writes about Mayor Daley beating the shit out of everybody, he writes really beautifully. | ||
| And that's somebody that's resonating right now with what Trump's doing and with the violence that we're seeing on the right and on the left. | ||
| Where Mailer was sitting with Pat Buchanan, who was Nixon's main aide, during that moment in Chicago when the hay market in shattered and everybody was beat up. | ||
| And they were looking down from the 17th floor. | ||
| And Mailer's thinking like, well, this is what happens if police take over society. | ||
| And he writes beautifully about how the police came and split the protesters because he's so high up running and it's gorgeous. | ||
| And Buchanan would write later like, I knew that Nixon was going to be president of the United States because if fucking Hubert Humphrey, that gutless old ward healer, can't control his own convention and his own party, how is he going to be able to run the country? | ||
| And so as soon as Chicago's violence erupted, the Nixon campaign knew they'd won the election. | ||
| Pappy Cannon, it's really interesting because even though Hunter would shit on him, Pappy Cannon was actually a fan. | ||
| No, they drank. | ||
| They drank at the Watergate. | ||
| They sat there and went deep all night. | ||
| But Hunter definitely shit on him. | ||
| Oh, he shit on him hard. | ||
| Pappy Cannon shit back on him hard. | ||
| The first night they met was at the Holiday Inn in 1968 in New Hampshire during Nixon's comeback campaign. | ||
| And Thompson walks in and Pat McKenna goes, who's this damn guy with the damn ski jacket walking through our goddamn lobby? | ||
| And Thompson's like, I have a press pass. | ||
| I'm here to do this. | ||
| And so they have this big moment. | ||
| And then later on that night, Thompson goes to a party with campaign people and with... | ||
| And he brings a big bottle of wild turkey. | ||
| And so Buchanan's a young journalist at the time. | ||
| He'd worked at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, I think. | ||
| He'd gone to the Columbia Journalism School. | ||
| He's working for Nixon as his main policy guy. | ||
| And he looks at Thompson. | ||
| He's like, that's the fucking scheme. | ||
| Oh, you got a bottle of what? | ||
| Oh, if you got a bottle of Old Crow, like, no, we'll drink that. | ||
| And so they stayed up all night and they talked about the Vietnam War. | ||
| And Thompson talked about how it disfigures us to be in a foreign war that's unjust and destroys our democratic ideals. | ||
| To be doing that. | ||
| And Buchanan was like containment, nuclear war. | ||
| We're trying to get out of it. | ||
| And they listened to each other till dawn, like that first night that they met. | ||
| Now, what was your idea behind writing this book? | ||
| Like what compelled you? | ||
| I think we've mistaken Thompson. | ||
| I think that we see him more as like a Doonesbury character. | ||
| People who know him really well don't, but I think that most people, through whatever cultural forces that we've had, don't see his voice. | ||
| Because a lot of people don't know the comparison, the Doonesbury character. | ||
| So I think in the 80s or 70s, 80s, 90s, the cartoon Doonesbury by Gary Trudeau, it became – there was a character on it called Uncle Duke, and Uncle Duke was based on Hunter Thompson. | ||
| And he was kind of an exaggerated version of Hunter Thompson. | ||
| He was a cartoonish version of Hunter S. Thompson. | ||
| And I think Terry Gilliam did a wonderful and kind of auteurish job on – We're good to go. | ||
| And so it kills me that we identify him more as a clown or more as a cartoonish figure as opposed to a very serious political thinker, political activist, and serious writer who can give us insight into the fucking shit show we experience every moment today. | ||
| Well, I think the perception of him is fairly nuanced. | ||
| I don't think that everybody thinks of him as a cartoon character, although particularly later on in his life, He was relegated to that because he really didn't speak well. | ||
| You know, later on in his life when he was, just the drugs had taken over. | ||
| Alcohol. | ||
| His son writes about the alcohol. | ||
| Juan writes so beautifully about the toll alcoholism took on Hunter S. Thompson. | ||
| Well, he couldn't talk anymore. | ||
| I mean, when he was deep into his 60s, it was so hard to even understand him. | ||
| There's an awful piece that he did with Conan O'Brien. | ||
| Where Conan went to Woody Creek and shot guns off the back porch with him. | ||
| And you could barely understand a fucking word Hunter saying. | ||
| That's why I tried to end it with Nixon leaving because it was really sad. | ||
| When Nixon resigned, Hunter Thompson was at the Connecticut Hilton, which is a hotel right by the White House. | ||
| Annie Leibovitz, the photographer with Rolling Stone, was calling him and saying, we need to get to the White House. | ||
| Nixon is leaving. | ||
| Like he's going to get on the helicopter. | ||
| And Thompson just laid in the grass and he didn't go. | ||
| You know, and that was heartbreaking. | ||
| And he didn't end up writing the eight page spread that he needed to. | ||
| Instead, it became Annie Leibovitz's photography, which was a famous and in retrospect, like huge move for her career. | ||
| But I think that that pain right there of thinking that he'd spent 10 years, I mean, he hated Nixon since the checker speech, you know, when Nixon was VP for Eisenhower. | ||
| He hated Nixon since 1962 when Nixon lost the California governorship and said, you in the press, you've been giving me the shaft for so long. | ||
| Like you won't have Dick Nixon to kick around anymore. | ||
| Like Thompson had seen that Nixon was somebody who said, I'm just the poor son of a butcher. | ||
| I'm just this like very hardworking American that represents all of us. | ||
| Where behind that, like he was a politically ravenous monster who was anti-communist, who would go to any extent to win. | ||
| And Thompson saw that and Thompson knew that other people saw it. | ||
| In 1964 at the Barry Goldwater Convention in San Francisco, my favoritly named arena of all time, the Cow Palace. | ||
| Barry Goldwater was going to speak to accept the nomination and what happened was Nixon was introducing him. | ||
| It was Nixon's way back from the wilderness. | ||
| Thompson was a few rows back. | ||
| The first time Thompson, I think, was that close to see him live. | ||
| And Nixon's like, you know, poor son of a butcher. | ||
| Don't think about me. | ||
| Just think about Barry Goldwater, Mr. Conservative, who'll become Mr. President. | ||
| And Thompson was like... | ||
|
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Fuck. | |
| Everybody here knows he's lying. | ||
| But they think that that act of lying is a skill. | ||
| And the way a used car salesman who lies but can make a lot of money off it is skillful. | ||
| The way that Trump buys selling steaks to people and then they go bankrupt and he gets rich. | ||
| That's an American skill. | ||
| And Thompson sensed that from the start with Nixon. | ||
| And so I think he battled against Nixon for a decade, for a lot of years. | ||
| And when Nixon left, I think he felt spent. | ||
| And so I tried not to focus on the later – I ended then in 74 – Because I think he wrote some beautiful things afterwards. | ||
| He definitely had some moments where he decided to not do the assignment that he was supposed to do. | ||
| And it was kind of sad. | ||
| Like the Ali Foreman fight. | ||
| He fucking floated in the pool. | ||
| Yeah, floated in the pool with a Nixon mask on. | ||
| Flew all the way to Africa. | ||
| I think it's one of the greatest sports moments. | ||
| It was like game six of the Boston Red Sox versus the Reds. | ||
| I think Ali was something different to people than... | ||
| I think it's... | ||
| I don't think we have someone like that today, so it's very difficult for us to understand. | ||
| People today look at Ali and they go, oh, he was a heavyweight boxing champion. | ||
| He was way more than that. | ||
| He was a cultural figure that represented the resistance to the Vietnam War and represented it with the biggest loss that any public figure had ever shown and willingly gave up three years of his career in his prime from age 27 to 30. From 1967, from the Cleveland Big Cat Williams fight, he didn't fight again for three years. | ||
| He didn't train. | ||
| He didn't do anything. | ||
| They kept him from his career. | ||
| When he was in his prime, when he was the best heavyweight of all time. | ||
| And he spoke publicly and often. | ||
| And he was fucking hated all over the country. | ||
| But he represented something different. | ||
| Like, my parents were hippies, and when I was a little kid, he lost to Leon Spinks, and the rematch was on television. | ||
| My parents never watched TV, and they definitely never watched boxing. | ||
| And they sat in front of that TV to watch that. | ||
| I remember thinking, I can't believe my parents want to watch a boxing match. | ||
| Like, this is crazy! | ||
| And I was probably like, I don't know, maybe eight or nine years old or something at the time. | ||
| And I just remember thinking, I can't believe my parents want to watch a boxing match. | ||
| And that's really when it sunk into me at a really early age that this guy was not just this heavyweight boxer. | ||
| He was a cultural icon. | ||
| He was a historical figure. | ||
| He meant a lot. | ||
| And to Hunter, he meant a lot. | ||
| He meant something much bigger than just a boxer. | ||
