Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
For the next two weeks, we'll be discussing the book _Savage
Journey_, a study of Hunter Thompson's literary formation and
achievement.  Thompson evolved from the more literary "new
journalism" of the time to gonzo journalism,  discarding the notion
of objective journalistic objectivity, and including the reporter in
the story, a first-person narrative. Thompson used the English
language as both a musical instrument and a political weapon.  The
book focuses on his influences, development, and the development of
his unique voice.

Our guest is Peter Richardson, author of the book. Peter has also
written books about The Grateful Dead, Ramparts Magazine, and
radical author/editor Carey McWilliams.  The New York Times, Mother
Jones, and Bookforum have excerpted his work, and his essays have
appeared in The Nation, The New Republic, Los Angeles Times Book
Review, San Francisco Chronicle, Los Angeles Review of Books,
Literary Hub, California, Guernica, California History, and many
other outlets. A busy book reviewer, he received the National
Entertainment Journalism Award for Online Criticism in 2013.  He
teaches courses on California culture at San Francisco State
University.

Leading the discussion is  Gary Burnett, a member of the WELL since
1990, is a Professor at the School of Information at Florida State
University. His particular interests outside of academia include
20th and 21st century American poetry and music of all kinds (he
claims that almost every one of his music-loving friends HATE at
least one artist he's passionate about). He has published books on
the American poet H.D. and on "Information Worlds," a conceptual
approach to examining social aspects of information behavior. He is
also a poet, but hasn't sought out publication venues for his work
since the early 1980s, when he published in numerous little
magazines. He has been the interviewer in several previous Inkwell
interviews.

Welcome, Pete and Gary!
  

    
Thank you, Jon, and hello, Gary. It's a pleasure to do this again. I
first joined the WELL in 2009 when David Gans recommended my book
about Ramparts magazine for this forum. 
  

    
Just a word about the origins of this project. Hunter Thompson was a
minor character in my three previous books. Those led me back to his
correspondence, especially the two fat volumes edited by Douglas
Brinkley. Those letters are really something. I also relished works
about Thompson: Bill McKeen's biography, the oral biography produced
by Jann Wenner and Corey Seymour, Alex Gibney's documentary film,
etc. 

What was missing, I thought, was a book that took Thompson seriously
as a writer. We've heard a lot about his lifestyle, persona, and
celebrity, not so much about the work and how he produced it. I
wanted to focus more on his influences, literary formation, model of
authorship, etc. I wanted to understand his shift to New Journalism
and then to Gonzo. I also wanted to talk about his editors and how
important they were to his development as a writer. 

The longer I focused on that material, the clearer it became to me
that there was nothing inevitable about Gonzo journalism or its
success. It certainly wasn't a conscious project--more like an
accident, really.  

So that's what I was going for. Nevertheless, the reviews have
focused on Thompson and his shortcomings as a person. Those are also
notable, and I'm happy to talk about them, but as I say in the book,
it isn't his virtue but rather his virtuosity that keeps me coming
back to his writing (especially the letters).  
  

    
Another motive for the book: I wanted to focus on Thompson's time in
the San Francisco Bay Area. He hitchhiked to San Francisco in 1960,
then posted up in Big Sur. That move made more sense for a budding
novelist, which is how Thompson thought of himself, than for a
journalist. He left Big Sur to report from South America, then
returned and settled briefly in Glen Ellen (Sonoma County). In 1964,
he moved to 318 Parnassus, near the Haight. 

He wasn't there long. He moved to Colorado in the fall of 1966, just
before the Hell's Angels book appeared, and he lived outside Aspen
for the next four decades. But the Bay Area time was formative. He
was anonymous when he arrived, but the Hell's Angels book made him a
national figure. For the next decade, his key editors were based in
San Francisco. Warren Hinckle paired him with illustrator Ralph
Steadman and helped birth Gonzo journalism. Hinckle's magazine
tanked, Jann Wenner made Thompson famous at Rolling Stone, which was
only three years old when Thompson ran his first piece there.  

The decade between 1965 and 1975 were Thompson's peak years, and I
argue that his literary formation was largely a San Francisco story.
That point is easy to overlook or take for granted, so I wanted to
make sure I put it across. 
  

