Rolling Stone Founder Jann Wenner Remembers Hunter S. Thompson

There's so much of, you know, when people think about Rolling Stone, a lot of people think about the early days, they think about Hunter. You know, they think about when you guys covered his run for sheriff. I mean, that was a giant moment in culture too, that this fucking madman was running for sheriff. And the panic, the moral panic that people had about, oh my god, what if this guy actually becomes a sheriff and takes up all the streets and locks up all the drug dealers who are actually selling drugs and they don't trust me for weeks. No, he wasn't going to lock up, drug dealers were going to lock up bad drug dealers. Right. All the drug dealers that were selling drugs. They were selling bad drugs, they were going to put up stocks in a main square and you'd have to be in a stock like in, you know, old Williamstown, Massachusetts or something. He wanted to, they saw the streets and they would rip up all the asphalt and make anything grass, which was a good idea. He renamed the city from Aspen to Fat City. On the theory Hunter came up with it, it would be more difficult for land developers to sell something called Fat City Estates than Aspen Estates, you know. And then you couldn't, the police had to be unarmed and then there'd be a giant parking lot out of town that you could park at. And nobody, other than residents, residents could not, non-residents couldn't hunt or fish. But he came close to winning and it was in a very wealthy resort town that was starting to have a hippie population. When we published his piece about that and it was the first thing he did for Williamstown, it was called Freak Power in the Rockies or the Battle of Aspen. So it got such serious attention and other press and film crews from New York and all these kind of, oh, ho, the hippies are going to try and take over the ski town. Well, let's see what happens, you know. So much press came in, it just raised the stakes, it became quite a serious showdown campaign at this wealthy resort, which they came very close to winning. But two things about Hunter, just off the bat. Hunter became just the DNA of Rawlings, though. I mean, his spirit, his thinking, his sense of adventure, his sense of fun, his commitment to a better America were at the heart of what we did. And these were the same things that I felt. And so we just fell in. We became very fast friends. I mean, we just locked in almost immediately that we saw something special between us that we did together. He could write and I could edit. And we were very partners in a very real sense of the world. There was never after we first met, it was never a question of whether or not we would work not work with it. There's always from now on, we were together and he was always overseeing what we were doing at the magazine game with ideas, stories, and writers. And he felt very committed to making the magazine a success. And he just, Hunter is a, I love Hunter. And to this day, I miss him terribly, terribly. And I wrote in my book, I said, well, wherever Hunter ends up, I'm going to go there, too. Who knows what that will be? But, you know, I mean, you know, he just meant that much. Yeah. The documentary, the Gonzo documentary, that was the first time I ever really got to see you talk about him. And, you know, you're kind of the glue that holds that documentary together because you're sort of the rational observer that was there during all the wildest and most mad times. He had, I mean, everybody loved to be with Hunter. I mean, you couldn't get enough of being with Hunter, you know, and including me after having for so much. When you were with Hunter, when you were with Hunter, you were like felt you're going to have more fun and be calm close to the edge. And of craziness and danger than you ever were in your life. You know, just getting in the car with Hunter, you know, he would always have to do something that scared the piss out of you. You know, you'd turn into the middle of a snowbound highway. And one night we were driving from Cambridge to New Hampshire to visit Norman Mailer for some strange reason. We had spent the night in Cambridge and we had taken some acid and we got on the road, head full of acid, driving up in the middle of the night to be in its all mountain roads. And so we go along and then all of a sudden, like Hunter would turn the headlights off. And I mean, you have mixed feelings at this point. I've by this time developed this sense that I'm safe with Hunter. No matter how crazy he is, he knows what he's doing all the time, which he did. So on the other hand, he liked the idea of freaking people out. So I was going, oh, Hunter, stop it, stop it. You know, like and it would just make him happier to know that I was freaking out. It was partly just to keep him going. But then it really is what he was doing is he was looking ahead to Ben's and memorizing the curves ahead so they could turn off the lights, which is risky in itself. But we got to Mailer's. We were visiting some colleague of mine who was staying in my house. We had the night before and taken us and made a tape on an old cassette tape of scream like an exorcism screaming in the house. You know, the ghouls gone nuts. So we get up there at 7 a.m. in the morning and set the tape deck in the kitchen of the house, punch it so it starts with the screaming at top of him and run out the door and they'll come back. Well, he loved to do that. So we'd steal restaurant signs. I mean, there's all sorts of madness and crazy. It was fun, you know, and it was innocent. It was like being a kid. You know, part Hunter was a big kid, but also, you know, he was just a wonderful guy. And of course, the funniest writer ever. I enjoyed his copy coming. I just laughed my head off of some of the things he'd say. I mean, unbelievably funny. I think the first thing I read was the Vegas story. That was one of the first pieces I ever read of him. And I remember thinking like, who the fuck writes like this? Like it's it was I don't remember how old I was when I read it, but, you know, it was before I think it was before or around the time Johnny Depp played him in the movie. Now much before. No, I mean, when you wrote that when I read it. Yeah. I think the movie introduced to him. The movie introduced to Hunter. Yeah. Wow. I mean, you believe and believe such a person took place, but that was a faithful portrayal of an individual. And lucky me, he got to be my closest friend for many years. And we worked together so closely and all the time for many years. And he was Johnny got him really well. And Johnny loved him. He wrote Vegas in I think was 1970. I think was about the time 70 or 71. No, 70 because 70 one, something to his campaign. He wrote that it was when he was writing. He started writing in my basement, San Francisco, where he was living, staying