| And so Hunter thought he was going to a death sentence. | ||
| George Foreman had crushed Joe Frazier. | ||
| He crushed everybody. | ||
| I mean, he was so powerful. | ||
| George Foreman, to this day, is one of the all-time scariest heavyweights of all time. | ||
| Without a doubt. | ||
| He could hit so fucking hard. | ||
| And literally picked guys off their feet. | ||
| He hit Joe Frazier and lifted him off his feet with a punch. | ||
| And everybody was convinced that that was going to happen to Ali. | ||
| That Ali had been past his prime. | ||
| And just look at what George Foreman had done to Joe Frazier. | ||
| What is he going to do to Muhammad Ali? | ||
| And Ali just rope-a-doped him until he got tired and then fucked him up in front of the whole world. | ||
| That's one of the greatest athletic moments. | ||
| I mean, we forget that athletes like Kurt Flood... | ||
| You know, they risked... | ||
| Who's that? | ||
| Kurt Flood was the American baseball player who challenged the reserve clause because in baseball, you weren't allowed to get free agency for another team. | ||
| And Kurt Flood was this great player. | ||
| And he was like, I'm going to sit out and I'm going to wait. | ||
| Athletes like Colin Kaepernick, they've sacrificed their career. | ||
| It's not the same with Muhammad Ali, who was like Babe Ruth and Barry Bonds and like everybody combined at that one moment. | ||
| But he was risking. | ||
| It's the opposite of Trump. | ||
| Trump used his celebrity to become this even more mangled version of himself and get more power. | ||
| Lee used his celebrity to speak for his virtue and his value and his beliefs instead of Thompson was really good at understanding what people sacrifice, what people have to give up, the wager, you know, between what that act will be, what the results will be. | ||
| They may be later, but he knew that. | ||
| And so his respect for Ali, for giving up those years of his prime, you know, was enduring. | ||
| Thompson came back from that fight and he gave his son, Juan, boxing gloves that were Ali's boxing gloves. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Yeah, it's very, very unfortunate that he missed that fight because it would have been fascinating to hear his take on it. | ||
| I mean, I'm sure he would have been so moved when he saw Ali win. | ||
| But it wasn't, I mean, that's a good point. | ||
| And it was indicative of, I think, the stress and the pressure that the last decade of covering Nixon had taken out on him. | ||
| Well, there's a little bit of that. | ||
| But let's be honest. | ||
| He was also kind of a fuck up. | ||
| I mean, when he was writing for Rolling Stone and they gave him that that early fax machine. | ||
|
unidentified
|
The mojo. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| And he would fuck that thing up. | ||
| He would unplug it and plug it back in. | ||
| He would do it just so he could go to the bar and say this thing doesn't work. | ||
| But that was the end, I think, of his arc where he was still on point. | ||
| He was still playing the role of a serious journalist. | ||
| And he would use that persona as a fuck up. | ||
| And there's letters by Jan Wenner being like, you cannot turn in your articles three hours before we go to press. | ||
| I know you made it. | ||
| This doesn't fucking work. | ||
| And so he was beginning to break down then. | ||
| He was also, I think, on the tail end of his decade of being a journalist who had met every deadline so that he could fucking feed his family. | ||
| And he could afford Al Farm. | ||
| Like, there's moments where... | ||
| Before he got the contract for Hell's Angels in 1965, he was ready to be like a longshoreman. | ||
| He was going and looking for work in the mornings in San Francisco to try to support his family. | ||
| He was willing to give up writing. | ||
| And instead, that article blew up. | ||
| And all these beautiful letters began to arrive at 319 Parnassus, where he lived at the top of the Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco. | ||
| And that opened up his chance to continue being a writer. | ||
| But money was the main motivating factor. | ||
| And so I think once money... | ||
| Like, unfurled once alcoholism, I think, took its toll. | ||
| And once he couldn't walk around anymore at a political convention without people just, like, grabbing his shoulder and saying, you're Hunter Thompson. | ||
| Once that happened, I think things began to change. | ||
| Yeah, that's one of the things that he talked about that I thought was really interesting, that he became a part of the story. | ||
| It wasn't just that he was covering stories. | ||
| He couldn't be anonymous anymore. | ||
| He was, in many cases, more famous than the people that he was covering. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| You know, like when he would go to meet Nixon, all of Nixon's Secret Service agents wanted to meet him and they wanted to get an autograph from him and shake his hand. | ||
| It was just too weird. | ||
| And then there's the alcoholism. | ||
| Alcoholism, look, it's a depressant. | ||
| It wrecks you. | ||
| And if you read, you know, we... | ||
| Me and Greg Fitzsimmons on a podcast once read off that one journalist who had detailed Hunter's daily routine. | ||
| And so we read the daily routine and they put a techno beat to it. | ||
| It's fucking hilarious. | ||
| That was a bad... | ||
| That's a sad... | ||
| So it's so funny because those seem funny now, but they're kind of a death knell. | ||
| I mean, that daily routine, that was the biography of Hunter. | ||
| It was in that. | ||
| And it's just... | ||
| It's heartbreaking. | ||
| I mean, we got to remember that the dedication to Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas was he who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man. | ||
| And I think the world was painful for Hunter Thompson. | ||
| I think it was painful to see powerful people abuse the weak and take what they wanted brazenly without being held accountable. | ||
| I think it was hard to deal with shitty editors who cut half your fucking essay on Nixon or half your story and made it into something that had nothing to do with the effort that you put out. | ||
| I think it was hard to pay your bills. | ||
| And, you know, live the way that you wanted to live. | ||
| And I think a lot of that gets undermined. | ||
| I just want people to realize how much effort he put out, especially during those years where he was like, all right, I want to be a great journalist. | ||
| I want to have a voice in our society. | ||
| I want to participate in our national conversation. | ||
| My only path towards that is to work harder than everybody else, to be at places when things happen and when they matter. | ||
| And he sacrificed a lot for that, but he was there and he's a voice and a light that we can have in this moment, which is another troubling moment in American history. | ||
| Yeah, his voice was very unique, too, in that he decided to combine fiction with nonfiction in a very weird, blurry way. | ||
| I think it was... | ||
| So, one thing I think of is he usually gives you a cue where what he did was he dramatized. | ||
| People didn't dramatize. | ||
| Well, wait a minute. | ||
| He made shit up. | ||
| He didn't just dramatize. | ||
| How about the witch doctor? | ||
| I didn't say that he did Ibogaine. | ||
| I said there was... | ||
| This is about Ed Muskie's campaign. | ||
| I said there was a rumor in Milwaukee that he did Ibogaine. | ||
| I started that rumor. | ||
| I mean, that's what he says. | ||
| But what he said on the Dick Cavett show, remember? | ||
| Yeah, later. | ||
| And I think Matt Taibbi on this show talked about it well, where one thing is that Muskie was already out of the campaign when that came out. | ||
| Muskie had already lost. | ||
| And so Muskie had been a fucking monster and a terrible person on that campaign. | ||
| And so Thompson used that version of Muskie and wrote, as Tayebi said, in a very straight way, the Ibogaine story. | ||
| And so if you had a sense of irony, you kind of knew, like, you're not really thinking that this is a guy who did Ibogaine. | ||
| So I think there's cues in there for a listening audience. | ||
| But what I think is even more... | ||
| I think he dramatized the way other people didn't. | ||
| He would say, I look left. | ||
| I look up. | ||
| I see. | ||
| He came down to me. | ||
| And then he said, people didn't write like that in journalism. | ||
| They didn't go step by step. | ||
| And he did. | ||
| And that was really important. | ||
| What I think is more important than the Ibogaine story. | ||
| So the Ibogaine story in the background is Ed Muskie was the front runner for the Democratic primary in 1972. He fucked up his campaign. | ||
| Afterwards, Thompson talked about how he had heard that There was a rumor that this candidate was doing ibogaine, which is like ayahuasca. | ||
| No, it's not like ayahuasca. | ||
| It's not. | ||
| No, it's very different. | ||
| It's not a hallucinatory. | ||
| It's a self-examinatory drug that's very good. | ||
| But he said they brought in a Brazilian witch doctor. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Ibogaine is not even a Brazilian drug. | ||
| It's from Africa. | ||
| But what I think people don't remember is, before that, and this affected the election, in February of 1972, Thompson was in Florida. | ||
| He was on something called the Sunshine Special. | ||
