Hell’s Angels: The Birth of Gonzo

In the mid-1960s, the Hell’s Angels were violently pounding their way into the heart of the cultural zeitgeist, sparking a moral panic which would cement their legend in the American zeitgeist. By the end of the decade, both pop culture and the counter-culture would have had a love-hate relationship with them, evidenced by a swathe of sleazy biker-themed exploitation movies (where for every Easy Rider there were a dozen Wild Rebels, Sidehackers, or Hellcats) and culminating in the disastrous Altamont Free Festival, where a badly misguided decision to hire local Hell’s Angels as concert security contributed to absolute bedlam and a string of deaths, injuries, and property damage.

Before the biker movie boom really hit top gear, and long before Altamont killed the hippie movement and stomped the idea into the counter-culture’s head that the Hell’s Angels aren’t good dudes, Hunter S. Thompson already laid out the score for all to see. From around 1965-1966, he got in deep with the Hell’s Angels – dabbling in riding his own bike but always as an outsider, a curious tourist tolerated for only so long before the Angels got tired of him and delivered a horrendous beatdown which put an end to his observations. The end result is Hell’s Angels – a vivid snapshot of the outlaw motorcycle scene in California as it existed at the time which ideally sums up where it came from, what it was all about, and its future trajectory, and one of the first major fruits of Thompson’s “gonzo journalism” style.

Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas might have launched him into the stratosphere, but this 1966 book is what put Thompson on the map and represents, to my mind, his best overall work of gonzo journalism as journalism, rather than gonzo journalism as mashup of amusing anecdote and opinion piece. Sure, Las Vegas is a hoot and there’s a certain red fury to Fear and Loathing On the Campaign Trail, but by the time he wrote both of those he had his Raoul Duke persona that set certain expectations. He slips Duke’s name in here as part of a list of famous American hellraisers, but otherwise he’s not overtly playing up the authorial voice people had come to expect of him. The book’s clearly still in that voice, but it comes naturally, there’s nothing tryhard about it, and we’re far away from the Flandersised self-caricature which Thompson would eventually find himself locked into.

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Hell’s Angels is as much about America’s response to the Hell’s Angels as it is about the outlaws themselves. By this point in his career Thompson might not have been a household name, but he was a seasoned enough journalist to recognise and despise lazy, thoughtless, badly-researched journalism which relies too much on just rehashing other people’s claims and not enough on verifying them. Whilst a range of other motorcycle gangs existed in the same milieu at the same time of roughly the same vintage – Thompson namedrops the likes of the Gypsy Jokers and the East Bay Dragons – it was the Hell’s Angels who gained wider recognition, and it was the media circus which grew up around their undeniably extreme activities which drove that.

Though Thompson was writing before the rise of the hippy movement (by a matter of months), he accurately diagnoses how the counter-culture and peace movements of the time were badly miscalculating in respect of the Angels, persuading themselves that as violently anti-Establishment types they must be essentially progressive at heart. Thompson provides good reason to think that’s not the case; though the Angels, as he reports, claim they only wear swastikas and iron crosses for the sake of freaking out squares, he diagnoses them as being basically fascistic in outlook.

He wasn’t alone in this; Allen Ginsberg, in a poem-speech he wrote to try and appeal to the Hell’s Angels’ better natures, warned them of what happened to the SA in Germany once Hitler had no use for street fighters. Ginsberg’s poem, reproduced here, was penned and delivered as a speech in the context of tensions between the Hell’s Angels and anti-Vietnam protesters, with one of Hunter’s acquaintances among the Angels, Tiny, slipping past police lines curiously easily in order to attack protesters. Ginsberg’s rhetoric was high-minded but seems to have ultimately been addressed to the wrong audience, Thompson’s insights into the Angels here suggesting that, far from wanting the heat to die down, the Hell’s Angels kind of loved a fight. (In the end, as Thompson reports, the Angels decided against counter-protesting the peace marchers, but sent Lyndon Johnson a telegram offering the services of a Hell’s Angels hit squad in Vietnam. Johnson didn’t take them up on the offer.)

