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October 31, 2005
One more for Halloween...
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A Halloween treat
Or maybe it’s a trick—hard to say.
A couple years ago Cecil and I recorded a version of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven,” partly as a way to test out his new recording setup. The results were mixed: I was never entirely happy with my contribution, but Cecil did a fantastic job on the music and the mixing, so I think that this deserves to finally see the light of day. Or the dark of night, whatever. And what better day than today?
So without, further ado, here’s The Raven.
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October 30, 2005
A spooky cat picture
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October 29, 2005
Three lines about Bela Lugosi
Bela Lugosi was born on this day in 1884.
But now he’s dead.
Undead undead undead.
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October 27, 2005
The Bauhaus report
I’m happy to report that Bauhaus was in fine form. Pete Murphy’s voice was as powerful as ever, though he has a big bald spot now, along with a blond dye job and a seedy-looking moustache; thankfully, he’s toned down the goofy dancing and now carries himself with a certain dignity. Daniel Ash played the bejeezus out of his guitar and looked like he’s been hitting the gym; formerly a wispy, skinny-armed English lad, he now sports big guns that he showed off with a sleeveless outfit. The Haskins boys, David and Kevin, provided a reliable backbone on bass and drums, and didn’t seem to have aged a bit. Kevin, in particular, pounded on his kit with the energy and enthusiasm of a teenager—but with the precision of a seasoned veteran.
The whole band, in fact, seemed to just plain enjoy being Bauhaus again, and this energy animated the music and thus the audience. The set list was close to perfect; sounding especially good were “She’s in Parties,” “Rosegarden Funeral of Sores,” and “Hollow Hills.” Ash got a chance to sing on an amped-up version of “Slice of Life,” always a personal favorite of mine, and there was no arguing with the encores: “Bela Lugosi’s Dead,” “Telegram Sam,” and to wrap things up, “Ziggy Stardust.” Murphy even wished us all sweet dreams before exiting stage left. On the whole, I don’t know what more I could have asked for from Bauhaus in 2005, except maybe Love and Rockets as the opening act—but that would be greedy.
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October 26, 2005
Bauhaus, back from the dead
Bauhaus, somber and well-dressed as always.
Tonight is the Bauhaus show at the Warfield, and though it’s a perfect day for it—gray and gloomy as all get-out—I am a little apprehensive.
I am hard-pressed to explain, even to myself, my great love for Bauhaus. In some ways they are just the kind of band I usually hate: a bunch of pretty boys who take themselves way too seriously. But when I started listening to their records back in 1985—two years after they’d split up—I was completely hooked. There was just something about them…a purity of purpose that captures perfectly what it’s like to be 19, 20 years old, artsy and alienated and seething with morbid sexuality.
Which makes me wonder, now that they’re these 45-year-old dudes, and I’m no spring chicken myself, will it be the same? Will it be pure nostalgia, or will the magic still be there? I guess we’ll find out soon enough.
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October 25, 2005
Movie recommendation
Anytime someone makes a movie that truly surprises me in this day and age, I figure they’ve accomplished something. David Cronenberg’s new one, A History of Violence, starts off looking like it’s going down one particular road and then just keeps making left turns. You really never know what’s going to happen next, which makes for a very nervous-making viewing experience. At times the suspense is downright Hitchcockian, and in fact there’s a moment early on that makes me think of Psycho…but I won’t elaborate any further, because I don’t want to give anything away.
Cronenberg has always been a master of twisted cinema, and this one is no exception, though it’s twisted in a much different way than his early horror films. I highly recommend it, with the caveat that it’s extremely brutal, both violence-wise and psychology-wise, though not gratuitously so. This is not a good popcorn movie, but it is a brilliant piece of filmmaking.
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October 24, 2005
High voltage man kisses night
It’s the exception rather than the rule for a cover to be better than the original, especially when the original is a Captain Beefheart song. But take a listen to this:
The song is called “Electricity,” and the problem with the Captain’s version is not so much the performance as the sound quality, which was poor even for its day. So the song was just laying there for twenty years or so waiting for Sonic Youth to come along and run a million volts through it, which they did on the now out-of-print Beefheart tribute album Fast’n’Bulbous. The result is transplendant, or superious, or some other Don King-style adjective.
Oh, by the way, play it loud.
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October 19, 2005
Neighborhood weirdness of the week
On the way down to Grand Avenue recently I ran across the following poster plastered to the side of a newspaper box:
I've intentionally made this photo so low-res as to be unreadable, because the poster appears to be the result of someone's disturbing love obsession, and the love object is mentioned by name several times in the course of a bizarre screed that reads as follows (all spelling, grammar, and opinions are the author's):
Shabubu![Girl's name],
This is not a flyer, just a personal letter. Im so tired, your wearing me out. You got two coats of shellack off last night/this A.M. and I realize that you are determined to NEVER let me get the last word.