| It was a whistle-stop tour that Muskie, the frontrunner, had a good chance to beat Nixon, poll numbers-wise, was going all the way down the Florida Peninsula on to try to win the Florida primary. | ||
| And Thompson was like... | ||
| This is the most disgusting thing I've ever seen. | ||
| At every stop, Muskie gave the same shit speech. | ||
| It's like, somebody should be your president, namely me. | ||
| And it was repeated. | ||
| The reporters were like, fucking, this is terrible. | ||
| Muskie was secluded in the back of the car. | ||
| He didn't interact with anybody. | ||
| They had his political operatives come out and make everybody sing the song about like musky sunshine in his hands, the whole world's in his hands. | ||
| It was terrible. | ||
| And so that night, Thompson pulled into a Florida town. | ||
| It was the second to last stop. | ||
| And he and this young political reporter named Monty Chitty were going to get a drink at 2:00 AM. | ||
| And this guy walks into the lobby. | ||
| He's like 6'6", 250, Peter Sheridan. | ||
| And he walks in and he says he's looking for the Muskie campaign, all these different things, and he ends up going out with Hunter Thompson for a drink. | ||
| And Hunter Thompson finds out that Peter Sheridan had been a good friend of Jerry Garcia, had hung out with the Hells Angels in California, had been to La Honda, where Ken Kesey was, and was actually a pretty smart guy who was out of his mind in his mid-20s. | ||
| They stayed out and drank all night. | ||
| At the end of the night, Thompson's like, so, what are you doing tomorrow? | ||
| Where are you going? | ||
| And Peter Sheridan was like, well, I'm going to Miami. | ||
| And Thompson's like, we are too. | ||
| You don't have to hitchhike. | ||
| Fuck that. | ||
| And so there's a really good journalist, Outlaw. | ||
| It's called Outlaw Journalist by Bill McKean, another Thompson biography. | ||
| It talks about how Thompson took his press pass, put it into the elevator, pressed the button, sent the press pass down to the ground floor. | ||
| Peter Sheridan got it. | ||
| So Peter Sheridan could ride for free. | ||
| On the Sunshine Express down to Miami the next day. | ||
| So Thompson oversleeps because the fucking Muskie campaign doesn't like him anyways. | ||
| Instead, Peter Sheridan gets on the Sunshine Express with a Hunter Thompson press badge. | ||
| And Peter Sheridan goes on to order 12 martinis. | ||
| And he goes, give me like a triple gin bucks and hold the buck. | ||
| And he runs up and down the car. | ||
| And, you know, Muskie has been a really shitty candidate at this point. | ||
| He's not been engaging people. | ||
| He got in this weird fight with his wife at a... | ||
| A campaign event where they like put cake in each other's face. | ||
| It's been really weird and people aren't reporting on it. | ||
| Like other reporters aren't saying Muskie's unstable. | ||
| And so Muskie at the end of this whistle stop, he spent all his campaign money to go up and down and try to do this whistle stop like tour. | ||
| He gives the speech at the caboose. | ||
| And Jerry Rubin, the anti-war activist who was one of the Chicago 7 and has come to heckle him, is in the crowd. | ||
| And he's saying to Muskie, So why did you support the Vietnam War in 1968? | ||
| Like, who do you think you are? | ||
| And so Muskie's yelling at Jerry Rubin. | ||
| He's saying, young man, keep your mouth shut. | ||
| Beneath Muskie. | ||
| Reaching up from the bottom of the caboose, Peter Sheridan is holding a gin bottle and grabbing at Muskie's leg as Muskie tries to give this speech. | ||
| And then Muskie falls back and the whole thing ends. | ||
| Like the whole press conference is over. | ||
| Like Women's Wear Daily reported this. | ||
| And it came out that Hunter Thompson had had 13 martinis and run up and down the train and had interfered with it. | ||
| And Muskie's campaign really believed that Thompson was working with Donald Segretti and Nixon's creep, Watergate crew, to fuck up Muskie's campaign. | ||
| And that actually changed the course. | ||
| Thompson helped expose how fucked up Muskie was as a candidate at that time. | ||
| And Thompson had never forgiven Muskie for being on the pro-Vietnam War platform at the 1968 convention. | ||
| And so we talk about the obligate aspect of changing the campaign, but That report and the way that disseminated through media, the way it was picked up by other newspapers, really did help change the people's perception of Ed Muskie, Big Ed Muskie, as Thompson called him at the time. | ||
| Now, when he wrote Hell's Angels, he hadn't really totally formulated that sort of gonzo style of journalism, but he did have a little bit of fiction mixed in with that, and that sort of ran him afoul of the Hell's Angels. | ||
| They were very upset by that, right? | ||
| Like, he did write some things in there that they claim were not accurate. | ||
| I think that when it came to Hell's Angels, what Thompson did really well is what Joan Didion did really well. | ||
| He took the way the media was portraying somebody and he stripped that off and said, this is who they actually are. | ||
| This is what they're actually doing. | ||
| Joan Didion, when she writes about Jim Morrison in the White Album, she's like, Jim Morrison was like sex and death in his leather pants. | ||
| It was the best thing ever. | ||
| Everybody loves Jim Morrison. | ||
| And then in the scene in the White Album, Joan Didion writes about how they sit at a recording studio for two hours and nobody says anything and they eat eggs out of a paper bag and it's a fucking nightmare. | ||
| Thompson knew that the media was sensationalizing the Hells Angels. | ||
| He went to them on a cold night in San Francisco down by the waterfront and he said, hey, here's a Newsweek article. | ||
| Here's a Time article. | ||
| Here's how everybody's writing about you. | ||
| All I want to do is write the truth about who you are. | ||
| And he did and he ended up writing with them and he ended up spending time with them. | ||
| I don't think they got as mad at him about the way he portrayed them. | ||
| I think they got mad that he began to make money or that he became famous. | ||
| Hell's Angels sold 500,000 paperback copies. | ||
| That is almost impossible to imagine today. | ||
| 500,000 paperback copies of a literary book. | ||
| And the angels were pissed off about that. | ||
| They felt Thompson owed him more money or owed him something for that. | ||
| Did he pay them at all? | ||
| Did he give them any money? | ||
| Well, Sonny Barger – Sonny Barger is so ridiculous. | ||
| Sonny Barger said he owed us a keg and he didn't give us a keg. | ||
| That's it? | ||
| You know, and the famous story at the end of it is that – I mean, really, like when they go through it, he said that – He said that Thompson was doing a subjective version of us, but it was at least closer than the shitty Newsweek and Time versions. | ||
| And so Thompson, at the end of... | ||
| He'd finished the book, barely made the deadline. | ||
| Had to go down to a hotel in Monterey, lock himself in, stay up for 100 hours straight, and write it in March of 67 to finish it. | ||
| So he turns it in, makes his advance deadline. | ||
| In September, they're like, here's our author photo, and it's shitty. | ||
| He's like, fuck this. | ||
| So he goes to a Hell's Angels rally. | ||
| He doesn't know anybody because he hasn't been with them for six or seven months. | ||
| He's taking pictures. | ||
| That's when he got beat up for writing about the Hells Angels. | ||
| And Tiny, his friend, who later committed suicide after Altamont, after being involved in the Altamont security situation... | ||
| That's the Rolling Stone one where the guy got stabbed? | ||
| Yes, where Meredith Hunter was stabbed. | ||
| But Tiny... | ||
| It was a woman that got stabbed? | ||
| Man, Meredith Hunter. | ||
| Oh. | ||
| It was a man named Meredith. | ||
| That was back in the day where you can name your kids Meredith, right? | ||
| Like Marion? | ||
| Marion's another one? | ||
| Right? | ||
| Lindsay? | ||
| Lindsay? | ||
| Some guys are Lindsay. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I got another one to speak. | |
| Give me one. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Jamie. | |
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| But Jamie's normal. | ||
| Like, there's a lot of Jamie's... | ||
| That future man scene where it's like... | ||
| What's his name? | ||
| It's like... | ||
| My name's Susan. | ||
| In the future, men are named Susan. | ||
| I know it's a girl's name in your time. | ||
| Oh, right. | ||
| Meredith is a weird one, though. | ||
| You must hate your fucking son. | ||
| You lose an argument with your wife. | ||
| But that... | ||
| I've lost a lot of arguments. | ||
| But that poor guy was, but Thompson was there and Tiny grabbed him after he was beat up. | ||
| There was a guy holding a rock to drop it on Thompson with the Hells Angels. | ||
| And Tiny was like, all right, I know him. | ||
| I know the rest of you don't. | ||
| And he grabbed him out. | ||
| And Tiny was this, like, enormous Hells Angel who had been, you know, Thompson was very good at empathetically understanding their flaws and their perspectives. | ||
| He'd never, I think, made excuses for them. | ||
| He said that their inherent perspective is fascistic. | ||
| He writes that. | ||
| You know, he says they used violence to respond to where they were in society. | ||
| Their idea of total retaliation, the Hells Angels, or any offense, like looking at you funny or being like, dude, you drink, could be met with everybody beating you up because the Hells Angels got to determine the offense. | ||
