Hell’s Angels | Hunter S. Thompson

This episode of Books for Men features Hell's Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga by Hunter S. Thompson. A fearless account of the author's year riding with the legendary motorcycle gang during the height of their fame. It's unapologetic, unbridled, and unmistakably Hunter. Listen for more!

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Welcome back to Books for Men, a podcast to inspire more men to read and bring together men who do. So I'm really excited to share this week's book with you as we get towards the end of the year, believe it or not. And we're in the fifth month already of the show, which is pretty exciting. I'm going to be featuring some authors that I really, really love. So they're authors that have probably widely influenced me in my life on a personal level, and maybe for reasons that aren't so obvious, so I might share some of those with you as we go through this. Today's book is by none other than Hunter S. Thompson, and it is titled Hell's Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga. And so I don't usually include the subtitle of the books because I don't know, I'm not a huge subtitle guy.

(01:02)

I prefer to just let you know whatever the main title is, speak for the work, even in non-fiction. But I think this is very appropriate given the author to use the words strange and terrible in the subtitle, it really gives a good understanding of who Hunter S. Thompson is. And I think that's probably a good place to start. I think there are two ways to look at him. You could look at the character and you can look at the man, right? Or the writer and the character who Hunter S. Thompson has been portrayed as and has grown to become over time from a cultural standpoint. And it's not that it wasn't there because if you read firsthand accounts of his life, then you quickly realize that all of his weirdness strangeness, drug-fueled nature, his commitment to the absurd, and real commitment to the truth above everything was there throughout his entire life.

(02:01)

And he did a lot of weird things, and he was just a super, super entertaining character. Really. I'm trying to hold back the laughter because as I start to think about Hunter S. Thompson, I think about all these stories that are so absurd. It's hard to even share some of them. I mean, you could do ones that are very well known, like the time he tried to run for sheriff in Aspen, or the time he covered the Muhammad Ali fight, the Rumble in the Jungle, instead of trying to cover the fight, he went and tried to find the fight promoter who put on the fight because he thought it would be a more interesting take on the story. And he failed in doing so and just gave up on the assignment altogether, didn't write the story, didn't even attend the fight, and instead had this huge party in a hotel pool with drugs and all kinds of stuff.

(02:51)

You could basically get lost in these types of stories with Hunter S. Thompson over and over and over again. And it's what, again, has propagated this character. And going back to the Keith Richards episode that we did a few weeks back, it's hard to not become a parody of yourself. At a certain point, I think that Hunter became a parody of himself. People would come from all over to hang out with him in his house in Aspen, which, and when I say people, I mean like celebrities, Jack Nicholson and all these different people who, because he was this overwhelming person, this overwhelming force of energy, and it's just easy to get lost in that and forget about the true genius in his writing. And although he started writing way before the book, Hell's Angels came out in 1967. He was doing journalism for small papers and whatnot.

(03:42)

This book was the one that really gave him national notoriety and for good reason, because it was a true feat of journalism. It was everything Hunter s Thompson would come to be. This was the foundation for it on a national level. So he rode with the Hell's Angels for a year up and down the coast of California. And for those of you who don't know, the Hell's Angels were not a group of watered-down bikers in a sense. They were very rough and tumble individuals beasts or monsters as Hunter Thompson might describe them. And he was there for a firsthand account of all the things that they did as they rated parties and raped and pillaged people. And it was a very gruesome, devastating account of the things that these bikers, these individuals did at this time period. And it didn't always paint the best picture, but it really is a story of media and how media could really prop up the image of a certain thing and a story of tribalism, and of course, the violence and just the all-around extremism of what the Hell's Angels were and what media coverage can do for any organization really.

(05:01)

I don't want to share too much about the book because I don't want to ruin all the details. If you do choose to read it, which I definitely think you should read it. I do want to be clear though, on Hunter s Thompson because I think it's easy to get misled, especially with what I just told you about the book. So Hunter is not a hell's Angel. Does it take a special individual, a certain type of individual to be able to pull this off? Yes. One, you have to be friends with individuals in the Hell's Angels to allow you to ride with them, but also you have to have a fearlessness in both your thaw and action to be able to pull this off. But the thing that really separates Hunter, and the thing that really drew me into Hunter originally was yes, all this extremism, it's so hard to not be entertained by it, but there's a deep moral center with Hunter s Thompson in that he has some kind of moral code that he lives by.

