Joe Rogan | Stories From Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail w/Timothy Denevi

Yeah, his voice was very unique too in that he decided to combine fiction with nonfiction in a very weird, blurry way. I think it was so one thing I think of is he usually gives you a cue or what he did was he dramatized. People didn't dramatize. Well, wait a minute, he made shit up. He didn't just dramatize. There's a rumor. There's a witch doctor. Yeah, I didn't say that he did Ibogaine. I said there was, this is about Ed Muskie's campaign. I said there was a rumor in Milwaukee that he did Ibogaine. I started that rumor. I mean, that's what he says. But what he said on a Dick Cavett show. Yeah, later. And I think Matt Taibbi on this show talked about it well, where one thing is that Musky was already out of the campaign when that came out. Musky had already lost. And so Musky had been a fucking monster and a terrible person on that campaign. And so Thompson used that version of Musky and wrote, as Taibbi said, in a very straight way, the Ibogaine story. And so if you had a sense of irony, you kind of knew like you're not really thinking that this is a guy who did Ibogaine. So I think there's cues in there for a listening audience. But what I think is even more, you know, I think he dramatized the way other people didn't. He would say, I look left, I look up, I see. He came down to me and then he said, people didn't write like that in journalism. They didn't go step by step. And he did. And that was really important. What I think is more important than the Ibogaine story. So the Ibogaine story in the background is Ed Musky was the front runner for the Democratic primary in 1972. He fucked up his campaign. Afterwards, Thompson talked about how he had heard that there was a rumor that this candidate was doing Ibogaine, which is like Ayahuasca. Well, he said that no, it's not like Ayahuasca. It's not. No, it's very different. It's not a hallucinatory. It's a self-examinatory drug that's very good. Yeah, it's very good. But he said they brought in a Brazilian witch doctor. Yeah. Yeah. Ibogaine is not even a Brazilian drug. It's from Africa. It's the same people got it. But what I think people don't remember is before that, and this affected the election in February of 1972, Thompson was in Florida. He was on something called the Sunshine Special. It was a whistle stop tour that Musky, the front runner, had a good chance to beat Nixon, poll numbers wise, was going all the way down the Florida peninsula on to try to win the Florida primary. And Thompson was like, this is the most disgusting thing I've ever seen. Like at every stop, Musky gave the same shit speech. It's like somebody should be your president, namely me. And it was repeated. The reporters were like, fucking, this is terrible. Musky was secluded in the back of the car. He didn't interact with anybody. They had his political operatives come out and make everybody sing the song like about Musky, like sunshine in his hands, the whole world's in his hands. It was terrible. And so that night, Thompson pulled into a Florida town. It was the second to last stop. And he and this young political reporter named Monty Chitty were going to get a drink at 2 a.m. And this guy walks into the lobby. He's like 6'6", 250, Peter Sheridan. And he walks in and he says he's looking for the Musky campaign, all these different things. He ends up going out with Hunter Thompson for a drink. And Hunter Thompson finds out that Peter Sheridan had been a good friend of Jerry Garcia, had hung out with the Hells Angels in California, had been to La Honda where Ken Kesey was, and was actually a pretty smart guy who was out of his mind in his mid 20s. They stayed out and drank all night. At the end of the night, Thompson's like, so what are you doing tomorrow? Where are you going? And Peter Sheridan was like, well, I'm going to Miami. And Thompson's like, we are too. You don't have to hitchhike. Fuck that. And so there's a really good journalist, Outlaw, it's called Outlaw, journalist by Bill McKean, another Thompson biography. Talks about how Thompson took his press pass, put it into the elevator, pressed the button, sent the press pass down to the ground floor. Peter Sheridan got it. So Peter Sheridan could ride for free on the Sunshine Express down to Miami the next day. So Thompson oversleeps because the fucking Muskie campaign doesn't like him anyways. Instead, Peter Sheridan gets on the Sunshine Express with a hundred Thompson press badge and Peter Sheridan goes on to order 12 martinis. And he goes, give me like a triple gin bucks, hold the buck. And he runs up and down the car. And, you know, Muskie has been a really shitty candidate at this point. He's not been engaging people. He got in this weird fight with his wife at a campaign event where they like put cake in each other's face. It's been really weird and people aren't reporting on it. Like other reporters aren't saying Muskie's unstable. And so Muskie at the end of this whistle stop, he spent all his campaign money to go up and down and try to do this whistle stop like tour. He gives the speech at the caboose and Jerry Rubin, the antiwar activist who was one of the Chicago seven and was it has come to heckle him is in the crowd. And he's saying to Muskie, so why did you support