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Feb. 20, 2006, 11:22 a.m., Korea Standard Time Hunter Thompson's widow offers photo to fans The Associated Press Feb. 20, 2006  "The widow of Hunter S. Thompson said she would let fans download a rarely seen photo of the gonzo journalist posted to his Web site to mark the anniversary of his death. "Hunter S. Thompson was 67 when he shot himself to death Feb. 20, 2005, in his home in Woody Creek, apparently despondent over health problems. "Anita Thompson said she took the photo at the Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles, when her husband had friends over as he was writing one of his columns. "He has a special look in his eye that he had once in while when he was up to something but was totally at peace," she said. 'I've taken thousands of pictures of him, but this one is my favorite. And nobody has seen it.' "Anita Thompson said she is still working on organizing a symposium on her husband for the summer in either Aspen or San Francisco." The Gang That Wouldn't Write Straight Reviewed by Noel Murray Onion A/V Club Dec. 21, 2005 Journalists don't have many heroes, because the profession is anonymous by design, and even in journalism schools, the names of the best-known reporters get used as cautionary examples. ("We don't need any Tom Wolfes in this class.") Still, the names alone make astute students sit upright. Wolfe, Hunter S. Thompson, Joan Didion, and their contemporaries changed what a reporter can be. In Marc Weingarten's book The Gang That Wouldn't Write Straight, those names pop up early and often, along with the names behind the names: Truman Capote, Lillian Ross, John Hersey, George Orwell, and all the way back to Charles Dickens. Weingarten is after nothing less than an all-encompassing salute to exemplary non-fiction.  As such, The Gang That Wouldn't Write Straight is disappointing only in that it's so short. A cursory glance at the index reveals names that are either missing or under-represented: David Halberstam, George Plimpton, Hugh Hefner, and even new journalism-influenced critics like Pauline Kael and Lester Bangs. Instead, Weingarten focuses on a few of new journalism's biggest stars and most important articles, as well as tracing the rise and fall of the zeitgeist-capturing magazines Esquire and New York. Gang doesn't contain much new about how Thompson wrote Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas, or how Wolfe enraged New York society with pieces like "Radical Chic" and the New Yorker-bashing "Tiny Mummies." But Weingarten puts both those writers into a larger context, considering what it was like for them to file complex, literary stories on deadline while their rivals were challenging them with their own work, and while the shifting fortunes of the Vietnam War and Richard Nixon's presidency were making their words look like prophecy.Weingarten sounds a few cautionary notes, making a point of describing the old guard's reaction to all the new techniques of compositing, interior monologues, and satire—all of which sometimes came at the expense of facts. Gang ends in the mid-'70s after New York reporter Gail Sheehy gets skewered for inventing characters in her story about the city's prostitution rackets; had Weingarten gone on for another 300 pages, he could've roped in the Stephen Glass and Jayson Blair scandals, not to mention the Orwellian "we report, you decide" tactics of Fox News. But too much dirt would muddy up the book's honorable goal of remembering a time when magazine journalism was as entertaining, artful, and important as any novel. If read by the right people, The Gang That Wouldn't Write Straight might inspire a new generation of journalism students to irritate their professors. Hunter S. Thompson's last blast By Marc Mohan The Oregonian Dec. 16, 2005 If, in fact, it really is better to burn out than to fade away, then it stands to reason it's even better to have your ashes shot out of a 150-foot-tall cannon in the middle of natural splendor. At least, that was Hunter S. Thompson's thinking. The gonzo journalist left specific instructions for the disposal of his remains, before taking his own life earlier this year. The realization of those plans is captured in the hourlong documentary "When I Die."  Director Wayne Ewing, who also made the intimate, entertaining portrait "Breakfast With Hunter," benefits from unfettered access to a process that was kept largely under wraps. The film opens with footage from 1978 in which Thompson describes the tower from which he wants his remains ejected: it should be topped by a gigantic rendition of a favorite image of his, a clenched fist with two thumbs.Funded by actor Johnny Depp, the construction of this monument is a significant undertaking, on the scale of a major Hollywood production. There's some amusing culture clash as the Los Angeles contingent of event planners and producers interact with the local authority (such as it is), the Woody Creek Caucus. The documentary feels at times like a morbid making-of-a-movie documentary, "Project: Greenlight" crossed with "Six Feet Under," but the overriding spirit of remembrance for the iconoclastic Thompson keeps it grounded. As spectacular as this final sendoff is, "When I Die" features near its finale the most heartfelt reminiscence of Thompson, and it comes from an entirely expected source: his favorite bartender at the Woody Creek Tavern. Thompson cronies sign book deal By John Colson Aspen Times Dec. 8, 2005 As the enduring legend of Hunter S. Thompson's life and reactions to his death continue to reverberate around the world, two of the late writer's close friends have signed a deal to write a book of reminiscences based on their memories and those of others in the Aspen area. Pitkin County Sheriff Bob Braudis and local artist Michael Cleverly have reached an agreement with the Harper Entertainment/William Morrow publishing firm for a book titled "The Kitchen