I bought this copy in 2009 from the Housing Works bookstore in SoHo. I think it was a quarter. The cover wasn't as jacked up as that when I bought it; that all happened as I'd have the book in my pocket as I walked around. See, in the City, you need something to read on the subway, and I always tried to have a book or a newspaper handy.
Hunter Thompson is one of my intellectual heroes, and I've modeled different projects as direct inspirations from Hunter's work.
Hell's Angels is a history of the returning WWII vets finding solace in groups, all riding motorcycles like they had during the war. They took club names from their old military divisions, and occasionally got into scrapes with other clubs and small-town constabulatory forces.
They weren't always seen as a public danger. They didn't really keep up with society's level of hygiene, but they did enjoy a brief level of notoriety as being a public commentator of political issues--no joke.
The rise and fall of Sonny Barger's group, being invited to an unwitting Kesey acid party at La Honda, getting onto television and in print interviews was all pretty good and heady for the group. Then reports of brutal rapes filtered in, mostly unsubstantiated, and then a fight between two guys spilled over into a small coastal California town, and the Angels were from then on outlaws in the bad sense, not in the romantic good sense.
This book also showed off Hunter's take on Tom Wolfe and Plimpton's New Journalism. With the other proponents, Wolfe set about establishing New Journalism as a thing where writers could use the methods of story-telling normally reserved for fiction in telling a non-fiction story. Hunter's take on that topic is usually called Gonzo Journalism, but is only shown here in his approach. It was Hunter's contention that the author of any piece was inextricable from said piece, and would eventually become part of the story.
Tom Wofle's The Right Stuff is an example of New Journalism. Using plot and character development, Wolfe weaves an exciting story of bat-shit crazy test pilots fighting for the chance to sit on a rocket and light a match.
George Plimpton's One For the Record shows his attempt, an approach a little closer to Hunter's, where the author has a part in the story of one man and his attempt to survive his march to history.
Hell's Angels isn't Gonzo Journalism exactly, but how is it set up? Hunter joins them, and reports the world as how he sees it, not even feigning impartiality. He just accepts that being impartial is an illusion, and that's the legacy that I'm a part of, at least with the blogging anyway.
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