Jake Brennan (13:25)
No problem. I'll be with you every step of the way. One in four was a fraud paying American. Not anymore. Save up to 40 your first year. Visit lifelock.com podcast terms apply this episode is brought to you by FX's Love Story. John F. Kennedy Jr. And Carolyn Bassette join host Evan Ross Katz on the official podcast for FX's new series Love Story, John F. Kennedy Jr. And Carolyn Bessette, and go behind the scenes with cast and special guests featuring Sarah Pidgeon, Paul Anthony Kelly, Grace Gummer and Naomi Watts. FX's love story John F. Kennedy Jr. And Carolyn Bessette Wherever you listen to podcasts. Vegas, Saigon, Miami, N.H. football kickoffs, rumbles in the jungle. Fear and loathing the only constant until that inevitable million pound shithammer comes crashing down. Wherever he was and whatever he was writing about, Hunter S. Thompson inserted himself into his journalism, if he could call what he did journalism, just as he inserted himself into the most feared motorcycle gang in the world when he rode with the Hells Angels for a year. By making himself part of the story, Hunter was making himself seen and heard like he always did, instead of setting fires and knocking over liquor stores like he did as a kid. Now as an adult, he dosed the unsuspecting with lsd, set off Roman candles in close quarters, stuck a severed boar's head in a toilet. All gags, all for attention, he wrote as he lived. Wild, feral one moment bleeding into the next, some moments deliberately exaggerated to ensure that his audience's eyeballs stayed glued to the page and others so saturated with truth that you could hardly believe what you were reading. His style, which in its infancy didn't have a name, was the product of his lifestyle in Big Sur. Hunter whipped his car through the twists and turns of Route 1, hunting deer at night alongside a whippet with balls the size of California oranges. 49 attempts, the 50th being the charm only because the dumb animal found itself caught like a, well, a deer in the headlights and ran head first into Hunter's vehicle. The dog was better at catching cats anyway. The hunter simply had to issue the non verbal command and the whippet with the mega nuts sprang into action. Hunter didn't make friends with the folk singer Joan Baez on that particular evening, seeing it was her cat on the wrong end of the whippet's jaw. In South America, hunters struggled to maintain a steady byline while simultaneously struggling with dysentery while some fucking bell tolled non stop outside his room, the national observer refusing to pay him, those weaseled dicks then stung by some poisonous insect, now forced to spend his beer money on cortisone and antibiotics, which meant he had to steal the beers two at a time so that the monkey living in his pocket wouldn't go without. I'm serious. This is 100% true. Look it up. The monkey's thirst for alcohol was as unquenchable as hunters. So unquenchable in fact, they he the monkey that is suffering from a bad bout of the DTs jumped from a 10th floor window, ending it all just as Hunter would end it some 40 years later, not by leaping from great heights, but with the great power of a.45. But I digress. In Chicago, Hunter found the true meaning of America in a cop's nightstick, Mayor Daley's horde of bloodthirsty thugs committing acts of brutality of innocent civilians that would have made the angels blush. Far more civil was Hunter's one and only meeting with his nemesis, Richard Nixon, in the back of a car as the presidential hopeful was driven to a Lear jet waiting for him in New Hampshire. The one stipulation Politics were off the table. Nixon wanted to talk football, which was all the same to Hunter because he already knew he hated Nixon's politics, and he'd gladly talked football for hours with with anyone, even his enemies. Hunter assumed the feeling was mutual, that he was on Nixon's infamous enemies list, a list that had grown to include Jane Fonda, Paul Newman, the Black Panthers, and Scanlan's, the anti authority magazine that hired Hunter to cover the Kentucky Derby. Hunter took the Kentucky Derby gig without a second thought. He'd cover anything if there was a paycheck attached. Even better of his. His expenses were paid. He had a wife and a young son. He needed the money. But when it came to the derby, to Kentucky, his home state, the state that rejected him years earlier, locked him up, kicked him out, publicly humiliated him While all the other wannabe ups ran home to their rich daddies, Hunter wasn't just writing an assignment, he was settling a score. Or so said Ralph Stedman, the Welsh artist hired to cover the Derby alongside hunter for Scanlan's 1970 Churchill Downs. Ralph Stedman had never met Hunter S. Thompson before, but he was easy to spot in the Derby crowd. He was the one in the striped polo tinted sunglasses, his watch threaded through a leather biker bracelet, white tube socks pulled up to his knees just below his short shorts, sitting at the bar, starting a rumor that the Black Panthers were on their way to protest. Anything to rile up the greed heads spilling bourbon all over themselves and pretending as though Jackie Robinson had never put on that Dodgers jersey. Hunter had more than his fair share of wisdom concerning Louisville's high society to impart to Ralph, as well as a few extra doses of psilocybin. Ralph had never done anything like that before. It didn't matter. He was working