Readings - Hunter Thompson in Woody Creek," to be published in 2007. According to a blurb on the "Deals" page of publishersweekly.com, "This isn't the first deal related to Hunter S. Thompson since his suicide in February, but it is the first book that promises to bring readers right into Thompson's living room - or kitchen, as it were. [Braudis and Cleverly], two close Thompson buddies who logged many hours in the kitchen of Owl Farm, will reveal several decades' worth of up-close-and-personal anecdotes ..." Cleverly, reached at his home just a mile or so above Owl Farm on Woody Creek Road, said the book is the brainchild of both him and Braudis. "Bob and I have been joking for years about writing a book when Hunter was gone. We were joking because we were dead certain he was going to outlive both of us," Cleverly said. But after Thompson shot and killed himself in February, Cleverly said, the topic of a collaboration on a book took a more serious turn. The two "cranked out a few sample chapters" and sent them to 20 publishers, receiving 19 rejections before the proposal was accepted, a deal was made with a publisher and a cash advance was promised. Cleverly called the cash advance "niggardly" but declined to give a specific dollar amount. "If you take what I was hoping for and slash a zero off the end, there you have it," Cleverly said. He said he and Braudis will be sharing the proceeds from the deal, including a percentage of the ultimate sales. Braudis said the proceeds from the book would not allow him to quit his day job. "I'm going to be writing at night and on the weekends. It'll be a sidelight, and it'll be fun... this'll be a growth experience." With no experience at writing beyond "college papers and police reports, and a few magazine articles," Braudis said he is counting on Cleverly's abilities, both as a writer and as an artist and thus better used to selling creative products to corporate buyers. "I believe Cleverly (who is a regular columnist for the Aspen Times Weekly) has a command of the language equal to most writers," Braudis said. Braudis said he wanted to be a part of the project "because I have a lot of stories about Hunter and considered him a very good friend and in many ways a political genius." The two said they will be including their own reminiscences along with the outcomes of interviews with some of the Good Doctor's friends in the Aspen area and farther afield. "It's about friendship, as far as I'm concerned," Cleverly said of the underlying theme of the book. The book is due out in 2007, and Cleverly said he hopes to have the final draft of the work finished in "about six months after signing the contract," which is expected to happen in a month or more. The contract, according to both writers, calls for a book that is 75,000 words in length. And since the two sent in about 15,000 words in their sample chapters, Cleverly said with confidence, "the thing is about one-fifth done already." Rolling Stone to Publish Thompson Note The Associated Press Sept. 8, 2005 Rolling Stone, the magazine that was home for years to Hunter S. Thompson, will publish a note written by the gonzo journalist days before he committed suicide in February. Douglas Brinkley, the presidential historian who is also Thompson's official biographer, writes that a Feb. 16 note may be Thompson's final written words. It reads: "No More Games. No More Bombs. No More Walking. No More Fun. No More Swimming. 67. That is 17 years past 50. 17 more than I needed or wanted. Boring. I am always bitchy. No Fun _ for anybody. 67. You are getting Greedy. Act your old age. Relax _ This won't hurt." Hunter left the note for his wife, Anita. He shot himself four days later at his home in Aspen, Colo., after weeks of pain from a host of physical problems that included a broken leg and a hip replacement. Written in black marker, the note was titled, "Football Season Is Over." Brinkley writes in the magazine, on newsstands Friday, "February was always the cruelest month for Hunter S. Thompson. An avid NFL fan, Hunter traditionally embraced the Super Bowl in January as the high- water mark of his year. February, by contrast, was doldrums time." Most of Thompson's early writings appeared in Rolling Stone. In pieces of great length, he often portrayed himself as a wildly intoxicated observer and participant. The writer's ashes were blown into the sky in Woody Creek, Colo., amid fireworks on Aug. 20. Bombs (sic) Bursting in Air: Hunter S. Thompson's farewell a great, sordid letdown By Michael Swindle The Village Voice 1974. Kandahar, Afghanistan. Spozmay Hotel. Habib, the proprietor, has brought a tray of assorted varieties of hashish and kief to mi hermano Alabama Billy Messerschidt's garden suite -- a first-floor one-room that opens onto a field of opium poppies in brilliant bloom. He is almost to the dregs of his morning pot of black tea, as he surveys his options and tells Habib he'll have a gram of black-slab Afghani, a vial of the local hash oil, and a chunk of that beautiful yellow kief that looks like bee pollen and is so much better for you. A pinch of this, a taste of that, a last dram of tea, and Billy is ready to step under the suspended steel water tank that Habib's man has somehow, magically, made hot with a wood fire, and pull the chain for the rapid and brief cascade that passes for a shower in those parts. Habib has a neon sign that flashes "Spozmay Hotel" in alternating colors. He is inordinately proud of this sign, and spends his evenings gazing admiringly at it for hours on end. "Green," says Habib, "red. Green. Red. Green. Red . . ."  