| Like that was fascism to Thompson. | ||
| And he wrote beautifully about their reliance on violence because they felt the Hells Angels, they had been left behind by our moderated society. | ||
| Like there's technology, there's all these new jobs. | ||
| If you came back from the war in 1950, you had a chance in Oakland to have a middle-class life and a beautiful house and work the rest of your days and have a family that will then go on. | ||
| But by 1965, that was no longer an option. | ||
| And the angels were a violent response to that, very similar to what we're seeing now. | ||
| So the way he wrote about the Hell's Angels is very similar to the way that we see violence within groups that are supporting Trump, you know, and groups on the left and the right. | ||
| Did he ever wind up resolving his differences with the Hells Angels? | ||
| I think so. | ||
| The Hells Angels got fucked, rightly so. | ||
| The Hells Angels were pursued like a mob, like a mafia group. | ||
| People went to jail. | ||
| Sonny Barger went to jail. | ||
| I think they, at the end, appreciated his representation of them because it was better than any other one out there. | ||
| There's no better representation of the Hells Angels. | ||
| No more sympathetic for sure. | ||
| Yeah, or just no more accurate. | ||
| No more on point. | ||
| Yeah, no more like, again, it gets to Thompson's effort. | ||
| If you ride for six months with somebody and you're an honest, like putting up your hands, you're not trying to fit what you see into a thesis. | ||
| You're doing the opposite. | ||
| Trying to look at the reality you have in front of you and then form an argument out of that. | ||
| That's what Thompson's gift was. | ||
| And very dangerous, too, to do that. | ||
| I mean, he did get beat up taking those photographs. | ||
| He also had a really bad motorcycle accident with his friend on the back. | ||
| His friend broke his leg. | ||
| That's why he left. | ||
| Get the fuck out of San Francisco. | ||
| Grace looks amazing. | ||
| San Francisco's amazing. | ||
| It's a fire that you're putting your hand onto. | ||
| How did he crash? | ||
| He was coming down. | ||
| It was with the mayor of Richmond. | ||
| He was coming down a slick road. | ||
| And they had hit like something was wet or an oil thing and it went out the back tire. | ||
| So Thompson rolled and was fine but his friend's knee hit railroad tracks. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So his friend's knee broke really badly. | |
| It was the mayor of Richmond. | ||
|
unidentified
|
He continued riding motorcycles though. | |
| Yeah, he did. | ||
| He would get in accidents at Woody Creek, but he was pretty careful. | ||
| So I love that scene in Hells Angels. | ||
| I don't know if readers or listeners know this, but the edge. | ||
| And that's a major part of the book where Thompson's fighting with his wife. | ||
| Thompson's finished his book, but he's breaking down because he'd worked so hard to do it. | ||
| And so he takes his BSA out and he goes, if you know San Francisco, he goes out to the park. | ||
| He hits the Coast Highway. | ||
| And he comes down it. | ||
| And he's like, I'm so overwhelmed. | ||
| Everything is so fucking terrible. | ||
| He's going as fast as he can. | ||
| And he talks about how his eyes begin to lose moisture. | ||
| You know, the scene. | ||
| It's this beautiful scene. | ||
| He's looking for sand pits. | ||
| Because if you hit a sand pit near the zoo, you're fucking done. | ||
| And he gets all the way to Rockaway Beach, which is halfway down to Santa Cruz. | ||
| And he turns around. | ||
| And what he talks about is when he's at 100 miles per hour, I think he was near death. | ||
| I think he was really overwhelmed. | ||
| He says, you know, the edge, the only people that know it are the people that have gone over. | ||
| The rest, the living, don't have any understanding of it. | ||
| And all we can do is approach it in this way. | ||
| And it's this beautiful end. | ||
| It's called Midnight on the Coast Highway. | ||
| It was anthologized in Tom Wolfe. | ||
| And it was just beautiful. | ||
| So he comes back. | ||
| And he sits at his desk. | ||
| And so he had a view of the Bay Bridge. | ||
| He could see its two flashing lights the whole time. | ||
| And he had broken the window in a terrible fight with his wife like three weeks earlier. | ||
| And so he sits at the broken window and he writes out that scene right away with his eyes still scoured. | ||
| Wasn't the broken window when she wouldn't give him a gun because he was on acid and he threw a shoe through the window? | ||
| So there's three versions. | ||
| So I do it and then I give the three versions of the notes. | ||
| So I go with the three versions that I've heard. | ||
| Like I heard it from... | ||
| Did you ask her? | ||
| You know, she wrote – I really respect Sandy, like, deeply. | ||
| She wrote it a few years ago. | ||
| She said, I'm done giving interviews about Alice Thompson. | ||
| That was my life that it was then. | ||
| She's given so many interviews up to this point. | ||
| Yeah, good for her. | ||
| She says that that exists. | ||
| And so I wanted to respect that more than anything. | ||
| And just use the information that I had. | ||
| And let the reader know, yo, here are three other versions. | ||
| Here's the best version I could make. | ||
| Dramatize. | ||
| Look left. | ||
| Throw. | ||
| Do this. | ||
| Did you talk to Anita? | ||
| Anita's been great. | ||
| I had to talk to Anita later, but the book ended so early that I... There's a beautiful... | ||
| Anita's the second wife for folks. | ||
| Yeah, Anita Thompson is... | ||
| She runs Owl Farm. | ||
| She runs kind of his legacy. | ||
| She does the Facebook page. | ||
| She does a wonderful job. | ||
| What is Owl Farm today? | ||
| Does she still live up there? | ||
| Yeah, she's going to make it into a writer's retreat. | ||
| She's doing a wonderful job, making it into a writer's retreat and also a museum. | ||
| It's taken a while to honor his legacy as a great political thinker and writer, a great literary light. | ||
| But since she didn't meet him until the 90s, I wanted to focus on the time that I was in. | ||
| I think talking to Bob Geiger, you know, his friend then was, I was really lucky. | ||
| Bob Geiger's in his late 80s. | ||
| And he was able to go through like, because I had, I believe if you interview somebody, you need to read everything that exists already. | ||
| You need to read everything they've already said. | ||
| You don't want to ask them questions that, when I do interview for research, that they've already supplied answers to. | ||
| So with Bob Geiger, I could see the holes or things I didn't know. | ||
| And I was able to sit with him. | ||
| Talk about throwing a football with Thompson. | ||
| You know, talk about taking the dog to the beach, like all these other things. | ||
| The football thing is an interesting thing because he was obsessed with football and that's one thing that he shared in common with Nixon. | ||
| And so when they went, one time they were going to the airport and he hitched a ride with Nixon and Nixon wanted to talk to him about football. | ||
| And he said, let's just not talk about politics when we talk about football. | ||
| And so he talked for the whole ride. | ||
| It was in 1968. Pat Buchanan had helped set it up. | ||
| They worked it out that week. | ||
| They'd become friends. | ||
| And so they come to Thompson. | ||
| They're like, all right, the boss is going to take a plane to Florida. | ||
| You can come and talk to him. | ||
| That is so crazy. | ||
| And so later Thompson said, later it was like, they told me not to talk about anything about football. | ||
| But earlier Thompson said, like, I was just really awkward. | ||
| Like this fucking guy, they're both in the backbench of a Mercury. | ||
| And so it's before Secret Service, so it's just a cop driving, and it's like Pappy Cannon in the front, and it's Thompson and Nixon, and they're right here next to each other. | ||
| And Thompson's like, well, you know, earlier in the night you'd said that, you know, the Oakland Raiders had a good shot to beat the Packers in Super Bowl II. Can you talk about that? | ||
| And he was like, Nixon's like, my good friend Vince Lombardi had told me to watch out for the AFL because they pass. | ||
| They can be very effective. | ||
| And so Thompson then, like, remembers that guy... | ||
| Bob Geiger had been a professional quarterback. | ||
| He had taken Thompson to his first football game. | ||
| And Thompson said, NFL is better than the AFL. And Geiger's like, shut the fuck up. | ||
| Let's go to a Raiders game. | ||
| And they went in 65, and the Raiders won on this beautiful pass, Tom Flores, a beautiful goal line pass. | ||
| And Nixon was saying the same thing. | ||
| And so then at that moment, at that moment, Thompson's like, oh yeah, it was the Miami guy, Miller, who'd caught the pass. | ||
| And Nixon goes, taps him on the knee and goes... | ||
| You're right. | ||
| And he goes, oh, what a beautiful moment. | ||
| And Thompson's just like, what the fuck is going on? | ||
| So Nixon, apparently, they were talking about college draft picks and all kinds of crazy shit. | ||
| Nixon was deep into it. | ||
| It was the only moment Thompson said that he knew Nixon wasn't lying. | ||
| There's one that can talk about football in that instant. | ||
| It's fascinating when people are so diametrically opposed to each other, but they find common ground. | ||
