Review: _Hell's Angels_ by Hunter S. Thompson

Hunter S. Thompson, Hell's Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga (New York & Toronto: Modern Library Edition, 1999). 

Hunter S. Thompson was introduced to me by Doonesbury, which I imagine he would have hated. Hunter was a generation earlier than me, and by the time I became aware of him he had grown to fit the joke; his 80s and later work were sometimes lyrical and powerfully written, but not very seriously intended (though sometimes a serious point was embedded therein, as when he closed his book on Bill Clinton's presidential campaign with the parable of the frog and the scorpion). 

A friend of mine recently undertook to re-read Hunter's 1966 work on the famous motorcycle club, however, and our discussion inspired me to find a copy and read it as well. It's a much better book than I had expected. 

A major part of the book is Hunter's Gonzo journalism as a genuine corrective to 'real' journalism. He points out the ways that journalist sensationalism had taken a motorcycle club that had dwindled to a few dozen members (p. 27: "less than 100") and made them a world-famous phenomenon that could command hundreds of 1965 dollars for an interview or thousands for a movie appearance: 

The Hell's [sic*] Angels as they exist today were virtually created by Time, Newsweek, and The New York Times.... anyone who has worked on a newspaper for more than two months knows how technical safeguards can be built into even the wildest story... the art of printing a story without taking legal responsibility for it. The word 'alleged' is a key to this art." (34) 

Hunter goes to great lengths to undo the journalistic spell, showing over and over where news reports played up accusations that were never charged, charges that were made but dropped, or which failed in court. In fairness to the reporters, the police reports he cites are even worse. 

I was expecting a sympathetic portrayal, but this isn't especially sentimental at all. It's a surprisingly honest bit of journalism throughout. For one thing it is honest about Hunter's own biases. He criticizes the Angels for being in favor of the Vietnam war, calling them 'fascists' for that even though he blew off the whole swastika-wearing thing from the Angels of the era. Hunter lauds their short-term connections with the LSD-using Berkeley left, and laments the fact that it was doomed; he points out where he thinks the Angels are similar to the Wobblies, with whom Hunter has real sympathy, but also notes that he found the Angels both ignorant of and hostile to any such comparisons because they hate Communists. He got into the motorcycle lifestyle enough to buy a bike (though not a Harley) and to let them hang out at his house and to use his car for beer runs to their campsites, and he made many friends among them. He still got beat up by some of them he didn't know** (ironically, while fleeing from the beating in his car afterwards, he finds famous Angel "Magoo" asleep in the back seat of his car). 

Ultimately it's a surprisingly balanced portrait of a phenomenon that is long gone -- what the Angels became after Hunter wrote about them is nothing like they were in the year or so he was spending time with them. By 1966 B-movie titan Roger Corman had picked up on all that publicity and started making Hollywood movies with them, and the crazy publicity that Hunter was already observing in 1965 just exploded. By 1969, the Rolling Stones hired them to pull security at Altamont. This wasn't Hunter's doing: he was trying to undo the spell the media was shaping around them, but it was already too late. 

There's a closing bit on riding motorcycles that's worth reading even if you skip the rest of the book. 

* The club doesn't use an apostrophe for reasons of its own. 

** I was struck at the time of reading it by the exact similarity of his mistake to the one that caused the death of 'Grizzly man' Timothy Treadwell, who lived among grizzlies and played with the ones he got to know -- but who was killed an eaten by one with whom he hadn't established that friendly relationship. You can befriend a bear or even many bears, but that doesn't make you the friend of every bear -- and they are still grizzlies.