Your girlfriend/crime partner called me a filthy name, and YOU are going to take the punishment if I don't get an apology and damn quickly.
Outside of that, I could find a "normal" relationship among the teenaged girls who LOVE my singing. I'm going to be playing/singing on the street, and making $$$ for my daily food, and glue etc. etc. Xeroxes cost a lot, and I don't know if you appreciate all the love I put into trying to communicate with you.
I Want you so badly, and you need me so badly, your "girlfriend" who is jealous of my cool hair, (your never going to guess the current colour) I had it done back to my natural shade of Reddish Brown, and I got all the grey burned hair softened and looking like God created me. I look real nice cleaned up, and Everyone in town thinks your Insane for not loving me, and me insane for loving a Bitchface like you. No wonder your hanging out with a Piedmont Ave Petty Drug Dealer like "Purple Top". She is a piece of crap, I've already made progress in finding out what her name is, who she is copping from, and why she is so nasty to me...
She wants to be your only lover, and resents the fact that I can Pound your cute chubby little Butt for hours and I have the heavy equipment, all she have is a plastic imitation and Stupid Looking Badly Coloured Hair.
So if you don't want your powerlessness, poverty (my movie producer saw you panhandling last weekend by Bart Station. )and you and your nasty friend's Dirty Business postered, broadcasted, and if I can talk myself into wasting the $$$, I put up a billboard on Piedmont Ave and Montclair, and take out ads in the newspapers......... I had better get some kind of intelligent response to all of this. I love you and I realize how stupid I am for loving such a Low Class Looser Drug Abusing Lying Bisexual Nasty Retarded Bitchface Scorpio such as you.........
I love you,
Leonardo the Lover
My question is, is this guy a genuine murderous psycho, or just somebody who loves himself a little too much and can't understand why this girl doesn't? Discuss amongst yourselves.
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October 17, 2005
Autumn in Big Basin
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October 13, 2005
Headline du jour
"Ancient noodles discovered in China"
Add your own Chinese restaurant joke here.
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October 12, 2005
Hexagram du jour
When clouds rise in the sky, it is a sign that it will rain. There is nothing to do but to wait until the rain falls. It is the same in life when destiny is at work. We should not worry and seek to shape the future by interfering in things before the time is ripe. We should quietly fortify the body with food and drink and the mind with gladness and good cheer. Fate comes when it will, and thus we are ready.
-I Ching, Hexagram 5
(Willhelm/Baynes translation)
Posted by bill at 4:19 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
October 9, 2005
Buy the Ticket, Take the Ride (Pt. 7 and Final)
“One owes respect to the living: To the Dead one owes only the truth.”
—Voltaire (via HST)
One last thing.
I went on at great length about Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas the other day, but I didn’t quite finish the thought. In additon to being all the things I said it was, Fear and Loathing is one thing that is often—maybe always—overlooked: a story of friendship. Specifically, the friendship between Hunter Thompson and his attorney, drug buddy, and partner in crime, Oscar Zeta Acosta.
Much of Thompson’s work is shot through with a peculiar kind of loneliness; however much people might have found it exciting to be around him, no one could take it for very long. Artist Ralph Steadman often served as the Doctor’s sidekick and straight man, but after a few days he would usually be on the edge of a nervous breakdown and have to return to England for lengthy recuperation.
In Acosta, the Doctor finally found someone who was truly on his wavelength, someone who could keep up with his relentless pace, superhuman drug intake, and general love of chaos. In fact, in Fear and Loathing, it’s Thompson who’s the sane one, the voice of reason, and Acosta who’s constantly flirting with going over the edge. I’ve always loved this passage from midway through the book (if possible, it should be read with an endless loop of the Jefferson Airplane’s Surrealistic Pillow playing in the background):
My attorney was in the bathtub when I returned. Submerged in green water — the oily product of some Japanese bath salts he’d picked up in the hotel gift shop, along with a new AM/FM radio plugged into the electric razor socket. Top volume. Some gibberish by a thing called “Three Dog Night,” about a frog named Jeremiah who wanted “Joy to the World.”
First Lennon, now this, I thought. Next we’ll have Glen Campbell screaming “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?”
Where indeed? No flowers in this town. Only carnivorous plants. I turned the volume down and noticed a hunk of chewed-up white paper beside the radio. My attorney seemed not to notice the sound-change. He was lost in a fog of green steam; only half his head was visible above the water line.
“You ate this?” I asked, holding up the white pad.
He ignored me. But I knew. He would be very difficult to reach for the next six hours. The whole blotter was chewed up.