    
Hi, Peter!

And thanks to the inkwell hosts for the invitation to get to talk to
Peter about this great book.

I certainly want to hear more about the San Francisco connection,
but I think I'd like to begin with a question for you, Peter, not
about the book, or about Hunter Thompson, but about your own
trajectory as a writer, because this isn't you're first, but (if I'm
counting correctly), your fourth. The one I'm familiar with is No
Simple Highway, which is a wonderful take on the Grateful Dead, but
before that you also have a book about Ramparts Magazine and another
(co-authored) about Carey McWilliams.

Do you see a "through-line" that ties these different projects
together? One, obviously, is that California connection, but I
wondered whether there were others.
  

    
Yes, the California connection is the main one. That's the material
I teach at San Francisco State University. I got that job largely on
the strength of my Carey McWilliams bio. In addition to being a
vastly underrated writer, especially during his years in Los
Angeles, McWilliams was Thompson's editor at "The Nation." 

At the time, I was working as an editor at the Public Policy
Institute of California. Peter Schrag of the Sacramento Bee
recommended McWilliams to me. The more I learned about him and his
work, the stranger it seemed that no one had ever written his
biography. 

In the course of researching that book, I interviewed several people
who wrote for Ramparts magazine. I wanted to learn more about that,
saw that no one had written a book about Ramparts, and decided to
work on that. That project also introduced me to the genealogical
link between Ramparts and Rolling Stone magazine. 

Instead of sticking with political journalism, I moved to the
Grateful Dead. Again, that mostly had to do with my teaching. After
a chance meeting with David Gans, I realized that the band's
experience was a perfect topic for my classes at SF State. It also
taught me a lot about the San Francisco counterculture--and the
mid-century bohemianism that preceded it. I knew the Dead's 50th
anniversary was coming up, so I timed the book accordingly. But I
really lucked out when the band announced its "Fare Thee Well"
concerts one week before the book's publication date.

I returned to political journalism with the Thompson project, making
that my third book on the topic. But I also see the last three
efforts as a kind of informal trilogy on the San Francisco
counterculture. I was born in Berkeley in 1959, so in many ways I
was writing about the world that I was born into but had never
really studied. 
  

    
That word that pops up a couple of times in your answer,
"counterculture" anticipates my second comment/question. (And,
sorry, this is probably a bit rambling and self-involved, but I hope
it's getting somewhere!)

I'm a few years older than you; I was born in Montana in 1955, but
my family moved to the Bay Area in 1966, and I almost immediately
discovered some parts of that counterculture, mostly music, and
mostly through the medium of FM radio. And certainly, I was an avid
reader of Rolling Stone from pretty early on. I always had a strong
sense that there had to be a strong connection between that music
scene and the other arts, but never really had the vocabulary or
knowledge to figure out exactly what that connection might be. Your
work provides one very valuable glimpse into that.

And also (of course), since I was really just a kid who didn't know
any better, I had an unrealistically romanticized perception of that
counterculture (at least until Altamont, at which I was present).

Savage Journey presents a powerful antidote to that romanticized
vision, certainly through Thompson himself, who is in many ways a
very dark figure, but also through the political and power struggles
of almost everybody involved. Your depiction of the relationship
between Warren Hinckle and Jann Wenner is fascinating in this
regard.

I'm certain jump around from place to place in the book rather than
taking a linear path through it, but maybe this would be a good
place to start: can you tell us a bit about what you see in that
relationship in terms of the dynamics and complexities of the Bay
Area counterculture?
  

    
I'll try not to carry on about the counterculture, but it obviously
extended the post-war bohemian project of expanding artistic,
political, and sexual freedoms. That spirit drew Thompson to Kerouac
in the 50s, though he didn't really like Kerouac's style. Later,
Thompson introduced Ken Kesey to the Hell's Angels and shared the
same pot dealer with Allen Ginsberg in the Haight. 

When you add psychedelic drugs, their project begins to look and
sound more spectacular. The national media coverage of the Summer of
Love was extensive and overwhelmingly negative. Warren Hinckle
certainly had no use for it. His coverage in Ramparts enraged Ralph
Gleason, who quit Ramparts and cofounded Rolling Stone later that
year. 