The lead Hell’s Angel in California, by Thomspon’s estimation – and certainly the one who seems to have taken the lead in formulating their response to the peace marchers – was Sonny Barger, who Thompson gets close enough to here to profile. Barger, as it happened, was also right in the thick of it at Altamont. Anyone who’d read Thompson’s book would have known better than to get Barger and his people in for concert security; Thompson reports a prickly and violent attitude on their part, where perceived slights are met with overwhelming force. Per Thompson, the Hell’s Angels don’t believe in an eye for an eye – retribution is massive and disproportionate.

In the process of infiltrating their circles and getting to know them, Thompson couldn’t help but be influenced by them to an extent; the final bit of the book before the postscript (where he addresses the beatdown they subjected him to) is an account of him taking his motorcycle out on a lonesome stretch of highway and feeling the Edge of riding it way past any sensible safety limit. The most startling aspect of the book – and a part where Thompson potentially gives his subjects too much credit – is on the topic of rape and sexual assault by Hell’s Angels.

To give Thompson his due, he does seem to have at least an intellectual understanding of the subject which was progressive for his time; he notes that rape as a subject is not something anyone really thinks about in a calm, objective manner, and he’s extremely aware that witness intimidation combined with an intrusive investigation process, humiliating cross-examination in court, and an utterly rotten conviction rate compared to other crimes can make women particularly reluctant to even report attacks, let alone press charges to the very end.

Nonetheless, there’s an instance early on where Thompson is discussing one incident where he’s a bit too quick to take the logic that because all charges were dropped, no actual rape happened. Admittedly, this is in the context of slamming the press for lazily asserting that a rape did happen – without any “allegeds” or similar, as though it were an actual fact that people were found guilty of the crime in question. That’s irresponsible journalism and basically traipses into libel – the sort of libel which a rich person could go after in court but a Hell’s Angel probably can’t afford to go after. The history of bad actors using defamation claims to silence victims of sexual assault is a troubled one, but a system where working class people can be libelled all day long but the news toes the line around the wealthy is not only an injustice in its own right, but one which ends up protecting a different category of abuser (see Epstein, see Weinstein).

More troubling is the way that Thompson’s understanding of consent appears fuzzy – though again, bear in mind that he was writing in 1966 and a literal lifetime of subsequent thought has emerged on the subject since. Thompson is probably correct that some women and girls – including girls not of the age of consent – did end up approaching the Hell’s Angels out of curiosity and a certain receptiveness. Thompson goes badly wrong when he suggests that if a woman initially consents to having sex with one Hell’s Angel, and is game for another, but changes her mind when it becomes apparent that some manner of gangbang is brewing, that this is at all complicated. It’s really not complicated, Hunter: it’s consensual sex as long as she’s saying and meaning “yes” and it’s rape as soon as she says “no”.

On the other hand, it’s at least possible to read Thompson’s comments in context as referring not to his own view on consent, but on how the legal system worked at the time – if Thompson’s understanding of feminism wasn’t exactly modern, a mid-1960s jury’s was surely far worse. Thompson was far from perfect on this point – but you get the impression that he was trying; the catalyst for the beatdown he suffered at the Hell’s Angels’ hands was him telling one of them “Only a punk beats his wife and dog.” This would be after a sustained period when, on the basis of the book, Thompson was in the area for all manner of mayhem perpetrated by the Hell’s Angels, and it says something of his character that despite the prolonged period of normalisation of such behaviour he finally snapped when faced with that.

Gonzo journalism intrinsically involves abandoning objectivity in favour of presenting a subjective impression of a time, a place, a subculture, as is the place here – so the objective truth of each and every anecdote that Thompson reports here is questionable at best. But the overall accuracy of the portrait he paints of the Angels would be exonerated at Altamont, and over and over again in the coming decades. If, as the Hell’s Angel who appeared on television to confront Thompson about the book said, it’s 60% cheap trash that might reflect the raw materials Thompson had to work with.