“You evil son of a bitch,” I said. “You better hope there’s some Thorazine in that bag, because if there’s not you’re in bad trouble tomorrow.”
“Music!” he snarled. “Turn it up. Put that tape on.”
“What tape?”
“The new one. It’s right there.”
I picked up the radio and noticed that it was also a tape recorder — one of those things with a cassette-unit built in. And the tape, Surrealistic Pillow, needed only to be flipped over.
He had already gone through side one — at a volume that must have been audible in every room within a radius of one hundred yards, walls and all.
” ‘White Rabbit,’ ” he said. “I want a rising sound.”
“You’re doomed,” I said. “I’m leaving here in two hours — and then they’re going to come up here and beat the mortal shit out of you with big saps. Right there in the tub.”
“I dig my own graves,” he said. “Green water and the White Rabbit…put it on; don’t make me use this.” His arm lashed out of the water, the hunting knife gripped in his fist.
“Jesus,” I muttered. At that point I figured he was beyond help — lying there in the tub with a head full of acid and the sharpest knife I’ve ever seen, totally incapable of reason, demanding the White Rabbit. This is it, I thought. I’ve gone as far as I can with this waterhead. This time it’s a suicide trip. This time he wants it. He’s ready….
“OK,” I said, turning the tape over and pushing the “play” button. “But do me one last favor, will you? Can you give me two hours? That’s all I ask — just two hours to sleep before tomorrow. I suspect it’s going to be a very difficult day.”
“Of course,” he said. “I’m your attorney. I’ll give you all the time you need, at my normal rates: $45 an hour — but you’ll be wanting a cushion, so why don’t you just lay one of those $100 bills down there beside the radio, and fuck off?”
“How about a check?” I said. “On the Sawtooth National Bank. You won’t need any ID to cash it there. They know me.”
“Whatever’s right,” he said, beginning to jerk with the music. The bathroom was like the inside of a huge defective woofer. Heinous vibrations, overwhelming sound. The floor was full of water. I moved the radio as far from the tub as it would go, then I left and closed the door behind me.
Within seconds he was shouting at me. “Help! You bastard! I need help!”
I rushed back inside, thinking he’d sliced off an ear by accident.
But no…he was reaching across the bathroom toward the white formica shelf where the radio sat. “I want that fuckin radio,” he snarled.
I grabbed it away from his hand. “You fool!” I said. “Get back in that tub! Get away from that goddamn radio!” I shoved it back from his hand. The volume was so far up that it was hard to know what was playing unless you knew Surrealistic Pillow almost note for note…which I did, at the time, so I knew that “White Rabbit” had finished; the peak had come and gone.
But my attorney, it seemed, had not made it. He wanted more. “Back the tape up!” he yelled. “I need it again!” His eyes were full of craziness now, unable to focus. He seemed on the verge of some awful psychic orgasm….
“Let it roll!” he screamed. “Just as high as the fucker can go! And when it comes to that fantastic note where the rabbit bites its own head off, I want you to throw that fuckin radio into the tub with me.”
I stared at him, keeping a firm grip on the radio. “Not me,” I said finally. “I’d be happy to ram a goddamn 440-volt cattle prod into that tub with you right now, but not this radio. It would blast you right through the wall — stone-dead in ten seconds.” I laughed. “Shit, they’d make me explain it — drag me down to some rotten coroner’s inquest and grill me about…yes…the exact details. I don’t need that.”
“Bullshit!” he screamed. “Just tell them I wanted to get Higher!”
I thought for a moment. “Okay,” I said finally. “You’re right. This is probably the only solution.” I picked up the tape/radio — which was still plugged in — and held it over the tub. “Just let me make sure I have it all lined up,” I said. “You want me to throw this thing into the tub when ‘White Rabbit’ peaks — is that it?”
He fell back in the water and smiled gratefully. “Fuck yes,” he said. “I was beginning to think I was going to have to go out and get one of the goddamn maids to do it.”
“Don’t worry,” I said. “Are you ready?” I hit the “play” button and “White Rabbit” started building again. Almost immediately he began to howl and moan…another fast run up that mountain, and thinking, this time, that he would finally get over the top. His eyes were gripped shut and only his head and both kneecaps poked up through the oily green water.
I let the song build while I sorted through the pile of fat ripe grapefruit next to the basin. The biggest one of the lot weighed almost two pounds. I got a good Vida Blue fastball grip on the fucker — and just as “White Rabbit” peaked I lashed it into the tub like a cannonball.
My attorney screamed crazily, thrashing around in the tub like a shark after meat, churning water all over the floor as he struggled to get hold of something.
I jerked the AC cord out of the tape/radio and moved out of the bathroom very quickly…the machine kept on playing, but now it was back on its own harmless battery power. I could hear the beat cooling down as I moved across the room to my kitbag and fetched up the Mace can….