| Thompson did a great job of that. | ||
| And I think we've lost it today. | ||
| I mean, you have to listen to the other side. | ||
| If you politically want to beat somebody like Pat Buchanan, if you want to defeat his tactics, if you want to defeat him, you need to know how he's thinking and what he's doing. | ||
| Thompson knew that Buchanan was listening to the left to defeat them. | ||
| And so Thompson listened to Buchanan. | ||
| What led him to move to Colorado? | ||
| Oh, he was losing his shit in San Francisco. | ||
| It was that night on the fucking motorcycle. | ||
| But how did he choose Colorado? | ||
| So, this is a great story. | ||
| In the early 60s, Thompson had a chance to drive, I don't know, some sort of cargo, like a friend's car out to Colorado on his way to San Francisco in 1960. He ended up doing a road trip up and down San Francisco after he passed through Colorado, but he stopped in Colorado because he had to drop off a friend's car and there was a woman there Peggy Clifford, who was a journalist and was his good friend at the Aspen Daily Times. | ||
| And she was older. | ||
| She saw him like after driving 20 hours. | ||
| She's like, hey, come in my house. | ||
| Hang out. | ||
| And she lived right in Aspen and Woody Creek. | ||
| And so then in 1963, after Sandy was pregnant, Tomson came back from South America where he was a reporter and did a wonderful job reporting on how democracies were falling apart down there. | ||
| Him and Sandy wanted to move West because the National Observer was the newspaper Tomson worked for. | ||
| They wanted to give Tomson a position to be a Western reporter. | ||
| He was thinking of going to San Francisco, but instead he chose to stop first. | ||
| Where Peggy Clifford was to stop in Aspen and Woody Creek. | ||
| And so he was living in Aspen and Woody Creek from August of 1963 to February of 1963. And he was there. | ||
| This is where Freak Kingdom begins. | ||
| He was there when John F. Kennedy was assassinated. | ||
| And he's sitting in his living room. | ||
| It's 10 a.m., 11 a.m. | ||
| Pacific time, and he gets a knock on the door. | ||
| And it's this rancher named Wayne Wagner, which is an old Aspen family. | ||
| And the rancher's like, the president's been shot. | ||
| What's more? | ||
| He's been murdered. | ||
| He's dead. | ||
| And Thompson just lets out a sob. | ||
| Then he begins to fucking swear. | ||
| And then he fucking calms down. | ||
| And he goes downtown Woody Creek. | ||
| He goes to Aspen. | ||
| And he just gets notes from people what their responses are. | ||
| And so when he then went to San Francisco to become the correspondent for the magazine that he was working for, he was having a tough time. | ||
| He was already wanting to flee. | ||
| Because he got Hell's Angels, he was able to stay in San Francisco longer, write, report on them. | ||
| But by 1966, 67, he was like, this city is not a good place for me. | ||
| He has a great quote about like what would have happened if he stayed in San Francisco from 67 on. | ||
| He's like, I would have burned up. | ||
| Like I would have been immolated right there. | ||
| And so when it was time to leave, he thought again of Woody Creek and of Aspen, which was so different than it is now. | ||
| And that was a place that he decided to move and rent for a little while at first. | ||
| But then because of the success of Hell's Angels, he was able to buy Owl Farm. | ||
| Aspen's very different, but Woody Creek is not that much different. | ||
| Woody Creek is still pretty different. | ||
| It's great. | ||
| But Salt and Woody Creek are great, dude. | ||
| There's a place called The Temporary. | ||
| They did an event with Juan Thompson and I did a reading at it. | ||
| And a lot of Thompson's friends were there. | ||
| So I'm like, I'm some fucking young... | ||
| I didn't know Thompson. | ||
| I'm an interloper. | ||
| I'm out there. | ||
| And it was really great to talk to everybody that knew him. | ||
| And to go through it. | ||
| And that's why this book almost killed me because I did a note for every sound, smell, or sight, or comment. | ||
| Like if I wrote, and then at that moment Thompson felt, what the fuck am I doing here? | ||
| I had the quote where he said, I looked around then and I felt, what the fuck am I doing here? | ||
| And I had that in the notes so people could see it. | ||
| And it was because I wanted those people that knew him well and respected him and trusted him to not think that I was in any way Trying anything but to make good art off of his life and who he was. | ||
| Trying to respond to my fucking view of Trump right now and my love of his work in this moment. | ||
| Why do you say it almost killed you? | ||
| It's not possible to write a narrative and then also cite every detail of the narrative. | ||
| So each day I would spend nine hours. | ||
| Researching and outlining with citations. | ||
| I wanted to write it like a novel. | ||
| I wanted to be like, you know. | ||
| And at that moment I felt like the machine oil from the bay was coming off. | ||
| I wanted to write it vividly. | ||
| I knew that I had to support all of that. | ||
| And so I would spend eight or nine hours every day just on the pure arrangement and research. | ||
| And then for the next six or seven hours or eight hours, I would write the narrative. | ||
| And then I'd sleep for five or six hours. | ||
| You know, I get up and I would do it again. | ||
| And I did this for four or five months, you know, after I was deeply into it. | ||
| And I don't think that's sustainable. | ||
| I think it's better in retrospect to go and report somewhere. | ||
| You know, to like go and be at the middle of Congress and take notes. | ||
| But to try to write something with the dramatized nature that I think Thompson wrote well and having my prose sound nothing like his. | ||
| You know, I wanted my prose to sound nothing like the way he wrote. | ||
| But then to also have almost as many pages of notes showing my work. | ||
| You know, like showing the math that went behind it. | ||
| So if I'm wrong, I'm wrong, but at least you can see it. | ||
| I think that was morally correct, but I think that was too much effort. | ||
| Was it just because you were trying to do it in a short period of time? | ||
| Did you have a crazy deadline or something? | ||
| Yes, but I also, I had a year. | ||
| And so, you know, and I had a family, and I had a, I'm a professor, like, I just – I never, when it came to writing, had to do both those things, which was to try to write it in a novelistic way, but then to also make sure that any question the reader would have. | ||
| But like, why did you think that the dinner was at 5 p.m.? | ||
| Or like, why did you think the sun was coming up in this way at this moment? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| To make sure, because out of respect, because what Thompson talked about was people making money off him like Doonesbury. | ||
| That's what he talked about, was people trying to make money off him. | ||
| And if I was going to write this book, it couldn't be in that space. | ||
| Didn't he have a lawsuit against Gary Trudeau? | ||
| He thought about it, I think. | ||
| I don't think he ever did it. | ||
| He talked about it publicly. | ||
| I think it was just... | ||
| Well, he became that guy, unfortunately. | ||
| That's what's really weird. | ||
| What happens when we become a caricature of ourselves? | ||
| It's really scary. | ||
| Do you know... | ||
| Well... | ||
| What's weird about it is that he kind of knew that it was happening. | ||
| There's that famous interview where he's talking to that British guy who did a documentary about him. | ||
| Breakfast with Hunter, maybe. | ||
| No, but yeah. | ||
| One of them. | ||
| But he's rolling a joint on the grass somewhere with that Las Vegas visor on, and he's talking about how He's really become this caricature and it would actually be better if he wasn't alive anymore. | ||
| He was breaking up with his wife during that. | ||
| It was really sad. | ||
| There's a scene in that where he hides where he's at like a parking lot and he doesn't want people to see him and he's standing against the wall and people are like, come on, we got to go. | ||
| He's like, I just don't want anybody to see me right now. | ||
| It was really sad. | ||
| And I tried to take that tragedy. | ||
| He wrote great things afterwards. | ||
| He was a great friend to people afterwards. | ||
| Ron Whitehead, this wonderful poet from Louisville, was a dear friend of his all through his life. | ||
| But the tragedy of how much effort he put out. | ||
| If we want to write about Trump, if you want to go after like Taibbi did about the financial institution, The way Thompson did it was to kind of wager time later for time now. | ||
| And he talks about that. | ||
| What do you mean by that? | ||
| And later, I'm not going to have it. | ||
| But I'm making that gamble. | ||
| I'm putting the card down right now. | ||
| And I think that's terrifying. | ||
| And I also think that he gave us brilliant writing over one of the most remarkable spans in American history because of it. | ||
| That's a weird tradition in journalism, right? | ||
| To destroy your body while creating your art. | ||
| And I think there's a, according to my friends who are journalists, there's a big problem with Adderall today. | ||
| And there's a lot of people that are using it to write. | ||
| And it's fucking speed and, you know, you get addicted. | ||
| I mean, Adderall makes everything in front of you closer. | ||
| Have you done it? | ||