(06:00)

And you can see it, you could read it, you could feel it when he writes. And everything that he does always relies on it. And he's not afraid to call people out and to be extreme in his depictions of what he sees and feels and almost bordering on fiction. And so another one of his books, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, which is probably his most famous book, was made into a movie by Johnny Depp, who was also a close friend of Hunter s Thompson, that was probably the best depiction of blending fiction with reality. And Hunter had sort of like this thought process, this idea that sometimes the best way to depict the truth is through fiction or through extremism because it's the only way that you can adequately express the emotion and the feeling of what it's like to actually witness something or experience something.

(07:01)

Because by the time it makes its way through the page, it doesn't have the ability to transfer that emotion. So you need that extreme element to it. And that's something that's really stuck around in my head as something that makes a lot of sense because it's hard to transfer that emotion. And when you read Hunter S. Thompson's work, you get all of that emotion. You can't take your eyes off the page. I've read close to everything the guy has ever written, and it's always a joy and it's always an experience when you read it. He kind of pioneered this style of journalism. It wasn't coined when this book was written, but it would later be known as Gonzo journalism. And what it was about was that unhinged quality and that ability to insert yourself into the story that you're reporting on and being fearless in your approach to how you report it.

(07:57)

And sometimes you have to be truly extreme and make shit up to make sure people get the true intention of what was happening at that moment. And it was quite a paradoxical way of doing journalism. It became something that he would be known for. He was at one point the most popular journalist writing for the most popular youth magazine in Rolling Stone. He covered a lot of big cultural moments for them. One of his probably more successful or more well-known beats was covering the 1972 election between Richard Nixon and George McGovern. McGovern and Hunter were close friends, which is pretty comical to think about, but that's how he gained such close access to the campaign. And if you read anything from that time period, the accounts will say, Hunter didn't look like any other political journalist at the time when he was there. People knew he was there.

(08:57)

And at a certain point, it almost became distracting because people wanted to talk to Hunter a lot of times. He had that type of personality. And one of the things that I always think about when I think about a guy like Hunter is what he would say if he was alive today. So what would he write about if he was alive today, and what would drive him up the wall? And what would be those chaotic things that he would just destroy and write in his visceral hell-bent craziness that he would write with? And one of the things that really points out to me is that he probably would never be able to survive today. And not because he would be so unapologetic with his writing, but because he would probably be killed by his own party because of how much that he believed in free speech.

(09:51)

Political correctness was not something that he was necessarily for, and so that juxtaposition of believing deeply in progress and being progressive and for a lot of human rights, but also having to walk this tightrope with language and what he can say and what he can't say, and he would just be eaten alive today if he was around in writing. So I will wrap this up, and before I do, I just wanted to mention one thing. The other day I was reading the Quentin Tarantino book, his new one called Cinema Speculation. And in it, he talks about how he was being interviewed, and during an interview he talk, he shared a book and the interviewer said to him, “Oh, that's the book that allowed you to be a writer.” And he was like, yeah, that's true. Right? And I think in a way, when I first read Hunter S. Thompson, I had no idea that words could look like that on a page.

(10:51)

I had no idea that words could sound like that on a page, that there was a writer that wrote like this. It broke everything in my mind about what a writer was or who a writer was. And so I have a really special connection with him, despite any of his faults and imperfections and his extremism. He's someone who did a lot for me personally. And I hope that if you read any of his work, you could see it for what it truly is, as opposed to just filing him away in your mind as this bombastic drug-fueled character, which he was, but he was so much more than that. With that being said, I want to thank you for listening. As always. If you enjoyed it, please remember to share it with friends, family members, and people who you think might like this. It is really, really important to me.

(11:46)

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