with us. And he just he was on assignment to do something else. I'm serious thing about the Chicano uprising in East Los Angeles. But in the middle of this, I mean, he had to go to Vegas to go for a motorcycle race for Sports Illustrated. And he wanted like a 200 word caption, but he never turned that in. Instead started writing this piece about going to Vegas saying, we were somewhere on the edge of Barstow when the drugs took hold. And then the image of this red Cadillac in a trunk full of amles, uppers, downers, guns, you know, just madness. But that piece was so strong in two parts. It's a novel, you know, a short novel. I clearly became regarded as a classic of American literature day up with kind of like Huck Finn or Catcher in a Rye, stuff like that. You know, interesting. Another story about the kind of adolescent spirit and all of us of men who just can't give up being little boys and cherish that wonderful freedom and sense of fun that none of us ever like to give up really. It still lingers with that. I look in your eyes, I can see it, you know, the mess. But I've lost my point. It ignited this appetite for chaos in people that were dissatisfied with the narrative that they had been told about the life that you were supposed to live and the way you're supposed to go about things. And, you know, and then the 70s was just a pivotal moment too, because they had legalized, they had made all psychedelic drugs illegal. And there was this water that was being thrown on this movement and so quickly sort of evaporated so quickly that the shift between the 50s and the 60s was kind of parallel between the shift of the 70s into the 80s. At the end, things change. I mean, that's a complicated. Let me just, what you said about it liberated the chaos. Yeah, they ignited an appetite for chaos in people. Exactly. That it was accepted that it didn't have to, that you could live loosely or openly or you didn't have to obey all these rules. That's what Dylan was about too, you know, about the complexity of life and all things going on in your head. The two great Dylan albums bringing it all back home and I was just, you wonder about chaos. But at the end of the 70s, I mean, the 80s was the era of Reagan. I mean, we have Reagan leading the country. Things change. You know, the mood is different. The values of society seem different. In the 70s, we had either a full scale rebellion going on against Nixon, which was an exciting time to be alive and seen the Watergate hearings and just a triumphal on stuff. And then Carter, as the end of the 70s, the first real rock and roll president, and who Hunter had a great love of and who Carter loved him, and Carter loved Dylan and was of that spirit. There's a great moment in the documentary where it talks about Hunter being at Carter's speech and going back to get his tape recorder and recognizing that this is a very unusual moment. This guy's different. He was going up to Carter's talking about the quality of justice, you know, and talking about his spiritual ideas that he got from Reinhold Niebuhr, if I pronounce that correctly, and quoting Dylan. Very unusual for politicians. Yeah. And it was an accident. It looked like Teddy Kennedy was going to run for president then to be the nominee. So Hunter was following Teddy around, and Teddy had to go to Georgia to be a guest of honor at the law school there for Law Day. And Carter spoke and gave this remarkable thing. You don't hear politicians talk like that then anyway. You didn't. And Hunter was knocked out. And we kind of got aboard the Carter campaign, wrote about it. Hunter almost, you know, kind of became a part of it in a way. And between Hunter's coverage of the McGovern campaign and the Carter campaign, particularly the McGovern, it put Rolling Stone on the map in a way, although we've done big stories and broken things before. The idea that we were, the Rock and Roll magazine was covering national politics. And furthermore, the guy doing it was best known for covering motorcycle gangs. Plus, sweating all the time because he's booze enjoying. That resonated everybody. And it brought real attention to us because Hunter wrote the best coverage of the campaign. The best stuff about the candidates, the best about the political strategy. And all of a sudden, Rolling Stone was part of the annual big national story, competing with the New York Times. Everybody else had on, and he beat them all. We were better than the rest of them. Yeah, well, that was where it really sort of captured the way young people were actually feeling versus the way it was being described. Want some more of that? I think I'll go with the water. Okay. Sorry about this. I mean, that was what your magazine had covered and what he had covered with fear and loathing on the campaign trail. It was the way young people were feeling about it versus the way it was being represented on television and in newspapers. And it was people finally had a real voice that spoke to them, and it really resonated with people. Yeah, because to see it through Hunter's eyes. Also, it was the first time that 18-year-olds were allowed to vote was in 1972. And so that made it extra interesting to young people. And also, there was a war in Vietnam. That's a big background. I mean, that was – that makes everything stand out of high relief. But also, Hunter was extremely fun. There were pieces – you didn't have to know anything about politics to read those pieces. They were so funny. These things that he's coming up with, Senator Muskie was shooting E.B. Gain on the campaign. I mean, literally, people would come up to me and say, is it true about the E.B. Gain? Come on. E.B. Gain being a drug from the pineal gland of some exotic South African animal that enables you to stand still without making a movement. But your function of bringing still for 24 hours and Muskie was having a problem with this drug? I mean, and people ask me where Hunter would give away his credentials to some wild-ass hippie, didn't ride them on the campaign. I mean, you just couldn't have asked for anything better. And as I say, that year of the campaign coverage, I just had the best time. Occasionally, I'd go out and meet him on the campaign trail. The late nights were hysterical. But the filing of the copy, when he'd write this stuff, and you just couldn't understand, where the hell did this idea come from? I mean, I'm not sure. I mean, I'm not sure. I mean, I'm not sure. I mean, I'm not sure. I mean, I'm not sure. I mean, I'm not sure. I mean, I'm not sure. I mean, I'm not sure. I mean, I'm not sure. I mean, I'm not sure. I mean, I'm not sure. I mean, I'm not sure. I mean, I'm not sure. I mean, I'm not sure. I mean, I'm not sure. I mean, I'm not sure. I mean, I'm not sure. I mean, I'm not sure. I mean, I'm not sure. I mean, I'm not sure. I mean, I'm not sure. I mean, I'm not sure.