Thompson was no flower child, but that was a peak era for him. He
knew better than others (from his Hell's Angels reporting) that the
counterculture had its dark side. Actually, the Hell's Angels and
their violence prompted his introduction to Jann Wenner. He wrote a
letter to Jann congratulating the magazine's Altamont coverage.
Later that year, he contributed his first piece to Rolling Stone.  

Jann wasn't a hippie, and many have criticized him for a range of
shortcomings, but I admire what he did in Rolling Stone's first
decade. He watched Ramparts (and Scanlan's) go down in flames
because advertisers weren't interested. Rolling Stone was different.
The music labels underwrote it, which allowed the magazine to run
significant political news and commentary. 

That's where Thompson comes in. He was older than the typical
Rolling Stone writer, he didn't write about music, he didn't finish
college, and he was an Air Force veteran. But Jann saw that
Thompson's stuff might click with his audience. That support led to
"Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" as well as Thompson's coverage of
the 1972 presidential campaign. And all this from a fledgling rock
magazine from San Francisco.

Obviously the hallmark of the San Francisco counterculture was the
music. Jann saw that. Many staffers wanted to do more radical
political material, but Jann knew that wouldn't fly with the record
labels. Not long after that, he was publishing Thompson, who became
the magazine's most popular writer. His work was satirical and
drug-addled, but it was also political. It continued to work at
Rolling Stone even after the revolutionary spirit of the 1960s
faded. 

So there were a lot of moving parts here--over and above the music
and utopian impulses of the SF counterculture. It's easy to overlook
the journalism, whose major figures--Hinckle, Wenner, Thompson,
etc.--didn't fit the hippie profile. That was reason enough for many
to question Rolling Stone's authenticity. But given the state of
mainstream journalism, it was important to have an outlet like
Rolling Stone. And no one understood the mainstream media's blind
spots better than Thompson.  
  

    
"Blind spots," yes. I think that he had his own particular set of
blind spots (which I'm sure we'll get to later), but what were the
mainstream media's blind spots that were especially key for him?
  

    
What a delightful surprise! I have the book. I guess I should it
read it now...
  

    
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The blind spots I have in mind were most visible (if you will)
during he 1972 presidential campaign, which Thompson covered for
Rolling Stone. The other reporters were expected to file "objective"
hard-news stories, and their editors rooted out anything that tried
to connect the dots. Even if those reporters wanted to, they
couldn't write frankly about the candidates and their campaigns. If
they stuck to the formula, however, life went more smoothly. Tim
Crouse, Thompson's assistant, put this story at the center of his
book, "The Boys on the Bus." In fact, Thompson suggested that angle
to Crouse.  

Thompson knew he lacked the experience, sources, support, and
prestige that his colleagues had. No one really cared what he or
Rolling Stone had to say. But he had one great advantage--he wasn't
planning to do this sort of reporting again, so there was no need to
play it safe. He could tell the unvarnished truth as he understood
it. His dispatches for Rolling Stone told readers what the other
reporters were holding back. In that way, he turned his marginal
status to advantage. 

Another media blind spot was more subtle. It had to do with Theodore
White, who created a franchise with "The Making of the President
1960." Essentially, White turned presidential campaigns into novels.
Whoever prevailed in the general election became the hero of that
novel. White's innovation was a critical and commercial success, but
it tended to glorify politicians, beginning with JFK and eventually
Nixon. 

Thompson went the other way with that, too. He didn't produce a
polished novel but rather a "jangled campaign diary" that was never
intended to glorify anyone. To the contrary, he went after Muskie,
Humphrey, and Nixon with gusto. The Watergate scandal took Theodore
White by surprise,  but as Nixon's presidency went down in flames,
Thompson's blistering attacks on him seemed prophetic.

We can extend much of this to Thompson's other work as well. "Hell's
Angels," for example, is both a first-person account of the
motorcycle gang AND a critique of mainstream depictions of the gang.
Thompson's reporting was usually about the event he was covering as
well as an act of media criticism. 
  

    
Interesting!  I had not thought of this aspect.
  

    
_Hell's Angels_ was a pretty straight-forward book though, compared
to his later work.  It's like the baroque overwhelmed the reporting
then, and made the truths easy to miss or dismiss.
  