Unfortunately, as it turned out, Acosta really was doomed, really was on a messianic suicide trip of some kind. He disappeared in 1974 and was never heard from again, for reasons that have never been made entirely clear, although there have been various theories over the years. In Breakfast with Hunter, Thompson says that he was murdered at sea and dumped overboard.
The Doctor’s eyes light up when he talks about Acosta in the movie, and it seems he never entirely got over the loss. In 1977 he wrote an angry, heartfelt requiem entitled “The Banshee Screams for Buffalo Meat.”
Oscar Zeta Acosta — despite any claims to the contrary — was a dangerous thug who lived every day of his life as a stalking momument to the notion that a man with a greed for the truth should expect no mercy and give none…
…and that was the difference between Oscar and a lot of the merciless geeks he liked to tell strangers he admired; class acts like Fatty Arbuckle and Benito Mussolini.
When the great scorer comes to write against Oscar’s name, one of the first few lines in the Ledger will note that he usually lacked the courage of his consistently monstrous convictions. There was more mercy, madness, dignity and generosity in that overweight, overworked and always overindulged brown cannonball of a body than most of us will meet in any human package even three times Oscar’s size for the rest of our lives — which are all running noticeably leaner on the high side, since that rotten fat spic disappeared.
Thompson goes on to detail how Acosta, whose contribution to Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is inestimable, nearly torpedoed the book at the last moment, for an utterly perverse reason:
He was, as I’d said, not concerned at all by the libels. Of course they were all true, he said when I finally reached him by phone at the Hotel Synaloa.
The only thing that bothered him — bothered him very badly — was the fact that I’d repeatedly described him as a 300-pound Samoan.
“What kind of Journalist are you?” he screamed at me. “Don’t you have any respect for the truth? I can sink that whole publishing house for defaming me, trying to pass me off as one of those waterhead South Sea mongrels.”
The libel lawyers were stunned into paranoid silence. “Was it either some kind of arcane legal trick,” they wondered, “or was this dope-addled freak really crazy enough to insist on having himself formally identified for all time, with one of the most depraved and degenerate figures in American literature?”
Should his angry threats and demands conceivably be taken seriously? Was it possible that a well-known practicing attorney might not only freely admit to all these heinous crimes, but insist that every foul detail be documented as the absolute truth?
“Why not?” Oscar answered. And the only way he’d sign the release, he added, was in exchange for a firm guarantee from the lawyers that both his name and a suitable photograph of himself be prominently displayed on the book’s dust cover.
That very photograph, a shot of Thompson and Acosta at Caesar’s Palace, can be found at the top of this page. These two guys were clearly cut from the same cloth, and it is a moving testament to something or other that the hillbilly from Kentucky and the Chicano from Riverbank, California could be so much like brothers. They were so much alike, in fact, that Dr. Thompson’s last words on Oscar Acosta could just as well serve as his own elegy. Which is what I’m going to let them do here, as I bring this ride to a close with the Good Doctor himself getting the last word, which is one thing he certainly deserves.
What began as a quick and stylish epitaph…has long since gone out of control. Not even [he] would have wanted an obituary with no end….
[He] was one of God’s own prototypes — a high-powered mutant of some kind who was never even considered for mass production. He was too weird to live and too rare to die — and as far as I’m concerned, that’s just about all that needs to be said about him right now….
We are better off without him. Sooner or later he would have had to be put to sleep anyway…. So the world is a better place, now that he’s at least out of sight, if not certifiably dead.
He will not be missed — except perhaps in Fat City, where every light in town went dim when we heard he’d finally cashed his check.
Posted by bill at 11:59 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
October 8, 2005
Buy the Ticket, Take the Ride (Pt. 6)
Although labeled “Dr. Gonzo,” this Ralph Steadman illustration actually depicts Raoul Duke, a.k.a. Hunter S. Thompson.
When I started this screed almost two months ago, I had no idea that it would absorb all my writing energy, if not my life, for so long…but here we are, it’s a cool day in October, the days are getting noticeably shorter, and in some ways I feel like I’ve only scratched the surface. But fuck it, sooner or later this thread is going to have to be terminated to make room for whatever comes next. There are just a few loose ends I feel obligated to tie up first.
In examining what makes Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas tick, I omitted for simplicity’s sake one factor that I would be remiss in not mentioning: the contribution of Ralph Steadman, the illustrator. It just wouldn’t have been the same book without his depictions of Raoul Duke, Dr. Gonzo, and the various Vegas citizens, cops, and lizards that they enounter in the course of their adventures.