August 20, 2005. Eight-something p.m. on a dark stretch of Colorado state highway 82 overlooking the late Hunter S. Thompson's Owl Farm. Soon will come the finale of the fiercely private public extravaganza that is the Godfather of Gonzo Journalism's "funeral." His ashes will be blasted from a custom-made "cannon," a 153-foot phallic structure in the form of the now legendary symbol of Gonzo Power: the shaft a lighted dagger blade fronting 11 explosive-and-HST-ashes-packed chrome cylinders, topped by a fiberglass clenched double-thumbed fist clutching a peyote button that is allegedly "spinning." The "glans," if you will, is pulsing: "red. Purple. Green. Red. Purple. Green. Red . . ." This week of near-insane Hunterism here in Sow's Ear, Calorado, which began on Tuesday afternoon past, when HST's ashes, meticulously divided among 30 fireworks mortars -- 10 red in color, 10 white, 10 blue -- by the world-renowned Pennsylvania-based Zambelli family's Fireworks Internationale, arrived in an armored car, according to a spokesperson for Thompson's widow Anita, "for the safety of the community." Pardon the tangent, but I was disturbed by Aspen Daily News reporter Troy Hooper's serial use of the word "pulverized" in describing HST's remains. Try as I might, I cannot find it within myself to equate that particular word with someone who has been cremated. They didn't use a hammer, goddamit. It were FIRE! On another front on that Tuesday, HST's neighbor Jimmy Ibbotson, of Nitty Gritty Dirt Band fame and seemingly heir apparent for Hunter's sinecure as craziest motherfucker in Woody Creek, made the wire services when he opened fire with his shotgun on what he termed a "paparazzi," who wanted to park on his property. "I wasn't aiming at him," said Ibbotson, known to one and all in these parts as Ibby. "I just wanted to scare his ass." Ibby, his good-natured maniacal hectoring of those assembled at the Woody Creek Tavern notwithstanding, was involved in one of the few bright spots in a week not noted for same. On Friday afternoon, he commandeered a guitar and joined noted composer, musician, and Beat scenester David Amram -- on pocket flute and mini-tabla -- in an half-hour-long, improvisational jam of "Mr. Bojangles" that brought a surprising dignity to one of the sappiest tunes ever penned. Amram, a longtime pal of HST's and, in the spirit of full disclosure, a friend of mine whom I hadn't seen since 1972, was invited to come to "the event," and planned to perform a special arrangement of "My Old Kentucky Home," in homage to Hunter's birthplace. Having been tossed onto the slag heap known in this neck of the woods as "The Press," I was not able to actually hear his handiwork, but I know in my heart that when his rendition sailed into the crisp Front Range ether, grown men cried and women bared their breasts. Brothers and sisters, space limitations -- that, by the way, defy human comprehension -- prevent me from detailing for you the extent of the sordidness that went down over the past five days here in Sow's Ear, Calorado. The surprising thing about this is that Hunter's fans were not the source of the abovementioned. I take no joy in telling you that it was HST's folks who were emanating the creepiest vibes. I cannot say it any better than John Rothchild of Miami (Florida or Ohio, I do not know) did in his letter to the editor published in the Sunday, August 21, edition of the Aspen Daily News, so I give him the floor: "Editor: Just rode up Lenado, past Hunter launch site. Rent-a-cops everywhere, some peering into hills with binoculars -- looking for invaders? Twice, I got stopped on my bike and told, 'don't loiter, keep moving, don't take any pictures.' The guy who made his reputation opposing authority exits the planet completely surrounded by authority. Who'd have thunk it?" Which brings us back to a dark stretch of Calorado state highway 82, nearing 9 p.m. on a day after the full moon August 20, 2005, where I am standing with a couple of pals who, like me, way back when, could not stand the wait for the second installment of "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" in the Rolling Stone. News reports relayed to me from various friends seem to run in an identical Party Line that read like this AP item: "With a deafening boom, the ashes of Hunter S. Thompson were blown into the sky amid fireworks late Saturday, as relatives and a star-studded crowd bid an irreverent farewell to the founder of 'gonzo journalism.'" My wife read me this and I asked her, for reasons of my own, if they had capitalized the j in journalism. Her answer: "Neither the g nor the j." See what I mean? If you're saying "yes," yeah you're fuckin' right! If it's "no", well, think about it; it'll come to you. I hope. I'm sorry to be redundant, but I take no, that's NO, joy in giving you this news: Two weeks ago I was on the Alabama Gulf Coast with my 4-and 3-year-old grandsons, and I shot off $15 worth of Black Cat bottle rockets that was a better show. They say Johnny Depp, bless his heart, coughed up most of the reported $2.5 million "the event" cost. He got screwed. By my best calculations, I figure "they" spent $2.499 million on the booze for the party, and the Zambellis had to make do with the leftover. As I stood out there on 82 for an hour waiting for a finale that had already happened, I thought of two young guys I had met at the Woody Creek Tavern, who had driven from north Washington state for "the event": Chad, a toned athletic Park Service Ranger candidate, and his charmingly dissolute cousin Sean. Sean, on a dare, had eaten all the psychedelic mushrooms they had with them as Chad drove through Utah. "Except for digging a few cloud formations," Sean said, "all I did was sweat and worry about Mormons." The last time I saw him before zero hour, Sean was steady drinking rough alcohol and chasing it with reefer. And I couldn't help but believe that Sean and his kin were the ones putting the grin on Hunter's face. And I couldn't help but think that "the event" would have made him bull goose looney. To close on a personal note, Hunter: This is the shittiest place I have ever been in my miserable fucking life, and that includes the DMZ and Port-au-Prince in 1994. So long, pal. Stay on the Sunnyside.  