with Hunter now, so he had to get on Hunter's level. The drug was a truth serum for your eyes, and when you were on this stuff, you were able to see who these Southern gentlemen, these Southern belles, truly were. Beneath the veneer of respectability was the underbelly, and I do mean bellies. Bloated bellies, shouting, crying, puking and pissing themselves, losing more money than Hunter or Ralph would ever see in their lives while the horses rounded the track down below. Hunter didn't care about what was happening on the track. That's not why he was here. He was here for the slobber on some old fat man's cigar, the decorum circling the urinal drain. Odorous lizards, all of them, their eyes black, their tongues forked, hissing, screeching, chanting. My old Kentucky home. Like a coven circling a pentagram etched on the floor. And on that floor, in the middle of it all, bloodied and defiled, lay the Derby crowd's sacrifice. The American dream. When it was all said and done, Hunter scrambled to make sense of it all. He was barely able to submit his article under deadline. He felt like he had failed, so stoned on hallucinogens, just like his genteel subjects were stoned on their own. Bullshit that his final draft didn't even mention the race itself, which is what Scanlan's paid him for in the first place. But when the magazine published Hunter's article the Kentucky Derby is Decadent and depraved in their June 1970 issue, it hit a nerve. It felt new, daring, a singular work from a Unique mind. The phone at Scanlan's rang off the hook and people really responded to it. A writer at the Boston Globe sent word to Hunter that his article read like a missive from the only man to make it through an all night drinking session with his wits still about him. The townies in South Boston had a word for that kind of guy. Gonzo. Hunter soon put his Gonzo stamp on other American events. Mardi Gras in New Orleans, the Super bowl in Houston. America's cup in Newport. New Year's Eve in Times Square, wherever the American dream was supposedly thriving. Hunter knew better. The American dream was not thriving anywhere. In fact, the American dream was fucked. It was fucked in Chicago in 68. Fucked the minute Nixon stepped off that Learjet in New Hampshire. Fucking when Hunter ran himself for sheriff of Aspen, Colorado, on a ticket that promised to legalize grass, publicly, shame dishonest drug dealers and disarm the entire police force. Hunter's bid for sheriff terrified the status quo so much that the opposition brought people on stretchers from the hospitals to go vote in the polls. They made sure Hunter lost by a wide margin. It was a political failure that. That now seemed to mirror what he was seeing as his imminent professional failure. Because even though he'd managed to coin a new style of journalism with his Kentucky Derby article, that didn't mean his life had suddenly changed. If anything, the attention merely gave way to more hustling for bylines and paychecks. Add to that the fact that it was the dawn of the 1970s and the United States was coming apart. At the scene, kids were being murdered at Kent State. Nixon was sending troops into Cambodia. On the home front, Hunter's wife suffered a string of miscarriages. The going was getting tougher by the day. But this is Hunter S. Thompson we're talking about. Which meant that the going didn't just get tough. The going got weird. And when the going got weird, that's when the weird turned pro. We'll be right back after this. Word, word, word. He was somewhere between his hotel room and the lobby when the drugs began to take hold. He remembered saying something like, oscar, Oscar, where the hell did you get off to, man? While all around him, the sights and sounds of a Casino at 4:30 in the morning assaulted his senses. Suddenly he realized that Oscar wasn't there. Not in the hotel and not in Vegas, not even in Nevada. Oscar was gone. And he was left behind, stuck, carrying Oscar's briefcase, which at last glance contained about a pound of weed, a loaded 357 Magnum and some extra bullets. If they caught him with this stuff, it was all over. Christ, they'd feed him to the wolves, maybe to the lions that did that act over at the Tropicana. Not because they knew what was inside his suitcase. You'd have to have X ray vision for that. But because he had no money left and thus was unable to pay the bill for his room. It was why he was here now. Broke, high and skipping out on his tab like some reprobate. He had to move fast. Well, not too fast. He didn't want to raise any eyebrows. Not that the red Cadillac convertible waiting for him outside was doing him any favors. But it was like he told Jan Wenner when he asked the editor of Rolling Stone to get him the car specifically for this assignment. You can't cover the air American dream in a goddamn Oldsmobile. Right now, though, he'd give anything for an Oldsmobile. Anything to look inconspicuous as he made his escape lugging a suitcase full of contraband through a casino lobby as the drugs began to take hold. Who was he kidding? The drugs had taken hold hours, days, weeks earlier. He was permanently under their sway at this point. That was the whole point. Point not in the article he was cooking up for Rolling Stone now. But coming to Vegas in the first place to blow off steam, to avoid yet another deadline to get the hell out of la. LA was all darkness, even on the outskirts, as far away as Pasadena, in a