    
"Thompson used the English language as both a musical instrument and
a political weapon."

Very good intro, Jon, reminds me of Woody. "This Machine Kills
Fascists"
  

    
Quite so about "Hell's Angels." It began as a bit of participatory
reporting for "The Nation" and fell within the emerging genre of New
Journalism. In fact, Tom Wolfe included it in his New Journalism
anthology a few years later. 

Thompson never really wanted to be a reporter as such. Mostly he
wanted to be a novelist. And by the time he created Gonzo journalism
(more or less by accident), the line between fiction and non-fiction
was quite intentionally blurred. Gonzo was a unique combination of
hyperbolic political commentary, satire, invective, media criticism,
and the occasional hallucination.  

"Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" is still shelved with nonfiction
titles in the bookstore, but the two main characters aren't real
persons, and we now know that many of the key details--for example,
the drug stash that Raoul Duke lovingly itemizes in the opening
pages--was wildly exaggerated. When Thompson and Acosta headed for
Las Vegas, they brought alcohol and prescription speed. Later,
Thompson discovered that Acosta also had a big bag of weed, a
handgun, and some ammo. But the LSD, cocaine, and ether were pure
fiction.

About the musical instrument and political weapon: Yes, it is like
Woody Guthrie. It's also the way Thompson described himself to a
Vietnamese officer whom he wanted to interview. It was apt
self-description, especially at that time.  
  

    
(By the way, the car and motorcycle race they nominally went to
cover, the Mint 400, was an off-road race, not a road race. Across
the desert from Las Vegas to Beatty and back, twice.)
  

    
I should note that I didn't write the part about "language as both a
musical instrument and a political weapon." I grabbed a book blurb,
and doing some followup research I find that was apparently a quote
from HST himself...

"In 1975, sent to Vietnam by Rolling Stone to gloat over the
withdrawal of American troops, Thompson wrote an
uncharacteristically deferential letter to a Vietcong official,
requesting an interview. He apologised for his typing, but assured
the colonel that, 'I am one of the best writers currently using the
English language as both a musical instrument and a political
weapon.' It was sweetly naive of him to imagine that military
despots value such credentials; nevertheless, his self-assessment
was just. The music made by the language, in his use of it,
resembles the percussive iteration of gunfire, or the fulmination of
an exploding grenade. From inside his fortified bunker in Colorado,
with his pet Dobermans slavering at the perimeter, he fires off
missives as if they were missiles."

<https://www.theguardian.com/books/2000/dec/10/biography.huntersthompson>
  

    
Hey Peter! I, like Gary, am a child of the 50's whose exposure to
the counterculture was FM radio, local 'underground' papers and
Rolling Stone. The '72 election was my first exposure to HST and I
pretty much read everything he wrote from then on. 

Really enjoy how you weave the events of the day, the cast of
characters and the publications into his story. It explains so much
of HST as a writer. It's refreshing not to dig into the persona.
  

    
Whoops, did I call it a road race? Thank you for the correction. 

Audrey, I'm glad you liked the writing. It's hard to measure
Thompson's achievement without that context. Yes, the persona is
very compelling, but it was his voice that made me want to read
those two volumes of edited correspondence many times.
  

    
(page 19)
  

    
Pete, I like the way you actually scrape off the Raoul Duke
"persona" that he chose to live. The Southern Gentleman was often
just below the surface (I found that out myself one night during a
phone call in the wee hours). He could be spontaneously generous and
kind. Here's what you recounted at around p. 184:

>   Timothy Ferris also recalled Thompson's “unwavering generosity”
after he was laid off at Rolling Stone during a downturn. Ferris
called Owl Farm and spoke to Sandy, who said Thompson was in his
room at the Watergate in Washington. When Ferris asked about her,
she said they were worried about money. They had only $400 in the
bank and nothing on the way. After Ferris rang off, he called
Thompson and reported that Wenner had fired him. “Do you need any
money?” Thompson asked. “I can lend you four hundred dollars.” <

He could be rude and abusive one moment, and sincerely apologetic
the next (IF he was wrong).

Peter you also wrote elsewhere about what happened to the final
volume of his letters (which I found fascinating). They're in a
private vault somewhere instead of a university? Am I
misremembering? If not, do you have any update?
  