Ashes-to-Fireworks Send-Off for an 'Outlaw' Writer By Katharine Q. Seelye The New York Times August 22, 2005 Hunter S. Thompson indulged in numerous hallucinogenic fantasies over the years, but this weekend, one of them morphed into reality: his ashes were blasted into the sky over his farm here, carried by red, blue and silver fireworks in front of a 153-foot monument that Mr. Thompson, the writer and avatar of "gonzo" journalism, designed himself almost 30 years ago. Former Senator George McGovern, the protagonist of Mr. Thompson's "Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72," was among the 350 invitation-only guests who paid him tribute before liftoff. "I'm not quite sure where he's going," Mr. McGovern, 83, mused in his flat South Dakota prairie voice during two hours of alcohol-free tributes. "But I salute you and wish you a happy journey in that land of mystery." Mr. Thompson's family and friends - including Senator John Kerry, Lyle Lovett, Bill Murray, the musician David Amram, Ed Bradley and locals like Bob Braudis, the sheriff of Pitkin County, Colo. - watched Saturday night as his ashes exploded with fireworks, lingered in great puffs of milky smoke, then vanished. "When the going gets weird," Mr. Thompson once wrote, "the weird turn pro." Thus, six months to the day after Mr. Thompson shot himself to death at age 67 at his home here, did his family and friends produce a highly professional show, staged and choreographed by Hollywood and underwritten by his friend the actor Johnny Depp for more than $2 million. "It's nice to be able to give a little something back," Mr. Depp, who played Mr. Thompson in the film version of "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas," told the crowd as the ceremony began solemnly about 6:30 Saturday night. "Hunter, this is for you." What unfolded here in the Rockies just outside of Aspen was the complete canonization of Mr. Thompson. At the entry to what could only be called the set, his portrait was hung at the center of his personal literary solar system, surrounded by the planets of Samuel T. Coleridge, Joseph Conrad, William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Henry Miller, John Steinbeck and Mark Twain. Jann Wenner, publisher of Rolling Stone, whose early history was entwined with Mr. Thompson's emerging career, said that Mr. Thompson was "the DNA of Rolling Stone" and called him "one of the greatest writers of the 20th century." Douglas Brinkley, the historian and Mr. Thompson's literary executor, said that beyond Mr. Thompson's persona as an outlaw journalist, "Hunter wanted to be remembered as a writer." He called him "the Billy the Kid of American literature." Throughout the tributes, the monument, sheathed Christo-like in a silky red fabric, loomed in the gloaming, becoming ever more prominent as the natural light faded and spotlights illuminated it against a backdrop of darkening cliffs. The service was private and laced with what was called "Academy Award-level" security. Mr. Thompson's fans were kept at bay, as were most of the news media, and guests were barred from bringing cellphones, cameras and recording devices. Orange cones marking a tow-away zone extended for three miles beyond Mr. Thompson's home off a narrow strip of rural roadway. Black-clad security guards, aided by a dozen county sheriff's deputies, patrolled the 40-acre property, which Mr. Thompson bought in 1968 for $50,000 and is now worth millions. By nightfall, scores of fans had gathered at the nearby Woody Creek Tavern and outside the gate to the property. Sheriff's deputies said that "numerous people" tried to crash the scene but were escorted away. The pavilion for guests, constructed in the last several weeks, was a vast stage set under a glass ceiling. To set a somber tone, everything, including the bar, was initially draped in black velvet. After the service, the black was lifted to reveal couches and Thompson memorabilia like stuffed peacocks and a gong. Above the bar were chandeliers and swatches of red velvet, evoking a frontier bordello. His widow spoke first. "We've been through a lot together," Anita Thompson, 32, told the guests. She sobbed her way through Coleridge's "Kubla Khan," which she said was Mr. Thompson's favorite poem. Earlier in the day, Mrs. Thompson took a brief ride, accompanied by a reporter, high over the property in a crane used to construct the monument. She had flown with his ashes the week before to Pennsylvania, where she delivered them to the Zambelli fireworks company. Technicians encased the remains with the fireworks in mortar shells, which were driven back to Colorado in an armored car. "Hunter just wants to come home," she said, gazing out on the sharp peaks surrounding the valley. At the ceremony, Mr. Bradley of the CBS program "60 Minutes" described first learning of Mr. Thompson through his writings in 1972 and thinking of him as an "off-the-wall madman"; eventually Mr. Thompson became one of his closest friends. Like others, he spoke of his grief at losing Mr. Thompson, saying he thought he had finished his crying until he started writing his tribute. Mr. Wenner recalled his drug-crazed exploits with Mr. Thompson but spoke of his feelings as well, saying at one point that he had been jealous of how close Mr. Depp had become to Mr. Thompson. "Now those days are gone," Mr. Wenner said. "Once I had Hunter all to myself, and now I don't have him at all. And none of us do." Mr. Thompson's son, Juan Thompson, 41, closed the tributes, a reminder that the ceremony was not only about a counterculture legend but also a father. He said he was not seeking "closure," dismissing that as "a Dr. Phil word." "I don't want closure; I want to remember him," he said. "Missing him is a way of loving him." As Champagne was served, Juan Thompson declared: "The king is dead. Long live the king." His father then appeared on screen from a 1978 BBC documentary, describing how he wanted his ashes dispersed. He drew up plans that looked remarkably