And above and beyond that he contributed the distinctive crude lettering and the weird ink blotches that occur throughout the book, sometimes obscuring bits of text and adding a unique element of chaos. This is why no version of Fear and Loathing in any other medium has ever been quite satisfying…it was meant to be a book and should be left that way (with all due respect to Mr. Gilliam).
Unlike “The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved” or The Curse of Lono, Steadman is not a character in Fear and Loathing, just the artist—a fact over which he apparently harbors some resentment, because in the film Breakfast with Hunter, filmed 30 years later, he is seen complaining to Thompson about not being invited along on the Vegas trip. Even so, the two remained friends until the Doctor’s death, which is fairly remarkable given that Thompson tended to drag Steadman along on stories that turned out to be twisted, drunken nightmares.
Their friendship was based, I think, on a similar way of looking at the world, which you can see in their work. Both were very highly attuned to the horror in the world, and took a perverse pride in having such insight into the true nature of things. Thompson put it this way:
There’s an element of reality, even in Ralph’s most grotesque drawings. He catches things. Using a sort of venomous, satirical approach, he exaggerates the two or three things that horrify him in a scene or situation… And you can say that these people didn’t look exactly like that, but when you can look at them again it seems pretty damn close. All the cops in the Vegas hotel lobby are wearing the same plaid Bermuda shorts, and they’re uglier than any group of mutants you’d see at a bad insane asylum — you know, for the criminally insane. But I look back at that scene and I know they weren’t much different, really. They had on different colored shirts and they weren’t all crazy and dangerous-looking — but he caught the one or two distinguishing characteristics among them: the beady eyes, burr haircuts, weasel teeth, beer bellies. If you exaggerate those four characteristics, you get a pretty grisly drawing….
If Thompson and Steadman accomplished one thing in their work together, it was to make us see many awful truths that otherwise might have escaped us. Which is not pleasant, but often necessary. And those of us who are interested in carrying on that work ought to be taking a long, hard, unflinching look at the horrors around us—not to wallow in them, but to recognize them and hopefully know how to deal with them. In the wake of the Bush administration’s latest fuckups, it seems that many new sets of eyes are being opened to the true nature of that particular band of swine, and after five years of national shame there may again be reason for hope.
In a nation ruled by swine, all pigs are upward-mobile — and the rest of us are fucked until we can put our acts together: Not necessarily to Win, but mainly to keep from Losing Completely. We owe that to ourselves and our crippled self-image as something better than a nation of panicked sheep…but we owe it especially to our children, who will have to live with our loss and all its long term consequences. I don’t want my son asking me, in 1984, why his friends are calling me a “Good German.”
- HST, 1971
As a sometime student of history I’ve never been comfortable with the notion that history repeats himself, but even so I had to admit that 2004 felt a lot like 1972, when America re-elected a morally crippled president in full knowledge of what it was doing, sending all right-thinking people into a spiralling depression. Course I was only five years old back then, and my knowledge is second-hand, but I think the point stands; so if last year was 72, that makes this 1973, when the tide turned, and many chickens began the return trip home to the roost. This may be why many of the Doctor’s words seem relevant in the context of 2005.
At the same time, I shared a dark suspicion that the life we were leading was a lost cause, that we were all actors, kidding ourselves along on a senseless odyssey. It was the tension between these two poles — a restless idealism on the one hand and a sense of impending doom on the other — that kept me going.
—The Rum Diary
At one point I raised but never really adressed the question, “What is Gonzo journalism, really?” The answer, I think, is really quite simple, as expressed in this quote from Paul Perry’s Thompson biography:
Hunter has tried to describe Gonzo many times, but his most succinct answer to the question “what is Gonzo?” is, “Gonzo is what I do.”
Fact is, there only ever was one Gonzo journalist, and there will never be another one.
Which reminds me, I recently came across an Onion story from March entitled “National Gonzo Press Club Vows to Carry on Thompson’s Work.” It’s ruthlessly funny in the patented Onion style, but also a heartfelt tribute in its own way, and well worth a read.
Meanwhile, Rolling Stone recently published what appear to be Dr. Thompson’s real last words, in the form of a note he left for his wife Anita four days before he died.
Football Season Is Over
No More Games. No More Bombs. No More Walking. No More Fun. No More Swimming. 67. That is 17 years past 50. 17 more than I needed or wanted. Boring. I am always bitchy. No Fun — for anybody. 67. You are getting Greedy. Act your old age. Relax — This won’t hurt
But that’s pretty much of a bummer, and no note to close on. I prefer this Thompson philosophy from another time:
I have learned to live, as it were, with the idea that I will never find peace and happiness. But as long as I know I can get my hands on either one of them once in a while, I do the best I can between high spots.