| Yeah, so my first book was called Hyper, A Personal History of ADHD. So it was about being medicated as a child. | ||
| You were medicated as a child? | ||
| Yeah, like having pills forced down my throat. | ||
| How old were you? | ||
| Six when I took Ritalin for the first time. | ||
| Fuck, man. | ||
| I had a suicidal moment at like six years old. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What? | |
| The first time. | ||
| You were six? | ||
| You wanted to commit suicide? | ||
| I held like a butter knife to my wrist. | ||
| I don't remember it, but yeah. | ||
| I kind of remember it, but yeah. | ||
| And it was on Ritalin, which I've taken now as an adult, and I always feel startled when I'm on it. | ||
| If I ever take Ritalin now, I'm like, what? | ||
| I take it to write. | ||
| Like, this world is incredibly painful, so I take Adderall now. | ||
| And I take it to... | ||
| How often do you take it? | ||
| Every day. | ||
| I take, like, 30 milligrams a day. | ||
| Really? | ||
| And I take it to go into a library, and this is what David Wallace-Wells was talking about, I think, like, two days ago on the show, was how do you read really shitty academic articles where you need the information from them? | ||
| I'm not good at that. | ||
| I'm not good at even making, like, a car reservation, you know, like a car rental reservation. | ||
| Mm-hmm. | ||
| And so this world's going to be painful no matter what, but there's a functionality that Adderall allows. | ||
| And it's always a wager. | ||
| What Thompson writes about is whenever something is given, something else is lost. | ||
| You never get anything for free in this world. | ||
| Thompson understood that better than anybody. | ||
| So with him with Dexedrine, I'm not going to say Thompson was hyperactive. | ||
| I'm not going to go into that. | ||
| But Dexedrine, like, Geiger was like, yo. | ||
| You're breaking down. | ||
| Like, you're 26. You have a wife. | ||
| You have a very small child. | ||
| You're writing right now. | ||
| You want to have your career go forward. | ||
| You're not doing well. | ||
| And Geiger was like, I'm a doctor. | ||
| I had gone through med school. | ||
| You know, I'd been overwhelmed like you. | ||
| Geiger ran every morning. | ||
| You know, he did other things, but he took Dexatrine, so he gave it to Thompson. | ||
| And for that small period of time, it helped. | ||
| I mean, for me, it's like, I'm not a good researcher. | ||
| And maybe I would be now, but the only way I can write about something like Hunter S. Thompson where I didn't know him, I have no experience with him, is to read everything that he's ever written or been written about him. | ||
| And then go out and interview people. | ||
| And so effort is my only path forward. | ||
| And what Adderall helps for me is to take the pain away of that effort. | ||
| But it doesn't take it away. | ||
| It shifts it around to other aspects and other parts of life. | ||
| And I think Thompson, when he wrote, he who makes a beast of himself escapes the pain or gets rid of the pain of being a man, We don't listen to that. | ||
| He was like, this effort is hard. | ||
| He's like, I'm struggling with this effort. | ||
| I'm trying to make these beautiful things. | ||
| I always think of James Salter, a fiction writer, Aspen resident, wrote beautiful novels. | ||
| He wrote his whole life until he was 90. His last novel was at 87. He wrote a memoir at 76 about being a fighter pilot, among other things, in the Korean War. | ||
| Lyric, literary. | ||
| He did it his whole life. | ||
| He didn't burn out for a small period of time. | ||
| He's the antonym To Thompson, I think, when it comes to effort and literary work. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Do you just take it for work? | ||
| Yeah, I mean... | ||
| You don't have, like, an issue that you need to take it for? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, I mean, we were... | |
| I think that whenever we have something like chemical speed, whenever we have something like alcohol, whenever we have something that's not like marijuana, or at least marijuana cuts your mania, you know, like whenever we have something else like alcohol or alcohol, Adderall, we need to ask the question, is taking the pain away and being productive through those actually hastening your own doom? | ||
| I think with alcohol, it's very clear it is. | ||
| I think with Adderall, it's more complex. | ||
| I think if you do an amount of time release, you can make it work. | ||
| How many Americans do that out of the percent that are prescribed? | ||
| I don't know, 10%, 20%? | ||
| It's dangerous. | ||
| How often do you take time off? | ||
| I'd say maybe one or two weeks of every three or four months. | ||
| And when you do that, do you feel weird? | ||
| No, I just watch movies. | ||
| I just don't do anything. | ||
| I don't have any productivity. | ||
| I don't produce. | ||
| So the only way you produce is on speed. | ||
| The only way I produce the way I want to right now is on speed. | ||
| I didn't start taking it until 2010. Dude, it's crazy that we're talking about this because there's so many people like you. | ||
| It's so – I mean, how much of the work that we enjoy today, especially literary work, is written by people – journalistic work is written by people that are on speed. | ||
| But that's not new. | ||
| I mean, that's what Thompson and Burroughs and Southern – like, this has been – I believe that our American society, the situation I'm in, I have created a situation where I have too much work, and it's my fault. | ||
| I should not be trying to be a professor and also go report at Congress and also at George Mason in the creative writing program. | ||
| You know, and also then be hosting, like, people coming out, and also then, like... | ||
| Be trying to research something that might be my next thing. | ||
| That's too much. | ||
| And the way Thompson saw Dexedrine was that he could make reality match his effort. | ||
| So there was no longer the limit. | ||
| It was the American dream idea. | ||
| If you just put out enough effort, you'll get it. | ||
| And that's why I think he so brilliantly understood the toxicity of the American dream. | ||
| Is that the effort is what destroys you. | ||
| Just because you have a path with the effort to be rich or be successful, that doesn't mean that's a good thing. | ||
| That's what will actually dismantle you. | ||
| It's putting it out. | ||
| And I think we forget that. | ||
| Do you... | ||
| One of the things about Hunter that's really intoxicating is that his sort of self-destructive path becomes romantic when you read it and you get involved in his work and you kind of mimic it. | ||
| That's the greatest fallacy. | ||
| I think what he was trying to say with self-destruction was that this was an incredible threat to our American democracy. | ||
| I don't mean that. | ||
| There's no romanticism to it. | ||
| Well, the romantic aspect of it was that his work was fantastic. | ||
| But it was until it wasn't. | ||
| It was fantastic until it wasn't. | ||
| I mean, so he understood. | ||
| He lived within the failure. | ||
| But it was until it wasn't. | ||
| But he lived in with – he spent much more time within the consequences of that binging than he did within the success of the binging. | ||
| And that – I think he knew that. | ||
| In his letters, it's really beautiful and heartbreaking. | ||
| And in his writing, too. | ||
| I mean, I think that's what's been missed about him is there's no romanticism in self-destruction. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Towards the end, he definitely lost his productivity, and Jan Werner talked about that in the Alex Gibney documentary. | ||
| And Sticky Fingers was a great – the new book on Jan Werner has great moments of Thompson in the 70s just being kind of lost. | ||
| And I think we've got to remember that. | ||
| We have incredible times in American history. | ||
| We have times that are going to burn brightly, and it's up to each writer to decide how they'd like to burn next to it. | ||
| And if they're going to burn brightly, they may not have other times. | ||
| And that's, I think, an American thing where you can wager that bright flame, which means you may have nothing left afterwards. | ||
| But Thompson knew. | ||
| That he may have to live in, that kind of afterlife. | ||
| Juan Thompson writes about it so beautifully in stories I tell myself. | ||
| There's some footage of him when he was writing for, I forget what newspaper, was it somewhere in the Pacific Northwest? | ||
| What was he writing for? | ||
| Who's the author of Playing Off the Rail? | ||
| Google Playing Off the Rail. | ||
| There's a guy who was a journalist. | ||
| What year do you think it was? | ||
| David McCumber? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| David McCumber. | ||
| David McCumber employed Hunter for a while when David was... | ||
| I forget what publication he was working for, but there's some footage of them communicating together and, you know, just trying to get Hunter. | ||
| I was in San Francisco. | ||
| I was in San Francisco. | ||
| And Hunter's just out of his fucking mind. | ||
| I mean, he was younger. | ||
| I mean, he wasn't even that old, but he was just wrecked. | ||
| He just couldn't communicate. | ||
| He couldn't talk. | ||
| He makes a beast. | ||
| You escape the pain of articulation. | ||
| You escape the pain of saying, this is what's wrong in American society. | ||
| For him to say the way he did, one of his great essays is from 1964. It's about going to Hemingway's Ketchum, Idaho grave in Hemingway's house. | ||