like the steel monument a few hundred feet away. Norman Greenbaum's 1969 anthem "Spirit in the Sky" then rose from the sound system, with the lyrics: "When they lay me down to die/ Going on up to the spirit in the sky." The silky red dressing around the monument slowly unpeeled itself, revealing a rocket-like structure embedded with a dagger. It was crowned by Mr. Thompson's logo, a two-and-a-half-ton red fist with two thumbs and a psychedelic peyote button pulsating at its center, a Day-Glo sight visible for miles around. The final send-off began with Japanese ceremonial drummers and Buddhist readings in Tibetan. Then, with a bang that Matt Wood, a Zambelli fireworks designer and producer, described as just below the level of a sonic boom, 34 lines of fireworks streamed from the ground. The whole display lasted less than a minute, after which a recording of Bob Dylan wailed with "Mr. Tambourine Man" ("I'm ready for to fade/Into my own parade"). The partying then commenced, with jam sessions into the wee hours. The monument, taller than the Statue of Liberty, is temporary because it violates local ordinances. Mrs. Thompson said she hoped to keep it up for two weeks, then would build a pond nearby as a permanent sanctuary, with a government-issued tombstone. (Mr. Thompson was an Air Force veteran.) She plans to inscribe it with a Thompson saying: "It never got weird enough for me." Gonzo goes out with a bang The Associated Press (SydMo) August 21, 2005  "With a deafening boom, the ashes of Hunter S. Thompson were blown into the sky from a 47-metre tower as relatives and a star-studded crowd bid an irreverent farewell to the founder of 'gonzo journalism.' "As the ashes erupted from the tower's pinnacle, red, white, blue and green fireworks lit up the sky over Thompson's home today for nearly 10 minutes as the crowd cheered. The actual blasts with the ashes took about 30 seconds." Friends, Fans Gather for Gonzo Farewell By Robert Weller The Associated Press (WaPo) August 20, 2005 Iconoclastic journalist Hunter S. Thompson would have loved the 153-foot tower built to blast his ashes into the sky, said one of his many friends and admirers gathered for an unsolemn farewell. "It's a beautiful structure. Of course, he would not have been able to resist putting a few holes into it," said Michael Cleverly, referring to his former neighbor's love of shooting guns. "But it weighs several tons, so it could handle a few holes." The counterculture author killed himself six months ago at his home near Aspen. His ashes, intermingled with fireworks, were to be fired out of the tower Saturday evening in front of a star-studded crowd at his Owl Farm compound. "He loved explosions," his wife, Anita Thompson, explained during the planning of the fireworks sendoff.  The tower -- intentionally built just taller than the Statue of Liberty -- was erected in a field between Thompson's home and a tree-covered canyon wall. It was shrouded in tarpaulins for days, but his widow, Anita, said it was modeled after Thompson's Gonzo logo: a clenched fist, made symmetrical with two thumbs, rising from the hilt of a dagger.The memorial was expected to be a party, with plenty of alcohol, reminiscences, readings from Thompson's works and performances by both Lyle Lovett and the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band. About 250 people were invited, including Thompson's longtime illustrator, Ralph Steadman, and actors Sean Penn and Johnny Depp, close friends of the writer. Depp portrayed Thompson in the 1998 movie version of "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream," perhaps the writer's most well-known work. Anita Thompson said Depp funded much of the celebration. "We had talked a couple of times about his last wishes to be shot out of a cannon of his own design," Depp told The Associated Press last month. "All I'm doing is trying to make sure his last wish comes true. I just want to send my pal out the way he wants to go out." Thompson was credited along with Tom Wolfe and Gay Talese with helping pioneer New Journalism _ he dubbed his version "gonzo journalism" _ in which the writer was an essential component of the story. Thompson often portrayed himself as wildly intoxicated as he reported on figures such as Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton. At the height of the Watergate era, he said Richard Nixon represented "that dark, venal, and incurably violent side of the American character." Besides the 1972 classic about Thompson's visit to Las Vegas, he also wrote an expose on the Hell's Angels and "Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72," in which the central character was a snarling, drug- and alcohol-crazed observer and participant. The Kentucky-born writer also was the model for Garry Trudeau's balding "Uncle Duke" in the comic strip "Doonesbury." In this now-chic resort community, he proudly fired his guns whenever he wanted, let peacocks have the run of the land and ran for sheriff in 1970 under the Freak Power Party banner. Thompson shot himself in his kitchen Feb. 20, apparently unable to handle his declining health. One close acquaintance suggested Thompson did not want old age to dictate the circumstances of his death. Anita Thompson said no suicide note was left. Final send-off in Colo. today for king of gonzo journalism By Dan Elliott The Associated Press (BoGlo) August 20, 2005 A hand-scrawled note on the refrigerator in Hunter S. Thompson's kitchen says: "Never call 911/ Never/This means you/HST." Over the sink, a snapshot shows the famously reckless father of "gonzo journalism" nuzzling a tiny kitten. This room -- jammed with cooking utensils, writing mementos, and a huge television -- is where Thompson wrote some of the acerbic books and articles that made him an American treasure in the late 1960s and early '70s. It is also where he fatally shot himself six months ago at age 67. The kitchen remains a center of Thompson's