Heh…Barger also said in an interview recently that he thought hunter was the greatest writer america ever produced…He just doesnt think much of him as a person. You really have to understand the culture to understand bargers coments, but they sound pretty accurate. Bargers book didn’t gloss over much…He admitted to a lot of stuff that most people wouldnt.
Basically, what happened with Hunter and the angels at the end, is that Hunter witnessed an Angel slaping his wife and kicking his dog. Hunter did something he shouldnt have, in that culture, and he stepped up and mouthed off to the guy. Hunter may have been right, but it was an unwise thing to do and he got stomped for it.
Hunter wasnt hiding in the trunk from the angels. Hunter was with the angels on a beer run, and they got into a standoff with some townspeople. Hunter, not wanting to get caught in the middle of riot, hid in his own truck. Smart, but a major loss of face in the Angels eyes. He was with them, after all.
And this guy thinks HST is a tool of the system. I’d tend to agree with the sentiment: True radicals like Jello Biafra and Jim Hogshire are ignored while the McRadicals with `names’ can advocate illegal activities without legal repercussions (or repercussions they can’t afford).
The author makes an astute comparison between HST and The Anarchist’s Cookbook. The Cookbook is a well-known `counterculture’ book, purporting to detail how to make bombs and drugs and all sorts of things. It’s also a blatant source of disinformation, the drugs being poisons and the explosives being overly-dangeorous suicide traps. The Cookbook’s popularity effectively suppresses real counterculture works from being written while selectively weeding out those naive enough to follow its recipies. HST works the same way, the author says.
Of course, I don’t believe everything the author says. Not by a long shot. But if HST is really despised by the Hell’s Angels, why the hell ain’t he dead or in hiding right now?
I’ve always taken HST with a few grains of salt (and a huge tequila shooter, haha). To me, he uses preposterous anecdotes to get across a certain feel of a person or story, if not the fact themselves. The Clarence Thomas story is a perfect example. Of course it’s total factual BS, it gets across the feelings and aura that HST got from Thomas. It paints a better mental picture than just saying “Yeah, he was kinda creepy.” Plus, and this is my favorite point, HST is the most underrated humorist of the 20th century. I can’t count how many times I’ve laughed out loud while reading his stuff.
Not that I am expert on the Hells Angels or anything, becuase I’m not(Ive known a couple of them though), but I get impression, he pissed them off, they stomped him, and let him go. They don’t kill eveybody who pisses them off…Good Lord, where do people get these ideas. Hell, I wouldnt be suprised if he is still friends with a few of them.
Thompson’s not a radical. He’s a writer, and a damn good one. Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail is one of the best books I’ve ever read, but it always puts entertainment before politics. I like Biafra, and maybe he’s a better ‘radical’, whatever that means, but he’s nowhere near the artist Thompson is.
Confirmation! As gonzo.org is an Official Unofficial HST website, it should be accurate. Interestingly, The Biography Project places his DoB at April 8, 1935, not `undetermined.’ I don’t know which to believe, myself, but his date of birth was not in contention here. Also, The Biography Project doesn’t mention his final hospital bill, so I don’t know how much stock to place in that, either. But the main fact is that he disappeared in the mid-1970s and he’s presumed dead.
At the time Hell’s Angels was written, HST was in something of a transition phase, which is obvious if you’ve read a significant portion of his work.
HA is more journalistically accurate thananything that follows it. You can tell because there are long passages of hard, uninterpreted information, such as the headcount of people at events and other details.
While I certainly wouldn’t hold HA up as a paragon of the traditional journalistic endeavor, it is much closer to “real” journalism than anything he did after, and effectively marks the end of HST as a reporter. Everything that followed was the beginning of Gonzo.
HST said in one interview that I read that the Angels went off on him because they saw a copy of his book and said, “$4.95, huh (lot of money back then!)? How much of that goes to us?..Oh yeah?..” Well, that’s one version of it; don’t know if there are any others.
In his book Hells Angels, Hunter S describes his stomping incident and how “Tiny” saved him. Read the Great Shark Hunt, sounds like Hunter was a pretty brawling kinda guy from the South, but then found guys that didn’t fight for fun like he was used to back home.