    
Yes, I worry that the reviews have focused on Thompson's nastiness
at the expense of his more admirable side. (His ex-wife and widow
were pretty clear that both sides were well developed.) He had many
friends, and the "perfect southern gentleman" trope comes up a lot,
especially from women who knew him. There are other stories of his
generosity, though Tim Ferris's is especially memorable. 

If you read everything, as I tried to do, the pattern is much as you
say above. He was a complicated guy, sometimes charming and kind and
compassionate, other times intimidating abusive, and scary. His gay
brother couldn't talk to him about his sexuality, and Juan
Thompson's memoir makes it clear that his father was very tough to
deal with. But Juan stuck with it and finally reconciled with him.
Toward the end, Thompson wondered how bad he could be if his son was
such a good guy. Ironic. 

I wasn't trying to launching any grand theories about Thompson as a
person. I tried to present an honest account of what's already out
there, but I really wanted to focus on the writing. Of course, you
can't finally separate the writing, persona, and person, especially
in a body of work that was so deeply autobiographical. I'm sure
readers will draw their own moral judgments about Thompson, which is
only fitting. Thompson's work was dripping with moral judgments,
many of which have stood up well over the years. Other parts of his
work--not so much.  

I don't have any inside knowledge about the third volume of
correspondence. The book has a title, cover, and ISBN number but
never appeared. You can still order it on Amazon, for God's sake,
but there's no sign that it's coming. We can speculate about why it
was withheld, but no one has explained it publicly. 

About the archive: It was sold to a consortium that includes Johnny
Depp. I gather 800 boxes of material are stored in a Los Angeles
warehouse. A few years ago, I heard a rumor that the consortium was
shopping it to at least one university. Depp has spoken about the
archive in interviews, but again, no one I've talked to knows when
that material will be available to scholars. Juan visited it one
time before he published his memoir, and he has been in touch since
then with the people processing it. Now you know pretty much
everything I know.   
  

    
Eight hundred boxes. Shit. That's a whole lot of words.
  

    
Greetings, all!
Thank you, Peter, Jon and Gary for exploring and mining a vein of
material that even today, has relevance for us.

For numerous reasons, I missed the boat on taking Jon up on his
offer to get an advance copy to read prior to this Inkwell kicking
off but I corresponded with Peter directly the other day and my copy
is on its way. So I have not read it yet. I am presently enjoying
_Cronies_ until _Savage Journey_ arrives.

Nevertheless, I first started reading Rolling Stone (RS) as freshman
in college at Menlo Park, California in 1969 when an issue cost 25
cents. As an aside (Gary), we were at Altamont, as well.

 I bought every issue of RS and devoured the coverage of the music
biz as chronicled in RS. So RS was my gateway drug into HST. I was
hooked, well and truly, the minute HST began publishing in RS. So
much so that in 1973, living in El Granada, California, I bought 20
copies of _Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail_to give to
friends as Christmas presents. 

I have been a HST junkie ever since.

Now back to your regularly scheduled programming.
  

    
Alex, you picked a good time to start reading RS. Thompson's arrival
in 1970 was so important to him and the magazine. After Scanlan's
tanked, Thompson didn't have great choices. Playboy had aggressively
rejected his Jean-Claude Killy piece, which Hinckle ran at
Scanlan's. But even Hinckle wasn't going to run Thompson's story
about the Chicano movement in Los Angeles.  

After Scanlan's went under, Wenner ran "Strange Rumblings in
Aztlan."  That's what Thompson was working on when he and Oscar
Acosta lit out for Vegas. "Strange Rumblings" wasn't Gonzo as such,
and Steadman didn't illustrate it, but it was a sign that Wenner was
behind Thompson. 

When Sports Illustrated rejected Thompson's story about the Mint
400, Thompson sent an expanded version to Wenner. That became "Fear
and Loathing in Las Vegas," but the path to its success was littered
with rejections. 

The Vegas piece was also an inflection point for Rolling Stone. It
separated RS from other rock magazines and pushed it toward the
general magazine category. RS had already won two National Magazine
Awards, but with Thompson on board, it became an outlet for writers.