Holiday Inn near the Santa Anita racetrack where, weeks earlier, Hunter S. Thompson holed up working on an assignment. The more Hunter investigated, the closer he got to that darkness. Ruben Salazar, a reporter for the LA Times, was dead. Killed by a tear gas round fired by a sheriff's deputy during the National Chicano Moratorium March against the Vietnam War. The story had all the things that got Hunter's blood pumping. War, protests, corruption, the haves and the have nots. But when it became clear to Hunter that Salazar's death was likely not an accident, but a premeditated assassination, that's when the darkness metastasized. This was heavier than the stuff Hunter typically covered. This wasn't the derby or a football game or a campaign trail. This was something else. Blood had been spilled, and blood would be spilled again. Hunter needed to think about his next move. He needed a moment. He needed a shower. He walked into his hotel bathroom only to find that there was no shower to take. It was just a bathtub with a copper wire running across it. A copper wire that was plugged into a socket. He didn't know when they'd gotten access to his room. But the message was clear. If Hunter wanted to peer into that darkness, if he wanted to go right to the edge, he was going to fall in and that would be the end. He thought of the beating he'd endured at the Hands of the Angels a few years prior. He didn't want to go through that again. So he got the hell out of Dodge. But not alone. He brought with him Oscar Zeta Acosta, his primary source for the Salazar story, who also just so happened to be Salazar's lawyer. And their agenda was get away, blow off steam, talk where they could be alone. And now Hunter was all alone, abandoned by his traveling companion, carting around a suitcase loaded with drugs and firearms while trying to skip out on his hotel bill at 4:30 in the morning. He was more paranoid than ever before as he made his way outside into the Cadillac, shocked that he hadn't been apprehended, even more so that he was able to haul ass out of Vegas before the sun even came up. And that sun was blinding. Hunter S. Thompson was a night owl. Born a night owl, just like he'd been born angry. He let those traits guide him as he furiously typed away, just finishing and filing the Salazar story and then getting to work on his experiences in Las Vegas. But his trip with Oscar Acosta would not be written like any other story. He rechristened himself Raul duke. Oscar became Dr. Gonzo, Duke's 300 pound Samoan attorney. And some things in the story were true, like the Vegas motorcycle race that Hunter covered for Sports Illustrated, a piece the magazine outright rejected, or the National District Attorney's Conference on Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, which, yes, no shit, Hunter and Oscar attended, presumably under the influence of all the things the conference organizers sought to eradicate. When Hunter's larger narrative of these experiences was finally published, first as a series of articles in Rolling Stone magazine and then as a 1972 novel, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream. It was a revelation. Hunter's sense of humor, the way in which his drug soaked narrative commented on the previous decade, on the so called revolution that had failed so spectacularly. Not that Hunter was a revolutionary or that he was anti drugs. Quite the contrary, Hunter S. Thompson advocated for paying as much for your morning paper as you did for a hit of good mescaline. He also embodied what was coming down the pike, what was already here. The cynical misanthrope who gleefully exposed liars and hypocrites. No matter if they called themselves liberal or conservative. No one was safe When Hunter S. Thompson was around 1971 California, Hunter shifted up a gear and merged into traffic. On the pch, Rolling Stone staffers filled out the rest of his Mustang, including the magazine's chief photographer, Annie Leibowitz. Hunter gave the gas pedal no quarter. California Highway Patrol clocked him easy. The cop's black and white Dodge hit the lights and Hunter pulled over. One of the fellow staffers was freaking out in the backseat, and the Mustang was packed to the gills with weed and acid and they were all going to get jail. The cop made his approach on the driver's side, and Hunter told everyone to remain calm and then told Annie to get her camera ready. The cop ordered Hunter out of the car. He wanted to know if Hunter had been drinking. Hunter didn't answer yes or no, but instead asked the cop if a drunk man could do this. Standing there on the side of the road, Hunter swung his head back, launching his sunglasses off his face, which he then caught with ease behind his back. Aries camera flashed and the cop smiled. He told Hunter to hit the road, but try and lay off the gas a little. Hunter, a cynic, a misanthrope, still managed to possess a charm that never failed to work its magic, even in the company of authority figures. That pissed him off, especially the people who truly made him angrier than anything. Richard Nixon, for example. He famously became good friends with Roxanne Pulitzer after describing her in one of his articles as a jaded Pan Am stewardess. This is a kind of person that does not exist anymore. Not in the world we live in today. Try going on Instagram or X as a card carrying member of the NRA who also wants to defund the police while tripping balls