| And it's gorgeous because it talks about Hemingway was a good writer, one of the best writers, when he was writing about a period he understood in the 1940s, 1930s, when there was a firmness to the reality that he could articulate. | ||
| One of the writer's goals is to give a pattern to chaos, is to give an articulation to chaos. | ||
| But what happens in the 1960s when the chaos is multiplying repeatedly, somebody like Hemingway becomes a literal relic, like his narrative no longer fits into the present that he's in. | ||
| And Thompson saw Hemingway's decline, and he wrote about Hemingway's... | ||
| What do you mean by his narrative doesn't fit? | ||
| Hemingway's idea of what America was and what a man should be fit perfectly with what I think the 20s to the 40s, what we experienced. | ||
| But I think in the early 1960s with our social upheaval of civil rights, You know, political upheaval. | ||
| Hemingway, it was confusing to him. | ||
| It didn't fit anymore. | ||
| Like, his way of operating no longer articulated the present. | ||
| And so Hemingway's last act was to take away his ability to say anything at all. | ||
| That was his only—the last thing Hemingway ever said was to say, I'm not going to say anything anymore, was the suicide that Hemingway committed. | ||
| And Thompson wrote about that gorgeously. | ||
| Yeah, when— When he was young. | ||
| When he wound up killing himself, it was almost— Unsurprising. | ||
| You know, when I read that he had died, I remember going, man. | ||
|
unidentified
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Well, I guess, yeah. | |
| You know what I mean? | ||
| I mean, it's like you knew that he was deteriorating rapidly. | ||
| You knew that he had really bad hips. | ||
| He had had hip replacement surgery. | ||
| The Ralph Steadman had drawn this very crazy image of him with the artificial hip. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It looked like pain, you know what I mean? | ||
| But I think that it's not my place to even deal with that because Juan Thompson's book writes about that moment where Juan Thompson was in the house. | ||
| And Juan writes beautifully about the stakes of it, how painful it was to the people that loved him. | ||
|
unidentified
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Of course. | |
| Everything about it. | ||
| Even if that's a logical outcome, that's not what needed it. | ||
| So it's interesting. | ||
| I would say read stories I tell myself. | ||
| That moment is so honestly and brilliantly written by Juan. | ||
| No, I'm sure. | ||
| But all I was getting at is that at the time of his death, he was deteriorating so badly. | ||
| He was wearing diapers. | ||
| His entire, because of his alcoholism, his ability to control his bladder was gone. | ||
| And so Juan gave this wonderful speech at George Mason when he came out. | ||
| He's like, how do you write honestly about your father? | ||
| And he asked the question of like, should I include this detail? | ||
| And he's like, if my father was alive, I couldn't include that. | ||
| But that's why I chose, in a sense, to write my book where my father was dead, because I think my father would want me to write honestly. | ||
| But also not want me to include that if he was still alive. | ||
| And so he included that detail and he talked about that, the struggle to include that detail, which I think brilliantly articulates what you're saying, which is the deterioration and the sadness of it. | ||
| And I mean, we have finite amounts of energy or effort. | ||
| We really do. | ||
| We have to take care of ourselves. | ||
| And if we don't, we will pay that price at some point. | ||
| We're going to pay it anyways. | ||
| We're all headed to the same place, whether we want to or not. | ||
| And so I think Hunter is a really terrifying and beautiful example of one wager of chips that were made for the 1960s and 1970s. | ||
| And I think the best way to honor that is to apply the brilliance that he forged and carved to the situation we have right now with corruption, Donald Trump. | ||
| An attack on American democracy. | ||
| Where American democracy is basically, it's like what Erdogan says, democracy is a train and we arrive at the station, we get off. | ||
| Like they basically use the ladder to get to the attic and now Trump's pulling up the ladder. | ||
| And I think Thompson would understand that really, really well. | ||
| And I think reading him now, whether you know him or not, helps you. | ||
| And that's why I wrote Free Kingdom was so that it can be a lens on his work going back or just on this present right now. | ||
| Regardless of Trump, I think what he really represents is a brilliant historical time capsule. | ||
| And he sort of captures that time period, that upheaval pre-internet where the world was in chaos like no one else. | ||
| He encapsulated this very strange moment in history, which I don't think is nearly as strange as the moment we're going through right now. | ||
| I think this is probably the most strange moment ever. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| But he nailed it. | ||
| And he nailed it in a very, very unique way. | ||
| That's still today. | ||
| I mean... | ||
| Well, that was another thing I wanted to ask you about. | ||
| Why did him and Tom Wolfe... | ||
| Like, Tom Wolfe got some of his tapes from some of the... | ||
| Was it La Honda? | ||
| The Hells Angels Parties. | ||
| And some crazy orgy that was going on. | ||
| And he gave the tapes to this. | ||
| Like, what was all that about? | ||
| So, when Thompson was covering the Hells Angels... | ||
| They believed the counterculture at the left in the 1960s, 65, 66. We're talking about Ken Kesey. | ||
| We're talking about the anti-war movement, the free speech movement with Mario Savio. | ||
| They believed the Hells Angels were on their side. | ||
| They were fellow counterculturalists that are also outside of the ballgame. | ||
| And so... | ||
| Kese and Thompson were having a drink after being on KQED or some local TV show in San Francisco. | ||
| Ken Kese's background is he was a wrestler at Oregon. | ||
| He grew up on a dairy farm. | ||
| He'd come down to Stanford to write for what is now the Stegner Fellowship, but back then was the graduate program at Stanford. | ||
| He had moved up to La Honda on the success of his first book, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, and had just written another beautiful book. | ||
| And so Thompson was like, yeah, I'm writing about the Hell's Angels. | ||
| And Kese was like, yo, I'd like to meet them. | ||
| Thompson was like, okay. | ||
| And so Thompson knew how dangerous the Hells Angels were, where I think people either romanticized them or exaggerated their danger. | ||
| He's like, okay, I'll set them up. | ||
| And he contacted the chapter with Kesey. | ||
| So on August 7th, I think, of 1965, the Hells Angels came to LaHonda. | ||
| Allen Ginsberg was there with Kesey. | ||
| Alpert was there. | ||
| All the Stanford intellectuals were there, and they made a huge banner that says, The merry pranksters welcome the hell's angels. | ||
| And Thompson rolled up with – this isn't the Gibney documentary. | ||
| Thompson rolled up with his family. | ||
| Juan was a child, a baby in the back seat. | ||
| Sandy was in the front seat. | ||
| And he pulled up and what Thompson saw was Ken Kesey giving acid. | ||
| In red cups, like red cake cups, to the Hells Angels. | ||
| Thompson was like, well, we're getting the fuck out of here. | ||
| And so he grabs his wife and his son. | ||
| They go to San Clemente, which is on the other side. | ||
| They have like a big picnic. | ||
| And on the way back, they're like, well, let's just check it out. | ||
| Let's see what it's like. | ||
| And they kind of pull in. | ||
| He's driving this old, like, roadster. | ||
| They pull in. | ||
| And everybody's watching on a giant trampoline screen, like the five-hour stream of consciousness footage from the Merry Pranksters trip across the US, which is what Tom Wolfe wrote about. | ||
| And Tom was like, all right, they're not eating each other's skulls. | ||
| Like, we can hang out a little bit. | ||
| So they hung out, and it was interesting how acid pacified the angels instead of made them violent. | ||
| And that's what acid – of course that's what acid is. | ||
| But they spent the night hanging out there. | ||
| Thompson was writing. | ||
| So he's like, "I'm not going to do drugs." He's like, "I'll have a few drinks." He's taking notes for his book. | ||
| Later on in the night, him and Allen Ginsberg – and this is something I cut out of the book – are like, "Let's go get some beer." And so the cops are staking out the property. | ||
| And Ginsberg and Thompson get pulled over by the cops. | ||
| Thompson's sober. | ||
| He's talking to the cops. | ||
| He gets a ticket because his red lens for his back taillight is cracked. | ||
| And he's like, come on, dude. | ||
| That's 300 bucks. | ||
| I can't. | ||
| I'm a journalist. | ||
| The cops are like, why are you writing about them? | ||
| And they're talking about people being taken away to jail. | ||
| And Ginsburg goes... | ||
| What's in Redwood City, man? | ||
| Thompson goes, it's called a jail, Alan. | ||
| And it goes back to talking to the cops and all of this. | ||
| And Thompson was friends with Ginsburg. | ||
| And so they go back into the party. | ||
| Tomson realizes that. | ||