still-swirling universe as family and friends wrap up plans to blast his ashes out of a 150-foot-tall monument behind the house at Owl Farm today. It's what Thompson wanted. "No crying, no tears, only celebration," Thompson's widow, Anita, said during a 2 1/2-hour interview at the home and her makeshift office, providing a rare glimpse into the writer's world. "He wanted people to celebrate," she said. "He envisioned it to be a beautiful party. The most amazing people would be there. His friends would celebrate his life. And he was even specific that there would be clinking of ice and whiskey." The monument towers over a field between the home and a tree-covered red rock canyon wall. It is shrouded in gray and blue tarpaulins that ripple in the wind, and it will not be unveiled until today. It is modeled after Thompson's gonzo logo: a clenched fist, made symmetrical with the addition of a second thumb, perched atop a dagger. Anita Thompson said the event will include some reminiscence, readings from Thompson's work, and performances by Lyle Lovett as well as the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band. About 250 people were invited, including the author's longtime illustrator, Ralph Steadman, and actors Sean Penn and Johnny Depp, close friends of the writer. Depp, who portrayed the writer in the 1998 movie version of "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas," is financing much of the send-off, Thompson said. She said that she doesn't know the total cost, and that others have offered to chip in. The event is private, and security will be tight. David Meeker of Specialized Protective Services in Aspen would say only that the precautions will be more elaborate than for any similar-sized event he has ever protected. The narrow roads that thread the canyon will remain open, but Pitkin County deputies will bar anyone from stopping to watch from outside the property, Thompson said. Sheriff Bob Braudis, a friend of Thompson's, did not return a call. After today, the monument will be taken down. Thompson, 32, who married the writer in April 2003, said she plans to protect and promote her husband's legacy. "I'll be working for Hunter the rest of my life. I know that. I made that commitment, and I'm honored that I can," she said. Gonzo in Space: Hunter Thompson Gets Wish, Ashes to be Fired Out Of Cannon in August Editor & Publisher July 11, 2005 The long-awaited firing of gonzo writer Hunter S. Thompson's ashes into space from a cannon will take place August 20 from behind his home in Woody Creek, Colo., near Aspen. Actor Johnny Depp has arranged the event through a Beverly Hills, Ca. "event planner," reports the Denver Post. The remains of the late writer will be blasted from the top of a 150-foot temporary tower exactly six months after his suicide by gunshot. Neighbors and family members have reportedly gone along with the idea, and the required official okays have been secured. Depp has promised to make sure private security keeps the public out [which is a sharp left turn away from the public ceremony mentioned a few months ago, ne? Methinks this link sums it up well.] Hunter Thompson’s family seeks permanent home for his archives By Jeff Kass Scripps Howard News Service May 30, 2005 Hunter S. Thompson’s son bounds into the room on a recent Saturday morning wearing a pinkish, plastic visor, circa 1971, that reads “Las Vegas” alongside a picture of two dice. This decades-old knickknack is among the multitude of items set to become part of the writer’s archives, which Thompson’s family and estate executors expect will elevate his literary standing. “It will be a good way to help him to continue to be taken seriously,” said Juan Thompson. “Most people don’t (take him seriously). He’s that wild man who did a lot of drugs and did a lot of crazy stuff.” Thompson’s personal and professional life - which he generally melded together - was, in fact, split between drugs and swashbuckling cultural criticism. The author of such iconic books as Hell’s Angels and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas killed himself with a handgun in the kitchen of his Woody Creek home Feb. 20. The Associated Press recently was given a glimpse of some items in the archives. They include manuscripts, as well as the visor, cocktail napkins and rental car receipts from Las Vegas. There are photos of the author with the Hell’s Angels and examples of his “shotgun art.” Thompson’s family and executors hope to place the archives, now in temporary storage at a secret site in Aspen, with a university in a city or state with some connection to the author. Obvious candidates include Kentucky, Thompson’s birthplace; Colorado, where he lived for nearly 40 years; and literary-rich New York, where he once worked. “Something that would feel right for Hunter,” added presidential historian Douglas Brinkley, who also is Thompson’s official biographer. “He’s somebody who didn’t like Phoenix.” For now, the archives are a hodgepodge of file cabinets, storage tubes, miscellaneous stacks and hundreds of cardboard boxes. One is labeled “Mags and Newspapers 1967-1980.” A box that reads “Steadman, R.,” surely refers to Ralph Steadman, who illustrated many of Thompson’s works. And visible in the stacks is a large, multicolored Steadman drawing of the “lizard lounge” scene from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. The book’s original manuscript also resides in the archives, said the late author’s wife, Anita Thompson. Juan Thompson says his father’s presence remains strongest at his residence, nicknamed Owl Farm. But meandering through the archives gives Juan a sense of finality surrounding his father’s death. “When he (my father) was alive, he would never, ever, ever have allowed this to leave the house,” he says, wearing his father’s Aztec medallion necklace, which will not go into the archives. Other items include a swath of padded manila paper that references Thompson’s novel and