“‘We’re the one-percenters, man—the one percent that don’t fit and don’t care.’”
—“A Hell’s Angel, speaking for the permanent record”
“They rode with a fine, unwashed arrogance, secure in their reputation as the rottenest motorcycle gang in the whole history of Christendom … More than ever before, they were wreathed in an aura of violent and erotic mystery … brawling satyrs, ready to attempt congress with any living thing, and in any orifice.
“So the Hell’s Angels, by several definitions, including their own, are working rapists … and in this downhill half of our twentieth century, they are not so different from the rest of us as they sometimes seem. They are only more obvious.”
A hellaciously intense opening, a meticulously researched recitation of facts, freewheel reporting tinged with epic editorializing, hysterical tangents that amount to full-throttle barreling down blind alleyways … welcome to the one-of-a-kind world of Hunter S. Thompson. Welcome to “Hell’s Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga.” Welcome to Gonzo journalism.
Here we see Thompson at his early best, when he was driven to mix booze, facts, drugs, research and a helluva story, then weave it all into something legendary. He mixes tones and prose, so that some reads like a free-word, free-form tribute to Jack Kerouac and other as a staunchly supported defense of the role of radicals in the free world. You really don’t even see or feel Thompson’s presence until you’re well into the book, a refreshing nod to a time when Thompson didn’t have to be the story in order to be a part of the story.
One summer, he elected to ride with the Hell’s Angels for a year or so in order to write a book on this cultural phenomenon, building on an article he had done that had garnered great reviews. Early on, he seems to take an overly aggressive stance of ensuring “fair” journalism, to the point where it comes across like he’s defending the Hell’s Angels themselves. Thus brings up the eternal question that has always surrounded this book: did he get in too far? Those in the “yes” camp point to Thompson’s own quasi-admission: “By the middle of the summer I had become so involved in the outlaw scene that I was no longer sure whether I was doing research on the Hell’s Angels or being slowly absorbed by them.”
For a while, Thompson makes it sound as if the Hell’s Angels were routinely provoked, just sitting around drinking beer when trouble always finds them. Like Michael Vick, the trouble is always hovering somewhere nearby, a shifting vortex of which they’re coincidentally in ever-present proximity to. He frequently, liberally and humorously relies on footnotes through much of the early part of the book. His great analysis of the Angels and the society that they must relate with eventually evolves into a searing condemnation of post-war America.
At one point, Thompson launches into a tremendous, transcendent description of American white trash and how they came to be, borrowing heavily from Nelson Algren’s “A Walk on the Wild Side” and William Faulkner’s “Barn Burning.” Using Algren’s words, he describes the Hell’s Angels as “fierce craving boys,” with “a feeling of having been cheated.” However, when he is describing the Angels as toads who believe their own press clippings and eventually become their own worst enemies, it is hard not to wonder whether he is unknowingly -- or knowingly -- describing himself.
Somewhere amidst the pervasive discussion of rampant abuse of alcohol and drugs and the rape culture that surrounds the Angels, in the latter parts of the book, we sense and feel a tonal shift in Thompson’s view of and perspective toward the Hell’s Angels. In what is his most insightful and impassioned writing of the entire piece, he positively skewers the gang, offering up a searing indictment of what the Angels had become. It is as if Thompson was willing to endure any horrors and chalk them up as sacrifices for the good of his art, but when he got to the end of the Angels’ highway and saw that it was an empty desert and a hollow dead end, the realization that there was nothing really to being a Hell’s Angel came as a shock. The idea that the Angels aren’t really about anything and don’t really stand for anything seemed to surprise Thompson.
“In the terms of our Great Society the Hell’s Angels and their ilk are losers—dropouts, failures and malcontents. They are rejects looking for a way to get even with a world in which they are only a problem … Most Angels understand where they are, but not why, and they are well enough grounded in the eternal verities to know that very few of the toads in this world are Charming Princes in disguise. Most are simply toads, and no matter how many magic maidens they kiss or rape, they are going to stay that way …
“For nearly a year I had lived in a world that seemed, at first, like something original … Later, as they attracted more and more attention, the mystique was stretched so thin that it finally became transparent.”