on the regular. You can't. You can't be all things to all people. Not like Hunter Thompson once was. Now, unfortunately, there are sides and there are lanes and you don't cross over to someone else's lane unless you want the rest of the world to drive you off the road. However, this is what Hunter did, and the more he did this, the more he emptied the contents of his brain onto the page in his rapidly evolving gonzo style, the bigger he became. John and Yoko, ccr, Little Richard, Elton John, Jimi Hendrix. They may have been on the COVID of Rolling Stone, but there was no question that the words running wild on the pages within were the work of the magazine's real golden God. Hunter S. Thompson, Rolling Stone Stone's one and only rock star. Hunter S. Thompson chased his breakfast of ham and eggs with a shot of whiskey. Sitting next to him at the kitchen table in his Woody Creek, Colorado home, Hunter's son was eating dinner. It was almost 6pm Hunter's Day was just beginning. The night called to him, as it always did, the hours when his creativity was at its peak. The only hours that his gonzo brain would acknowledge the dawn approaching at an alarming rate. Daylight was the great motivator. Well, that and the drugs, which were beginning to take hold, as they always did. The routine got Hunter writing. And that writing gave him what he always wanted, attention. And over the years, his legend simply grew larger, even when the quality of his writing began to decline, until, just like the Hell's Angels that he'd written about decades prior, Hunter now appeared more mythical than he actually was. College girls came banging on his door, drug buddies, naked women, autograph hounds, Keith Richards. You never knew who was going to show up at any given time. Truly a rock star life. A life that Hunter lived half the time while simultaneously living as a family man during the other half. But the haves weren't equal. Hunter's first wife grew tired of it all, of not knowing what was truth and what was bullshit, just like the gray area in Hunter's writing. And by the 1980s, divorce seemed the logical choice. But she knew the thought of it would anger Hunter. So she called the cops for peace of mind. Does he have a gun? The cops wanted to know. Yeah, he's got a gun. He's got 22 guns and they're all loaded. Guns were a fascination. Guns passed the time. They broke the tension. Machine guns were cathartic as fuck. Firing those out back was like watering the lawn, as Hunter said. When it came to home security, though, a 12 gauge short barrel shotgun was the way to go. Hunter had a couple of those. But today, Hunter didn't have a shotgun in his hand. On this day, decades after his first wife divorced him on February 20, 2005, Hunter was holding his.45 caliber pistol. Hunter had his guns, his booze, food, drugs, fame, attention. But he also still had his anger. He was angry that Jan Wenner seemed incapable of paying him on time anymore. Angry about yet another debacle of a presidential election. And perhaps most of all, angry that once again, it was February and that meant football season was over. Football, the one thing Hunter could talk to Richard Nixon about. The only place where the American dream was still alive, if only for a few hours on any given Sunday. But now Hunter was staring down March months of Sundays with no football, staring down the edge, somewhere between sanity and insanity, life and death. The thought was depressing as always, but for some reason this year, right now, at 67 years old, it was too much. One toke over the line Sweet Jesus, just like the song said. And with that, Hunter S. Thompson, sitting in his favorite chair at the kitchen table of his Woody Creek home, stuck the barrel of his.45 in his mouth and pulled the trigger. Six months later to the day, at the top of a 15 story tower shaped like a clenched fist holding a peyote button, the logo created years earlier when he ran for Sheriff Hunter S. Thompson, Thompson's final wish was carried out as his ashes were shot out of a cannon. This was followed by a fireworks display while Norman Greenbaum's song Spirit in the sky played at maximum volume. Hunter Thompson had gone over the high side like an angel's bike sliding into the curve, to a place the rest of us have yet to see. A place where, as Hunter himself once wrote, there is no honest way to explain it, because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over. Can you imagine how Hunter Thompson would explain the afterlife? That's one piece of gonzo journalism that we'll never get to read, and that is a disgrace. I'm Jake Brennan and this is Disgraceland. Disgraceland was created by yours truly and is produced in partnership with Double Elvis. Credits for this episode can be found on the show notes page@gracelandpod.com if you're listening as a Disgraceland All Access member, thank you for supporting the show. We really appreciate it. And if not, you can become a member right now by going to Disgracelandpod.com Membership members can listen to every episode of Disgraceland ad free. Plus you'll get one brand new exclusive episode every month. Weekly unscripted bonus episodes, special audio collections, and early access to merchandise and events. Visit disgracelandpod.com for details. Rate and review the show and follow us on Instagram, TikTok, Twitter and Facebook disgracelandpod and on YouTube@YouTube.com disgracelandpod Rocka Rolla He's a bad, bad man.