I’ve always loved that quote, and I think I understand it more and more with every passing year. We always think we’re going to reach that Promised Land: final truth, enlightenment, closure, total happiness or perfect art. Well, forget it; it’s not going to happen, and even if it did, it would only last for a fleeting moment and then things would start changing again.
The Doctor was fond of this quote from Joseph Conrad: “Art is long and life is short, and success is very far off.”
Translation: Tomorrow is not promised to us; do what you can today.
And, OK, if things go south on us, if today turns out to be fucked, maybe there will be a tomorrow. We can certainly hope so. But the point is, we took our best shot at today.
He was also fond of this quote from Henry James, which seems like a good place to leave off: “We work in the dark—we do what we can—we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task.”
Posted by bill at 7:30 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
October 7, 2005
Buy the Ticket, Take the Ride (Pt. 5)
After a long and perilous journey, we have now arrived where I wanted to get to in the first place, which is Las Vegas.
I was 16 years old when I first read Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and it changed my life—not entirely for the better, but that’s water under the bridge now. Like a great early experience with sex, drugs, or rock’n’roll, it was the kind of rush you find yourself chasing after for a long time, and never quite recapturing.
In my relatively sober middle age I find myself asking questions like, why is Fear and Loathing so great—or, to put it another way, what’s so great about it? Why is it so much fun, when its subject matter is not just fear and loathing, but also paranoia and disillusionment? And what is it, exactly, when you get right down to it?
To answer those questions—or at least come up with a reasonable-sounding response—you need to look at how it came to be.
According to Dr. Thompson’s 1971 jacket copy—which didn’t make it into the actual book but is anthologized in The Great Shark Hunt—Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas started off as “a 250-word caption for Sports Illustrated.” The year was 1970, and the assignment was to cover the Mint 400 motorcycle race in Las Vegas, an assignment which Thompson accepted only because he needed a break from the high-pressure situation he was immersed in:
I was down in LA, working on a very tense and depressing investigation of the allegedly accidental killing of a journalist named Ruben Salazar by the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Dept. — and after a week or so on the story I was a ball of nerves & sleepless paranoia (figuring that I might be next)…and I needed some excuse to get away from the angry vortex of that story & try to make sense of it without people shaking butcher knives in my face all the time.
The people shaking the butcher knives were associates of Thompson’s friend Oscar Zeta Acosta, a Chicano attorney who was a key figure in the ongoing struggle between LA’s Mexican-American community and city authorities. Thompson had met Acosta in Colorado in 1967, and he describes that first meeting this way:
When he came booming into a bar called the Daisy Duck in Aspen and announced that he was the trouble we’d all been waiting for, he was definitely into the politics of confrontation — and on all fronts: in the bars or the courts or even the streets, if necessary.
Oscar was not into serious street-fighting, but he was hell on wheels in a bar brawl. Any combination of a 250-pound Mexican and LSD-25 is a potentially terminal menace for anything it can reach — but when the alleged Mexican is in fact a profoundly angry Chicano lawyer with no fear at all of anything that walks on less than three legs and a de facto suicidal conviction that he will die at the age of thirty-three — just like Jesus Christ — you have a serious piece of work on your hands. Specially if the bastard is already thirty-three and a half years old with a head full of Sandoz acid, a loaded .357 Magnum in his belt, a hatchet-wielding Chicano bodyguard on his elbow at all times, and a disconcerting habit of projectile-vomiting geysers of pure red blood off the front porch every thirty or forty minutes, or whenever his malignant ulcer can’t handle any more raw tequila.
Thompson seems to have immediately recognized a kindred spirit in Acosta, but their friendship was severely tested by the circumstances they found themselves in three years later. Acosta was an important guy in his community by then, having run for sheriff of LA county on a Brown Power platform the year before, and was constantly surrounded by angry Chicano militants. It was this set of conditions that led directly to the events that became Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.
I found it impossible to talk to Oscar alone. We were always in the midst of a crowd of heavy street-fighters who didn’t mind letting me know that they wouldn’t need much of an excuse to chop me into hamburger.
This is no way to work on a very volatile & very complex story. So one afternoon I got Oscar in my rented car and drove him over to the Beverly Hills Hotel — away from his bodyguards etc. — and told him I was getting a bit wiggy from the pressure; it was like being on stage all the time, or maybe in the midst of a prison riot. He agreed, but the nature of his position as “leader of the militants” made it impossible for him to be openly friendly with a gabacho.
I understood this…and just about then, I remembered that another old friend, now working for Sports Illustrated, had asked me if I felt like going out to Vegas for the weekend, at their expense, and writing a few words about a motorcycle race. This seemed like a good excuse to get out of LA for a few days, and if I took Oscar along it would also give us time to talk and sort out the evil realities of the Salazar/Murder story.
