A strange and terrible way to begin a blog

I'm way too lazy to think of anything new to write so to start off with I am going to share with you a book review I wrote of "Hell's Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga" by the late Hunter Thompson. The review was written last year (2006) for a journalism class I took at Harper College in Palatine, IL. I am, by the way, a perpetual student in an on-going, very slow life-long pursuit of a college degree. So, here 'tis:


An outlaw looks at outlaws: Hunter Thompson and
the most notorious bikers in the world

The concept of the outlaw, a man living life by his own rules, sometime violent, always set apart from normal society, is pervasive throughout American culture. It goes back in time at least as far the 1800s and the mythologizing of the gunslingers of the Old West. More recent history brings us the myths of the outlaw biker. Tales of booze fueled beasts on two-wheeled machines began to come out of California as early as the 1940s and the stories became more popular and more frequent, to the extent that small town citizenry could be whipped into a frenzy at the mere rumor of a biker gang invasion.

No biker gang, then or now, captures the attention of America more than the Hell’s Angels. By the mid-1960s, due to clashes with law enforcement and sensationalistic articles in the press, the Angels had attained mythological status amongst outlaw motorcyclists. In 1965, Hunter Thompson, destined to become an outlaw of the literary variety, decided to seek the truth about the Hell’s Angels and spent a year with them, by turns riding with and interviewing them, boozing with and studying them, even warily befriending some of them. The result was “Hell’s Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga,” published in 1967.

The book is a more traditionally journalistic odyssey than Thompson’s later chemically influenced works such as “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.” In “Hell’s Angels”, Thompson excerpts long passages from magazine articles published at the time that recounted, sometimes truthfully, sometimes not, the misdeeds of the Angels as well the California attorney general’s report on the rise of criminal activity amongst bikers. He also quotes from his own interviews with Angels, police officers and average citizens who encountered the Angels. In addition, Thompson provides a brief history of the motorcycle club, which began as a loose organization of World War II veterans whom missed the camaraderie and excitement of their days in battle.
What makes “Hell’s Angels” unique is Thompson’s insertion of himself into the story. He buys a motorcycle--albeit one manufactured in Britain—to go on runs with the Angels and even shares his living quarters with them for brief periods.

The book can be hauntingly disturbing, as in Thompson’s eyewitness description of an event “somewhere between a friendly sex orgy and an all-out gang rape.” But there are humorous passages as well. When Thompson accompanies the Angels on a “run” to a camping site in northern California, he fears a battle between Angels and cops. While taking a few of the bikers in his car to buy beer, he writes that “if things got serious I could jump into the trunk and lock it behind me, then kick out the back seat and drive away when it was all over.” This apparent lack of willingness to back up the Angels in a fight earned the enmity of Sonny Barger, the Angels leader at the time. In a 1990 interview, Barger said, “I don’t like Hunter S. Thompson as a person.”

Some notable names of the 1960s find their way into “Hell’s Angels.” Thompson introduces the Angels to LSD at the home of author Ken Kesey where everyone gets stoned and listens to Bob Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man.” The Angels meet with poet Allen Ginsburg who writes “To the Angels” in which he asks them not to attack peace marchers. By the time they meet with Ginsburg, the Angels are getting politicized and Barger sends a telegram to President Johnson offering up the Angels for military service, the thought being that “a crack group of trained gorillas [sic] would demoralize the Viet Cong and advance the cause of freedom.” As Thompson put it, “For reasons never divulged, Mr. Johnson was slow to capitalize on Barger’s offer and the Angels never went to Viet Nam.”

The book ends with Thompson being beaten by several Hell’s Angels for no apparent reason. Thompson describes his time with the Angels as “a bad trip…fast and wild in some moments, slow and dirty in others, but on balance it looked like a bummer.” Throughout the book, there are glimpses of the Thompson style that would be fleshed out in his following works. Indeed, the final words of “Hell’s Angels” are actually from an author and work that Thompson would return to over and over again during the course of his career, Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness.” “The horror! The horror!…Exterminate all the brutes!” A fitting end to a well-written book that serves to demythologize a group of all-American outlaws.