| Neil Cassidy, who's blackout drunk, who is Dean Moriarty in On the Road by Jack Kerrack, that's the character on whom it was based, his two or three girlfriends, one of them is having an orgy with the Hells Angels at this cabin off to the side and Tomson sees it. | ||
| And he describes it in two ways. | ||
| When he writes about it, but he did audio notes. | ||
| So he did audio notes of step by step. | ||
| And he describes it as like just horrific where she's barely awake. | ||
| Like she's catatonic. | ||
| And they bring in Neil Cassidy to hook up with her too. | ||
| It's horrific. | ||
| And he articulates this horror. | ||
| I had a friend who's a good feminist writer who's dear to me. | ||
| She's like, You wrote about a fucking white guy, like whatever. | ||
| She's like, you did most of it right. | ||
| She's like, you excused Thompson in that moment. | ||
| You should have just let it stand and write about it in the book instead of trying to talk about how upset he was at saying it. | ||
| Thompson was really upset. | ||
| Why did she say that? | ||
| That doesn't make any sense. | ||
| Because I think she thought that I was making the experience less authentic by trying to qualify it for our current times. | ||
| But why would that be the case when you were just explaining how he felt in the moment? | ||
| No, I think I should have let him stand more instead of showing or amplifying his emotion too much. | ||
| But are you saying this based on her criticism or your own personal opinion? | ||
| No, I think that he was really upset, but I think him being really upset is secondary to whatever she was experiencing. | ||
| Right, but you're writing about him. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| So I stand by it. | ||
| I thought about that when I wrote it. | ||
| I stand by it. | ||
| What is her criticism again? | ||
| That by amplifying his upsetness, by showing how upset he was, that that's too much of an excuse for him. | ||
| Just write it where he experienced it. | ||
| What did she think? | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| Nothing like that. | ||
| She was on point. | ||
| She felt the effort on my part to try to explain his upsetness instead of just having him be upset with one sentence and then go on. | ||
| She thought it was overriding. | ||
| I thought it was a fair criticism. | ||
| Where I overwrote it. | ||
| But long story short, Thompson goes back and he goes to Kesey and he goes, this is one of the worst things I've ever seen. | ||
| This is in the documentary. | ||
| Right, but if that's the case, then why would it be that you were overwriting it? | ||
| It doesn't seem like you overwrote it. | ||
| I always worry I'm overwriting. | ||
| It's one of my great fears. | ||
| If someone sees something like that, I think it's important that you accurately relay the emotions of the experience when they're watching a horrific event. | ||
| I mean, he did describe it as horrific. | ||
| But how much of it is my... | ||
| Cultural perception of this moment that I'm giving too much to Thompson and how much of it was what he accurately experienced. | ||
| But he talked about it. | ||
| So I think just giving his words instead of saying a little bit. | ||
| Okay, I don't know what he says. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| But he goes back on his notes that night. | ||
| These are the notes he gave to Ken Kesey. | ||
| I'm sorry, these are the notes he gave to Tom Wolfe. | ||
| But he gave him the recordings. | ||
| No, I don't think there were actual recordings. | ||
| No, I don't. | ||
| I think that's what Tom Wolfe said. | ||
| No, that's what one of the documentaries said. | ||
| Tom Wolfe said he gave me the notes of it. | ||
| So he gave me the notes of what happened. | ||
| And Tom Wolfe, I know what those notes are. | ||
| Use those notes to recreate that scene in electric Kool-Aid acid test. | ||
| And so, this is why we talk about truth. | ||
| Later in life, Thompson, some biographies might have said that he actually recorded the event. | ||
| He didn't. | ||
| He went back and he took these long audio notes of like shadow and light and the horror that he saw. | ||
| No, that's what I'm saying. | ||
| He took the audio notes, the recordings. | ||
| He made the recordings. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And then he gave those to Tom Wolfe. | ||
| And Tom Wolfe used those. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's what I'm saying. | |
| Exactly. | ||
| But some people have said that he put the tape recorder in the room. | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And that's not what he did. | |
| That's not what I meant. | ||
| I meant he gave him the recordings. | ||
| And they're beautiful. | ||
| I mean, they're terrifying, but it's about like... | ||
| Violence and shadow and light and horror. | ||
| You know, it's a horrific scene that says Thompson's brilliance at that age. | ||
| He could, in an audio note, get the fucking images and details that he needs to express the nature of that incident. | ||
| And so Tom Wolfe used those to create it himself, but then Thompson recreated it too, or wrote about it in Hell's Angels, but in a more distant way than Wolfe did. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Which is crazy because he was actually there. | ||
| It's fucking crazy, dude. | ||
| That was the first time Thompson ever took acid because he was so upset. | ||
| He went to Kesey and he's like, fuck it. | ||
| I'm not a journalist anymore. | ||
| That's so horrific what I saw. | ||
| Fuck it. | ||
| He had friends that had told him that he's a personality where if he did acid to go to the bottom of the well for him, you know, this would be a really horrific thing. | ||
| And so he's like, I don't care anymore. | ||
| And instead he just walked around and like was at peace. | ||
| It's always funny when someone tells you how you're going to react to a drug. | ||
| Relax. | ||
| Right? | ||
| Because you're going to react to it how you're going to react to it. | ||
| What was it like for you when you finally finished this? | ||
| When you put the last page down and you knew you were done? | ||
| I know that you, like me, share, we have an adoration for this guy. | ||
| He's one of my, for sure, personal heroes. | ||
| I mean, the last image I wrote was one of the most beautiful things Thompson writes is something he didn't actually see was when Nixon's helicopter he saw on TV left the White House lawn. | ||
| What happens is that giant helicopter with the white top and the blue… It's wheels lose their pressure. | ||
| So the wheels are, you know, flattened at the bottom. | ||
| But as the rotors begin to bring it up, they become elongated wheels that still touch the ground. | ||
| Thompson wrote that image, and I've always loved that image. | ||
| So I was writing that, in a sense, when I was at CPAC in 2018, last year. | ||
| And I was walking out just after I wrote that in Pence's helicopter. | ||
| It was on the lawn right there. | ||
| It was lifting off. | ||
| And I saw the wheels elongate just like that. | ||
| And I just had so much respect for Thompson's ability as a... | ||
| We talk about fiction as a narrative writer to detail that instant, you know, and to detail the way that that elongated and went. | ||
| And to have that be the emotion of Nixon finally departing. | ||
| And so I felt, you know, I felt... | ||
| I gave it, you know, I threw as hard as I could. | ||
| I threw as many pitches as I could. | ||
| I threw for as long as I can, you know, and I hope that everybody knows it's my version of Thompson and that it's a version of Thompson written through the lens of Donald Trump, but hopefully that it's through the effort and through the detail, a version that might bring more people to Thompson while also at the same time for Thompson fans, you know, being something that they can respect and engage. | ||
| Beautiful. | ||
| Well, thank you for writing it. | ||
| Thank you for just highlighting who this guy was, and thanks for all your work, man. | ||
| I appreciate it. | ||
| Thanks for being a good fan and for highlighting his work, too. | ||
| Your beautiful poster, we didn't even talk about it, the Aspen Wall poster that you have right in here is just so gorgeous. | ||
| Yeah, I got a hundred shit all over the place. | ||
| It's fantastic. | ||
| It's good. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| No, I'm a diehard. | ||
| For sure. | ||
| Listen, man, thank you, brother. | ||
| I'm so happy to be here. | ||
| Thank you very much. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Thanks for doing this. | ||
| Tell everybody the book, where to get it, how to get it. | ||
| Freak Kingdom, Hunter Thompson's 10-year Manic Crusade Against American Fascism. | ||
| It's available everywhere on Amazon. | ||
| I'm at Tim Denevy on Twitter. | ||
| And you should check out the Gonzo Voice Twitter hashtag, which has Thompson quotes all the time, which is great. | ||
| And, you know... | ||
| There's a great guy on Instagram, too. | ||
| There's a couple of them. | ||
| Yeah, RxGonzo. | ||
| RxGonzo and the Jackalope. | ||
| He's another guy who's got a bunch of great... | ||
| And Anita Thompson does a great job on Facebook. | ||
| And, you know, if you are interested in Thompson and you don't know him, I hope you read Free Kingdom, and that's a lens on his work, you know, to organize it. | ||
| And if you love Thompson, I hope you read Free Kingdom, too, because that's a way to engage him again. | ||
| Beautiful. | ||
| Thank you everybody. | ||
|
unidentified
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Bye. |
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