the Vietnam War in 1968? Like, who do you think you are? And so Muskie's yelling at Jerry Rubin. He's saying, young man, keep your mouth shut beneath Muskie, reaching up from the bottom of the caboose. Peter Sheridan is holding a gin bottle and grabbing at Muskie's leg as Muskie tries to give the speech and then Muskie falls back and the whole thing ends like the whole press conference is over like women's wear daily reported this. And it came out that Hunter Thompson had had 13 martinis and run up and down the train and had interfered with it. And Muskie's campaign really believed that Thompson was working with Donald Segrady and Nixon's creep Watergate crew to fuck up Muskie's campaign. And that actually changed the course. Thompson helped expose how fucked up Muskie was as a candidate at that time. And Thompson had never forgiven Muskie for being on the pro Vietnam war platform at the 1968 convention. And so we talk about the abelgate aspect of changing the campaign, but that report and the way that disseminated through media, the way it was picked up by other newspapers really did help change the people's perception of Ed Muskie at big Ed Muskie as Thompson called him at the time. Now he, when he wrote Hell's Angels, he hadn't really totally formulated that sort of gonzo style of journalism, but he did have a little bit of fiction mixed in with that. And that sort of ran him a foul of the Hell's Angels. They were very upset by that, right? Like he did write some things in there that they claim were not accurate. I think that when it came to Hell's Angels, what Thompson did really well is what Joan Didion did really well. He took the way the media was portraying somebody and he stripped that off and said, this is who they actually are. This is what they're actually doing. Joan Didion, when she writes about Jim Morrison and the white album, she's like, Jim Morrison was like sex and death in his leather pants was the best thing ever. Everybody loves Jim Morrison. And then in the scene in the white album, Joan Didion writes about how they sit at a recording studio for two hours and nobody says anything and they eat eggs out of a paper bag and it's a fucking nightmare. Thompson knew that the media was sensationalizing the Hell's Angels. He went to them on a cold night in San Francisco down by the waterfront and he said, hey, here's a Newsweek article. Here's a Time article. Here's how everybody's writing about you. All I want to do is write the truth about who you are. And he did. And he ended up writing with them and he ended up spending time with them. I don't think they got as mad at him about the way he portrayed them. I think they got mad that he began to make money or that he became famous. Angel sold 500,000 paperback copies. That is almost impossible to imagine today. 500,000 paperback copies of a literary book and the angels were pissed off about that. They felt Thompson owed him more money or owed him something for that. Did he pay them at all? Did he give them any money? Well, Suddy Barger, Suddy Barger is so ridiculous. Suddy Barger said he owed us a cake and he didn't give us a cake. That's it. You know, the famous story at the end of it is that that I mean, really, like when they go through it, he said that he said that Thompson was doing a subjective version of us, but it was at least closer than the shitty Newsweek and Time versions. Right. And so Thompson at the end of he'd finished the book, barely made the deadline, had to go down to a hotel in Monterey, lock himself in, stay up for 100 hours straight and write it in March of 67 to finish it. So he turns it in, makes his advanced deadline. In September, they're like, here's our author photo and it's shitty. He's like, fuck this. So he goes to a Hell's Angels rally. He doesn't know anybody because he hasn't been with him for six or seven months. He's taking pictures. That's when he got beat up for writing about the Hell's Angels. And he tiny, his friend who later committed suicide after Altamonn, after being involved in the Altamonn security situation. That's the Rolling Stone one where the guy gets stabbed? Yes, Meredith Hunter was stabbed. But tiny, it was a woman that got stabbed? Man, Meredith Hunter. Oh, it was a man named Meredith. It was back in the day where you can name your kids Meredith. Right? Like Marion, Marion's another one. Right? Lindsey. Lindsey. Some guys are Lindsey. I got another one to speak. Give me one. Jamie. Oh yeah. But Jamie's normal. Well, there's a lot of Jamie's. That future man scene where it's like, what's his name is like, my name's Susan. In the future, men are named Susan. I know it's a girl's name in your town. Right. But Meredith is a weird one though. You must hate your fucking son. The man, but you lose an argument with your wife. But that, but I lost a lot of arguments with my, but that poor guy was, but Thompson was there and tiny grabbed him after he was beat up. There was a guy holding a rock to drop it on Thompson with the Hells Angels. And tiny was like, all right, I know him. I know the rest of you don't. And he grabbed him out. And tiny was this like enormous Hells Angel who had been, you know, Thompson was very good at empathetically understanding their flaws and their perspectives. He'd never, I think made excuses for him. He said that their