So I called Sports Illustrated — from the patio of the Polo Lounge — and said I was ready to do the “Vegas thing.” They agreed…and from here on in there is no point in running down the details, because they’re all in the book.
The book, in case you haven’t read it (in which case I envy you, because the first time is the best), opens in a wild careening rush. Thompson and Acosta—for literary purposes thinly disguised as “Raoul Duke” and his 300-pound Samoan attorney “Dr. Gonzo”—are on their way from LA to Vegas, free of all responsibilties and entanglements, having just gobbled an assortment of psychedelic drugs.
We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. I remember saying something like “I feel a bit lightheaded; maybe you should drive…” And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of what looked like huge bats, all swooping and screeching and diving around the car, which was going about a hundred miles an hour with the top down to Las Vegas. And a voice was screaming: “Holy Jesus! What are these goddamn animals?”
Then it was quiet again. My attorney had taken his shirt off and was pouring beer on his chest, to facilitate the tanning process. “What the hell are you yelling about?” he muttered, staring up at the sun with his eyes closed and covered with wraparound Spanish sunglasses. “Never mind,” I said. “It’s your turn to drive.” I hit the brakes and aimed the Great Red Shark toward the shoulder of the highway. No point mentioning those bats, I thought. The poor bastard will see them soon enough.
It was almost noon, and we still had more than a hundred miles to go. They would be tough miles. Very soon, I knew, we would both be completely twisted. But there was no going back, and no time to rest. We would have to ride it out. Press registration for the fabulous Mint 400 was already underway, and we had to get there by four to claim our sound-proof suite. A fashionable sporting magazine in New York had taken care of the reservations, along with this huge red Chevy convertible we’d just rented off a lot on the Sunset Strip…and I was, after all, a professional journalist; so I had an obligation to cover the story, for good or ill.
The sporting editors had also given me $300 in cash, most of which was already spent on extremely dangerous drugs. The trunk of the car looked like a mobile narcotics lab. We had two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half full of cocaine, and a whole galaxy of multi-colored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers…and also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of Budweiser, a pint of raw ether and two dozen amyls.
After a strange encounter with a hitchhiker—during which Dr. Gonzo utters the famous words “”We’re your friends…we’re not like the others”—our heroes arrive in Vegas, out of their heads on LSD and seeing lizards everywhere, and must deal with the difficult ordeal of checking into their hotel.
There is no way to explain the terror I felt when I finally lunged up to the clerk and began babbling. All my well-rehearsed lines fell apart under that woman’s stoney glare. “Hi there,” I said. “My name is…ah, Raoul Duke..yes, on the list, that’s for sure. Free lunch, final wisdom, total coverage…why not? I have my attorney with me and I realize of course that his name is not on the list, but we must have that suite, yes, this man is actually my driver. We brought this Red Shark all the way from the Strip and now it’s time for the desert, right? Yes. Just check the list and you’ll see. Don’t worry. What’s the score here? What’s next?”
The woman never blinked. “Your room’s not ready yet,” she said. “But there’s somebody looking for you.”
“No!” I shouted. “Why? We haven’t done anything yet!” My legs felt rubbery. I gripped the desk and sagged toward her as she held out the envelope, but I refused to accept it. The woman’s face was changing: swelling, pulsing…horrible green jowls and fangs jutting out, the face of a Moray Eel! Deadly poison! I lunged backwards into my attorney, who gripped my arm as he reached out to take the note. “I’ll handle this,” he said to the Moray woman. “This man has a bad heart, but I have plenty of medicine. My name is Dr. Gonzo. Prepare our suite at once. We’ll be in the bar.”
The woman shrugged as he led me away. In a town full of bedrock crazies, no one even notices an acid freak.
When they finally get into their suite, things calm down a bit, and the next day an attempt is made to actually cover the motorcycle race. They quickly learn, however, that there’s not much to cover; immediately upon leaving the starting line, the racers generate a huge could of dust that makes it impossible to see much of anything. Every so often a lone motorcylist appears out of the dust, refuels, and quickly disappears again; that’s about it.
As a result, Duke/Thompson soon loses interest in the Mint 400, which is probably why Sports Illustrated rejected with extreme prejudice the 2500 words that he eventually submitted. I doubt the Doctor cared much because by then, the Vegas story had become something far larger in his mind. In the jacket copy he talks about what he was trying to do, and how well he thinks he did it:
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is a failed experiment in Gonzo Journalism. My idea was to buy a fat notebook and record the whole thing, as it happened, then send in the notebook for publication — without editing. That way, I felt, the eye & mind of the journalist would be functioning as a camera. The writing would be selective & necessarily interpretive — but once the image was written, the words would be final; in the same way that a Cartier-Bresson photograph is always (he says) the full-frame negative. No alterations in the darkroom, no cutting or cropping, no spotting…no editing.