reads: “Rum Diary Bound Galleys.” Another box is for Thompson’s unfinished book, “Polo is My Life.” Inside that box are manuscripts, notes and outlines. Anita Thompson cannot immediately locate them, but says polo mallets are somewhere in the room. Juan Thompson recalls hotel bills from 20 years past, and 1,000 small, hotel-sized bars of Neutrogena soap Thompson probably purchased when he first discovered the brand. Anita Thompson said her husband learned his archival ways from his mother, a librarian. Brinkley said Thompson’s letters to his mom when he was jailed at 17 are among the items that have not yet been made public. Thompson was an avid reader, and books lying about include the 1950 novel “Joy Street” by Frances Parkinson Keyes and “Alice in Wonderland.” Thompson’s reporter notebooks chronicle him discussing the Black Panthers while at the Louisville, Ky., airport — a scene recounted in his story, “The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved.” “He was a chronicler of himself,” Brinkley said, and added, “It’s a unique view of modern America.” "Gonzo" send-off taking shape Friends, family of Hunter Thompson organizing cannon ceremony By Troy Hooper The Denver Post April 6, 2005 Hunter S. Thompson's ashes will be blasted from a cannon sculpted into a 53- foot-high fist in a public ceremony in August, his widow said Tuesday. Anita Thompson said Bob Dylan may be invited to perform "Mr. Tambourine Man" at the send-off ceremony being organized by friends and family, including actor Johnny Depp. Hunter S. Thompson, the noted "gonzo" journalist, shot and killed himself in the kitchen of his home near here on Feb. 20. "Hunter came into a lot of people's lives, and he's left a lot of people feeling alone," Anita Thompson said. "They'll always have Hunter's books to read, but it will be nice to get together at least once to share the Hunter Thompson experience." As far back as the 1970s, and leading up to his final days, the writer envisioned having his remains scattered across his rural Woody Creek estate in a thunderous explosion to symbolize how he lived: wild and furiously. Family and friends have been referring to a 1978 British Broadcasting Corp. documentary titled "Fear and Loathing on the Road to Hollywood" to garner details of the late writer's wishes. In the film, Thompson discussed his vision during a visit to a mortuary. The exact date of the August ceremony and official approvals from Pitkin County are still pending, but Anita Thompson said her late husband's friends are already beginning to construct the giant monument. Depp, who played Thompson in 1998's "Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas," has been a driving force behind the project and has been showing friends conceptions of the sculpture that he is carrying on his laptop. "Johnny Depp has been very generous in funding the project so far," said Anita Thompson, noting she was not sure how much the last blast will cost, but that it would be "worth every penny." The gonzo fist - a symbol that appears on many Thompson works - would be 53 feet high and mounted on a 100-foot pillar. Thompson's ashes would explode out of a peyote button clenched by the fist. At least one Thompson neighbor and friend is offering to donate some of his acreage to accommodate camping for visitors. During a break at a Pitkin County commissioners' meeting Tuesday, officials said the ceremony could require a permit. Commissioner Michael Owsley is supportive of the plan. "I think people should think of ways to remember Hunter. His death was a terrible loss to Woody Creek," said Owsley, who lives down the road from Thompson's compound. "It's just awful out there now. It's so lonely." Hunter Thompson's ashes to be shot from cannon [in August] The Associated Press Apr. 5, 2005 Hunter S. Thompson's ashes will be blasted from a cannon mounted inside a 53-foot-high sculpture of the journalist's "gonzo fist" emblem, his wife said Tuesday. The cannon shot, planned sometime in August on the grounds of his Aspen-area home, will fulfill the writer's long-cherished wish. "It's expensive, but worth every penny," Anita Thompson said. "I'd like to have several explosions. He loved explosions." Thompson, 67, shot himself in the head on Feb. 20 after a long and flamboyant career that produced such new journalism classics as "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" and cast his image as a hard-charging, drug-crazed daredevil. The cannon shot will be part of a larger public celebration of Thompson's life. Some details remain to be worked out, including the exact date, what kind of cannon will be used and the specifics of the gonzo fist, Anita Thompson said. She said the gonzo fist will be mounted on a 100-foot pillar, making the monument 153 feet high. It will resemble Thompson's personal symbol, a fist on an upthrust forearm, sometimes with "Gonzo" emblazoned across it. Anita Thompson has said the monument will be a permanent fixture on the writer's 100-acre property. She said planning for the fist has been guided by a video of Thompson and longtime illustrator-collaborator Ralph Steadman, recorded in the late 1970s when they visited a Hollywood funeral home and began mapping out the cannon scheme. Meanwhile, Playboy magazine this week is publishing an interview with Thompson based on a series of conversations he had with magazine staffer Tim Mohr in December. In the interview, Thompson discusses a range of topics from political freedom to the best kind of snow tires to buy but offers no obvious hints of his impending suicide. "He was really enthusiastic and full of energy," Mohr told The Associated Press on Monday. Thompson even talked about embarking on a long-term project to expand the Playboy piece into a book, "a guide to life, sort of a handbook," Mohr said. The interview appears in the magazine's May issue, which hits newsstands Friday.  