Richard Luck's Blog
May 13, 2019
The Ballad Of Phil Lynott
For those interested, my latest piece for The New European. https://www.theneweuropean.co.uk/top-...
May 4, 2019
Great Books - Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas
* originally published on blokely.com
"We were somewhere near Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold..."
It was with this sentence that an entirely new form of literature was born. In 1970, Hunter Stockton Thompson was hired by Sports Illustrated to cover the Mint 400, an off-road race for dune buggies and motorbikes held just outside of Las Vegas, Nevada. Having made his name with his irreverent writings for Rolling Stone and Hell's Angels, a book about Hunter's time on the road with the notorious motorcycle gang, the editorial team must have been geared up for something other than straight sports journalism from their latest recruit. What they couldn't have been prepared for was a 200-page screed covering everything from the conflict in Vietnam and the war on drugs to the death of '60s idealism.
Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas was the book that secured Thompson's place on the literary landscape. It also cemented the reputation of Welsh illustrator Ralph Steadman whose drawings became a fundamental part of the project. More pertinently still, Thompson's tome blazed a trail for a genre in which the writer himself was at the centre of events. Christened 'Gonzo Journalism' (no prizes for guessing who came up with that term), this form was characterised by its potency and its immediacy. And while the writer might if he desired adopt a nom de plume - in Fear And Loathing... Thompson is 'reborn' as Raoul Duke - the reader was in no doubt that the opinions offered weren't those of a character but of the author himself.
Besides Steadman's cartoons and Thompson's devastating comedy ("The Circus Circus [casino] is what the whole hep world would be doing on Saturday night if the Nazis had won the war"), Fear And Loathing... is infamous for the drug intake of the author and his partner in crime Dr Gonzo (aka crusading attorney Oscar Acosta). And what quantity of narcotics did the dynamic duo take with them into the desert? "We had two bags of grass, 75 pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a saltshaker half-full of cocaine, and a whole galaxy of multi-colored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers... Also, a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of Budweiser, a pint of raw ether and two dozen amyls. Not that we needed all that for the trip, but once you get locked into a serious drug collection, the tendency is to push it as far as you can."
And did they really ingest all this? According to director Terry Gilliam (whose adaptation of Fear And Loathing... starred Johnny Depp and opened to mixed reviews in 1997), the heroic doses described are merely intended to underline Hunter's identification with what he describes as "the drug culture". As the former Python told Blokely, "There's no way you could take drugs in those quantities. If Hunter had ingested to that degree the book would never have been written because he and Oscar would have died of an overdose before they reached the Los Angeles city limits."
If its status as a "junkie bible" guaranteed its cult status, it was Thompson's decision to paint himself into his story that ensured Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas' place in the literary pantheon. In the years that followed, Hunter's approach would be refined by the likes of Tom Wolfe (The Electric Kool Aid-Acid Test) who would, in turn, coin another name for the genre, 'New Journalism'. But as that moniker is less exciting that the one Thompson chose so all those who followed had a hard time keeping pace with Woody Creek's most famous resident. And it wasn't just because he permanently existed at the cutting edge that Thompson stood apart from the crowd. No, as this requiem for the collapse of the counter-culture demonstrates, he was simply a far better writer than his contemporaries:
"[Back then] there was madness in any direction, at any hour. You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning... And that, I think, was the handle - that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of old and evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn't need that. Our energy would simply prevail. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look west, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark - that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back."
"We were somewhere near Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold..."
It was with this sentence that an entirely new form of literature was born. In 1970, Hunter Stockton Thompson was hired by Sports Illustrated to cover the Mint 400, an off-road race for dune buggies and motorbikes held just outside of Las Vegas, Nevada. Having made his name with his irreverent writings for Rolling Stone and Hell's Angels, a book about Hunter's time on the road with the notorious motorcycle gang, the editorial team must have been geared up for something other than straight sports journalism from their latest recruit. What they couldn't have been prepared for was a 200-page screed covering everything from the conflict in Vietnam and the war on drugs to the death of '60s idealism.
Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas was the book that secured Thompson's place on the literary landscape. It also cemented the reputation of Welsh illustrator Ralph Steadman whose drawings became a fundamental part of the project. More pertinently still, Thompson's tome blazed a trail for a genre in which the writer himself was at the centre of events. Christened 'Gonzo Journalism' (no prizes for guessing who came up with that term), this form was characterised by its potency and its immediacy. And while the writer might if he desired adopt a nom de plume - in Fear And Loathing... Thompson is 'reborn' as Raoul Duke - the reader was in no doubt that the opinions offered weren't those of a character but of the author himself.
Besides Steadman's cartoons and Thompson's devastating comedy ("The Circus Circus [casino] is what the whole hep world would be doing on Saturday night if the Nazis had won the war"), Fear And Loathing... is infamous for the drug intake of the author and his partner in crime Dr Gonzo (aka crusading attorney Oscar Acosta). And what quantity of narcotics did the dynamic duo take with them into the desert? "We had two bags of grass, 75 pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a saltshaker half-full of cocaine, and a whole galaxy of multi-colored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers... Also, a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of Budweiser, a pint of raw ether and two dozen amyls. Not that we needed all that for the trip, but once you get locked into a serious drug collection, the tendency is to push it as far as you can."
And did they really ingest all this? According to director Terry Gilliam (whose adaptation of Fear And Loathing... starred Johnny Depp and opened to mixed reviews in 1997), the heroic doses described are merely intended to underline Hunter's identification with what he describes as "the drug culture". As the former Python told Blokely, "There's no way you could take drugs in those quantities. If Hunter had ingested to that degree the book would never have been written because he and Oscar would have died of an overdose before they reached the Los Angeles city limits."
If its status as a "junkie bible" guaranteed its cult status, it was Thompson's decision to paint himself into his story that ensured Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas' place in the literary pantheon. In the years that followed, Hunter's approach would be refined by the likes of Tom Wolfe (The Electric Kool Aid-Acid Test) who would, in turn, coin another name for the genre, 'New Journalism'. But as that moniker is less exciting that the one Thompson chose so all those who followed had a hard time keeping pace with Woody Creek's most famous resident. And it wasn't just because he permanently existed at the cutting edge that Thompson stood apart from the crowd. No, as this requiem for the collapse of the counter-culture demonstrates, he was simply a far better writer than his contemporaries:
"[Back then] there was madness in any direction, at any hour. You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning... And that, I think, was the handle - that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of old and evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn't need that. Our energy would simply prevail. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look west, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark - that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back."
