How Hunter S. Thompson Ended up in Colorado | Joe Rogan and Timothy Denevi

What led him to move to Colorado? Oh, he was losing his shit in San Francisco. It was that night on the fucking motorcycle. But how did he choose Colorado? So, this is a great story. In the early 60s, Thompson had a chance to drive, I don't know, some sort of cargo, like a friend's car out to Colorado on his way to San Francisco in 1960. He ended up doing a road trip up and down San Francisco after he passed through Colorado, but he stopped in Colorado because he had to drop off a friend's car and there was a woman there, Peggy Clifford, who was a journalist and was his good friend at the Aspen Daily Times. And she was older. She saw him like after driving 20 hours. She's like, hey, come in my house. Hang out. And she lived right in Aspen and Woody Creek. And so then in 1963, after Sandy was pregnant, Thompson came back from South America where he was a reporter and did a wonderful job reporting on how democracies were falling apart down there. Him and Sandy wanted to move west because the National Observer was the newspaper Thompson worked for. They wanted to give Thompson a position to be a Western reporter. He was thinking of going to San Francisco, but instead he chose to stop first where Peggy Clifford was, to stop in Aspen and Woody Creek. And so he was living in Aspen and Woody Creek from August of 1963 to February of 1963. And he was there, this is where Freak Kingdom begins. He was there when John F. Kennedy was assassinated. And he's sitting in his living room. It's 10 a.m., 11 a.m., Pacific time, and he gets a knock on the door. And it's this rancher named Wayne Wagner, which is an old Aspen family. And the rancher's like, the president's been shot. Like, what's more, he's been murdered, he's dead. And Thompson just lets out a sob. Then he begins to fucking swear. And then he fucking calms down. And he goes downtown, Woody Creek. He goes to Aspen. And he just gets notes from people what their responses are. And so when he then went to San Francisco to become the correspondent for the magazine that he was working for, he was having a tough time. He was already wanting to flee. Because he got Hell's Angels, he was able to stay in San Francisco longer, write, report on them. But by 1966, 67, he was like, this city is not a good place for me. He has a great quote about what would have happened if he stayed in San Francisco from 67 on. He's like, I would have burned up. I would have been emulated right there. And so when it was time to leave, he thought again of Woody Creek and of Aspen, which was so different than it is now. And that was the place that he decided to move and rent for a little while at first. But then because of the success of Hell's Angels, he was able to buy Al Farm. Aspen's very different. But Woody Creek is not that much different. Woody Creek is still pretty. It's great. But Salt and Woody Creek are great, dude. There's a place called the temporary. They did an event with Juan Thompson and I did a reading at it. And a lot of Thompson's friends were there. So I'm like, I'm some fucking young. I didn't know Thompson. I'm an interloper. I'm out there. And it was really great to talk to everybody that knew him and to go through it. And that's why this book almost killed me, because I did a note for every sound, smell, or sight, or comment. If I wrote, and then at the moment, Thompson felt, what the fuck am I doing here? I had the quote where he said, I looked around then, and I felt, what the fuck am I doing here? And I had that in the notes so people could see it. And that was because I wanted those people that knew him well and respected him and trusted him to not think that I was in any way trying anything but to make good art off of his life and who he was, trying to respond to my fucking view of Trump right now and my love of his work in this moment. Why do you say it almost killed you? It's not possible to write a narrative and then also cite every detail of the narrative. So each day I would spend nine hours researching and outlining with citations. I wanted to write a novel. I wanted to be like, you know. And at that moment I felt like the machine oil from the bay was coming off. I wanted to write it vividly. I knew that I had to support all of that. And so I would spend eight or nine hours every day just on the pure arrangement and research. And then for the next six or seven hours or eight hours, I would write the narrative. And then I'd say, for five or six hours, you know. I'd get up and I would do it again. And I did this for four or five months after I was deeply into it. And I don't think that's sustainable. I think it's better in retrospect to go and report somewhere, you know, to go and be in the middle of Congress and take notes. But to try to write something with the dramatized nature that I think Thompson wrote well and having my prose sound nothing like his. I wanted my prose to sound nothing like the way he wrote. But then to also have almost as many pages of notes showing my work, you know, like showing the math that went behind it. So if I'm wrong, I'm wrong. But at least you can see it. I think that was morally correct. But I think that was too much effort. Was it just because you were trying to do it in a short period of time? Did you have a crazy deadline or something? Yes, but I also had a year. And so, you know, and I had a family and I had a, I'm a professor, like, I just, I'd never, when it came to writing, had to do both those things, which was to try to write it in a novelistic way, but then to also make sure that any question the reader would have, but like, why did you think that the dinner was at 5 p.m.? Or like, you know, why did you think that the sun was coming up in this way at this moment? To make sure, because out of respect, because what Thompson talked about was people making money off of Mike Dunesbury. You know, like, that's what he talked about, was people trying to make money off of him. And if I was gonna write this book, it couldn't be in that space. Didn't he have a lawsuit against Gary Trudeau? He thought about it, I think. I don't think he ever did it. He talked about it publicly. I think it was just. Well, he became that guy, unfortunately. That's what's really weird. What happens when we become a caricature of ourselves? It's really scary. Do you know, well, what's weird about it is that he kind of knew that it was happening. Like, there's that famous interview where he's talking to that British guy who did a documentary about him. Breakfast with Hunter, maybe, or no, but yeah. One of them, one of them. But he's rolling a joint on the grass somewhere with that Las Vegas visor on, and he's, you know, talking about how he's really become this caricature, and it would actually be better if he wasn't alive anymore. You know, then he's. He was breaking up with his wife during that. It was really sad. There's a scene in that where he hides, where he's at like a parking lot, and he doesn't want people to see him, and he's standing against the wall, and people are like, come on, we gotta go. He's like, I just don't want anybody to see me right now.