inherent perspective is fascistic. He writes that, you know, he says they use violence to respond to where they were in society, their idea of total retaliation, Hells Angels, or any offense, like looking at you funny or being like, dude, you drink. It could be met with everybody beating you up. Cause they got to determine the, they got the Hells Angels got to determine the offense like that was fascism to Thompson. And he wrote beautifully about their reliance on violence because he, they felt the Hells Angels, they'd been left behind by our moderated society. Like there's technology, there's all these new jobs. If you came back from the war in 1950, you had a chance in Oakland to have a middle-class life and a beautiful house in work the rest of your days and have a family that will then go on. But by 1965, that was no longer an option. And the angels were a violent response to that. Very similar to what we're seeing now. And so the way he wrote about the Hells Angels, it's very similar to the way that we see violence within groups that are supporting Trump, you know, and groups on the left and the right. Did he ever wind up resolving his differences with the Hells Angels? I think so. Sonny Barger, Hells Angels got fucked. Like rightly so. The Hells Angels were, you know, pursued like a mob, like a mafia group. People went to jail. Sonny Barger went to jail. I think they at the end appreciated his representation of them because it was better than any other one. Right. There's no better representation of the Hells Angels. No more sympathetic for sure. Yeah, or just no more accurate. No more on point. Yeah. No more like, again, it gets to Thompson's effort. If you ride for six months with somebody and you're an honest, like putting up your hands, you're not trying to fit what you see into a thesis. You're doing the opposite, trying to look at the reality you have in front of you and then form an argument out of that and cohere it. That's what Thompson's gift was. And very dangerous too, to do that. I mean, he did get beat up taking those photographs. He also had a really bad motorcycle accident with his friend on the back and his friend broke his leg. Like it was, it was really tough. That's why he left. He's like, get the fuck out of San Francisco. Race looks amazing. Like, it's amazing. It's a, it's a fire that you're putting your hand onto. How did it burn? It's going to crash. He was coming down. It was with the mayor of Richmond. He was coming down a slick road and they had hit like something was wet or an oil thing and it went out the back tire. So Thompson rolled and was fine, but his friend's knee hit railroad tracks. So his friend's knee broke really badly. It was the mayor. Yeah, it was the mayor of Richmond. And that's continued riding motorcycles though. I, yeah, he did. He would get an accident at Woody Creek, but he was pretty careful. Like, so I love that scene in Hell's Angels. I don't know if readers or listeners know this, but the edge, you know, and that's a major part of the book where Thompson's fighting with his wife. Thompson's finished his book, but he's breaking down because he'd worked so hard to do it. And so he takes his BSA out and he goes, if you know, San Francisco, he goes out to the park, he hits the coast highway and he comes down it and he's like, I'm so overwhelmed. Everything is so fucking terrible. He's going as fast as he can. And he talks about how his eyes begin to lose moisture. You know, the scene like this, this beautiful scene. He's looking for sand pits because he can hit a sand pit near the zoo. You're fucking done. And he gets all the way to Rockaway beach, which is in, um, like halfway down to Santa Cruz and he turns around and what he talks about is when he's at a hundred miles per hour, I think he was near death. I think he was really overwhelmed. He says, um, you know, the edge, the only people that know it are the people that have gone over the rest, the living don't have any understanding of it. And all we can do is approach it in this way. And it's this beautiful and it's called midnight on the coast highway. It was a anthologized and Tom Wolf, you know, and it was just beautiful. So he comes back and he sits at his desk. And so he had a view of the Bay bridge. He could see it's two flashing lights, um, the whole time. And he had broken the window in a terrible fight with his wife, like three weeks earlier. Um, and so he sits at the broken window and he writes out that scene right away with his eyes still scoured. Wasn't a broken window when she wouldn't give him a gun cause he was on acid and he threw a shoe through the window. There's three, there's three versions. So I do it. And then I give the three versions of the notes. So I go with the three versions that I've heard, like I heard it from, um, you know, she wrote, I really respect Sandy, like deeply. She wrote at the, um, a few years ago, she said, I'm done giving interviews with about her songs. And that was my life that it was then she's given so many interviews up to this point. Good for her says that that exists. And so I wanted to respect that. Good for you more than anything. And just use the information that I had and let the reader know, yo, here are three other versions. Here's the best version I could make dramatize, look left, throw, do this.