But this is a hard thing to do, and in the end I found myself imposing an essentially fictional framework on what began as a piece of straight/crazy journalism.
And now we’re getting (finally) to the point…if Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas isn’t really Gonzo journalism, what is it exactly? You could call it a meditation on the end of the sixties; a bold indictment of the lies and avarice at the heart of the American dream; or the self-indulgent, rambling diary of a drug fiend. And it is all of that, sure.
But to me, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas above all else is a testament to the power of freedom—the sheer joy that comes from letting go of all constraints and seeing what happens. Duke and Gonzo the characters do whatever they please and get away with it; Thompson the writer writes whatever he pleases and gets away with it. As readers, we get to go along for the ride.
Fear and Loathing’s epigraph comes from Samuel Johnson: “He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man.” Remember, the Vegas trip started as a way to escape from the pressure of the Salazar situation; and Dr. Thompson wrote the book to get away from the pressure of writing the Salazar story:
I began writing it during a week of hard typewriter nights in a room at the Ramada Inn — in a place called Arcadia, California — up the road from Pasadena & right across the street from the Santa Anita racetrack. I was there during the first week of Spring Racing — and the rooms all around me were jammed with people I couldn’t quite believe.
Heavy track buffs, horse trainers, ranch owners, jockeys & their women…I was lost in that swarm, sleeping most of each day and writing all night on the Salazar article. But each night, around dawn, I would knock off the Salazar work and spend an hour or so, cooling out, by letting my head unwind and my fingers run wild on the big black Selectric…jotting down notes about the weird trip to Vegas. It had worked out nicely, in terms of the Salazar piece — plenty of hard straight talk about who was lying and who wasn’t, and Oscar had finally relaxed enough to talk to me straight. Flashing across the desert at 100 in a big red convertible with the top down, there is not much danger of being bugged or overheard.
But we stayed in Vegas a bit longer than we’d planned to. Or at least I did. Oscar had to get back for a nine o’clock court appearance on Monday. So he took the plane and I was left alone out there — just me and a massive hotel bill that I knew I couldn’t pay, and the treacherous reality of that scene caused me to spend about 36 straight hours in my room at the Mint Hotel…writing feverishly in a notebook about a nasty situation that I thought I might not get away from.
These notes were the genesis of Fear and Loathing. After my escape from Nevada and all through the tense work week that followed (spending all my afternoons on the grim streets of East LA and my nights on the typewriter in that Ramada Inn hideout)…my only loose & human moments would come when I could relax and fuck around with this slow-building, stone-crazy Vegas story.
By the time I got back to the Rolling Stone Hq. in San Francisco, the Salazar story was winding out at around 19,000 words, and the strange Vegas “fantasy” was running on its own spaced energy and pushing 5000 words — with no end in sight and no real reason to continue working on it, except the pure pleasure of unwinding on paper. It was sort of an exercise — like Bolero — and it might have stayed that way if Jann Wenner, the editor of Rolling Stone, hadn’t liked the first 20 or so jangled pages enough to take it seriously on its own terms and tentatively schedule it for publication — which gave me the push I needed to keep working on it….
The only other important thing to be said about Fear and Loathing at this time is that it was fun to write, and that’s rare — for me, at least, because I’ve always considered writing the most hateful kind of work. I suspect it’s a bit like fucking, which is only fun for amateurs. Old whores don’t do much giggling.
Nothing is fun when you have to do it — over & over, again & again — or else you’ll be evicted, and that gets old. It’s a rare goddamn trip for a locked-in, rent-paying writer to get into a gig that, even in retrospect, was a kinghell, highlife fuckaround from start to finish — and then to actually get paid for writing this kind of maniac gibberish seems genuinely weird; like getting paid for kicking Agnew in the balls.
(Note: For those of you born in the last part of the 20th century, Spiro Agnew served as vice president under Thompson’s arch-nemesis Richard Nixon until he was booted for being too visibly corrupt and replaced by Gerald Ford. The modern-day equivalent would be getting to empty a can of pepper spray on Dick Cheney…or better yet, G.W. Bush himself.)
And there’s the hook, the thing that made people take to Fear and Loathing and keeps them coming back to it thirty-odd years later: It’s fun to read because it was fun to write. It’s the work of a genius-level prose stylist working with no concern for commercial considerations, absolutely unfettered by decorum, conscience, or fear of consequences. It’s a trip, it’s a ride, and it shouldn’t be taken too seriously—and certainly not emulated.
Well, that seems like as good a place as any to leave off for now, before things can mushroom any further out of bounds. I will have a few more thoughts in the next couple days, but take heart—the end is near.
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