The skeptic will invariably -- and understandably -- point to the book’s most infamous feature as the reason for Thompson’s seeming change of heart. At the very ending of the book, as almost an addendum, Thompson adds the tale of how the Hell’s Angels eventually turned on him and administered a severe beating. He is careful to say that the Angels he was closest to and spent the most time with were not involved in the attack, but the circumstances surrounding the beating vary depending on who you want to believe. In the Thompson biography “Gonzo,” Angels leader Sonny Barger himself said that Thompson intervened when a Hell’s Angel was beating his lady and his dog, calling him out in front of the crowd. According to Barger, the Angel in question pounded Thompson on his own. However, most other accounts say that the Hell’s Angels got jealous when it appeared that Thompson was going to make money off the book and they weren’t, then ganged up to pummel him.
The beating is only touched on very briefly in the postscript, so the anticipatory feeling of waiting for a payoff is somewhat robbed; after all, some have read the book only because they had heard the stories about Thompson being beaten to within an inch of his life by the Hell’s Angels (Thompson maintains that one of the Angels had a huge rock and was poised to crush it down on a prone Thompson’s head, until “Tiny” intervened at the lost moment). In the end, there is probably no logical explanation for the episode, other than the fact that Hunter was probably being Hunter and the Angels were simply being the Angels.
“The attack ended with the same inexplicable suddenness that it had begun. There was no vocal aftermath, then or later. I didn’t expect one -- no more than I’d expect a pack of sharks to explain their feeding frenzy.”
It is this tone that permeates the book; Thompson doesn’t shy away from the controversial or dance around the despicable. He tells it the way he knows best: all details included and no holds barred, letting you decide what you want to believe and how you want to feel about it. At the conclusion, it’s still not apparent whether it is a more or less complex deal than what you would think; the Hell’s Angels aren’t complex or misunderstood. They are just outlaws who live in a world of their own morality and making; as Thompson maintains, they are losers, pure and simple. They aim to take out their unvoiced frustration on a world they don’t understand, then blame it on the world for not understanding their frustration and taking issue with the attack itself. In the end, they’re just wandering thugs; in the end, none of it meant anything anyway. After all, this is who they were and nothing more, nothing heroic or romantic, notable only for the same reason society has always been drawn to those who live on the edges of morality.
The larger story is the birth of Gonzo journalism through its mainstream publication in “Hell’s Angels.” The idea that Thompson partially becomes the story, and impartiality be damned, is ultimately crystallized in this work that partly reads like one long op-ed piece. The high of creating an entirely new literary genre must be similar to the way Thompson tries to explain the thrill of winding out his bike on the open road …
“It has to be done right … and that’s when the strange music starts, when you stretch your luck so far that fear becomes exhilaration and vibrates along your arms … The Edge … 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.
“The others -- the living -- are those who pushed their control as far as they felt they could handle it, and then pulled back, or slowed down, or did whatever they had to when it came time to choose between Now and Later.
“But the edge is still Out there. Or maybe it’s In. The association of motorcycles with LSD is no accident of publicity. They are both a means to an end, to the place of definition.”
At the close, there is little question the taste left in Thompson’s mouth is one of bitterness. His conclusion may have been different had the final impression not been one of him getting his ass stapled to his face, but reality is reality. Hence Thompson’s own epitaph, fittingly incorporating another tremendous author, Joseph Conrad:
“It had been a bad trip … fast and wild in some moments, slow and dirty in others, but on balance it looked like a bummer. On my way to San Francisco, I tried to compose a fitting epitaph. I wanted something original, but there was no escaping the echo of Mistah Kurtz’ final words from the heart of darkness: ‘The horror! The horror! … Exterminate all the brutes!’”
Indeed. But breathe a new literary style to life in the process.
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