Rolling Stone catalogs memories of late Hunter S. Thompson 33 pages dedicated to Woody Creek author By Chad Abraham The Aspen Times March 11, 2005 Rolling Stone magazine's expansive effort to detail the "life force" that was Hunter S. Thompson hits newsstands today. The magazine, which published his seminal "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" in two parts in consecutive issues in 1971 and kept him on the masthead for nearly four decades, devotes 33 pages to the legendary Woody Creek author. Founder and Editor in Chief Jann Wenner writes about the first time he met Thompson: "He was thirty-three, stood six-three, shaved bald, dark glasses, smoking, carrying two six-packs of beer; he sat down, slowly unpacked a leather satchel full of 'travel necessities' onto my desk - mainly hardware, like flashlights, a siren, knives, boxes of cigarettes and filters, whiskey, corkscrews, flares - and didn't leave for three hours." Presidential historian Douglas Brinkley, who edited Thompson's books of letters, writes a mesmerizing article titled "The Final Days at Owl Farm." There are also plenty of photos and a touching, melancholic farewell painting from longtime friend and collaborator Ralph Steadman. Perhaps most entertaining are the snippets of remembrances that Rolling Stone procured from those who were actually close to him. These are not people who say, in the words of Deputy Managing Editor Will Dana, " 'I snorted cocaine once with Hunter in 1978 and, boy, it changed my life.' We got about 40 of those unsolicited three or four days after he died," he said yesterday. Instead, the tributes are from people such as Dr. Robert Geiger, who sheltered Thompson, his first wife, Sandy, and son Juan when they were evicted in 1965 in Sonoma, Calif. Nixon aide Pat Buchanan writes of vicious, Wild Turkey-laden arguments over communism lasting until dawn. Steadman gives a truly hilarious account of Thompson helping the artist overcome seasickness. Pitkin County Sheriff Bob Braudis, possibly the author's closest friend, writes that "Hunter was always a very important member of my family here." The issue, which kept getting "bigger and bigger," Dana said, also has a United States president recalling how Hunter threatened his press secretary. In Jimmy Carter's short piece, he says some of the subjects Thompson brought up were "discomforting." Longtime Aspenite Jack Nicholson uses a bit of his space to plug a potential fund-raiser involving Thompson, himself and the Aspen Music Festival and School. Finally, there are the memories from a son and a wife. Juan Thompson's essay is a tearful, brief exploration on a complex relationship, as is Anita Thompson's farewell letter. And the same could be said of the Rolling Stone issue itself. "I thought it came out pretty great," Dana said. "It just was obvious that we had to do something big." Hunter S. Thompson and Mental Health By George Thomas Clark ChronWatch Since Hunter Thompson put a gun in his mouth and shot himself last week, I’ve been digging deep into the Internet and reading lots of articles about him. The first wave of stories commended his hard-punching, eye-gouging, “gonzo” style of insightful political writing in such books as “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” and “Kingdom of Fear,” and recalled with wonderment and affection his manic consumption of alcohol, LSD, cocaine, and enough other intoxicants to fill the Physician’s Desk Reference. A couple of days after the coroner came, many who’d known the man, or witnessed one or more of his countless binges, began to somberly note that he really had drunk, snorted, and dropped too many unforgiving things and such behavior wasn’t so amusing and admirable after all. But in none of the articles I’ve found has anyone said, “Hey, Hunter should have gotten help.”  That is amazing, and appallingly typical. If a guy gets a toothache he’ll dash to the dentist. A fever sends him scampering to the doctor. A rash drives him scratching to the dermatologist. Heart, liver, kidney, and stomach problems are also widely understood to require medical attention. But what about the human brain? It is easily the most astonishing organ in this solar system, yet it’s usually considered a body part unworthy of professional treatment. The essential problem is ignorance; most people still view the brain as a primarily psychic phenomenon and assume that common (even rampant) ailments like depression, alcoholism, drug addiction, and excessive anger should either be ignored or treated with more alcohol or cigarettes or, most admirably, by gnawing on the stick of righteous stoicism. None of those will work. People whose brains have sentenced them to unrelenting depressive pain, generally because of an intrinsic chemical imbalance, must be treated medically. A guy like Thompson, who drunkenly barrels into public events, snorts coke in a thousand bathrooms, stands barefoot in the snow shooting guns in the middle of the night, hordes explosives, and repeatedly tells his wife that he’s considering suicide, is a guy who needs help. Perhaps his wife did suggest he see a psychiatrist. She should have insisted. Instead, the Associated Press quotes her as having threatened to leave him. His final act certainly wasn’t her fault. She couldn’t have saved him. Only Thompson had a chance to do that. When Thompson broke his leg in Hawaii last year, Sean Penn immediately spent twenty-seven grand to fly him back to the writer’s “fortified compound” – the focal point of his isolation and paranoia – in Colorado. That was a compassionate gesture by Penn but would have been far more helpful had the jet been pointed toward a mental health facility. Thompson would have bellowed upon arriving. He probably would have refused treatment, claiming he didn’t need it but the rest of the world did. He was, however, decidedly capable of admitting some kinds of pain. He acknowledged his hip hurt bad enough to be replaced, and underwent the operation. So Hunter S. Thompson, a very tough guy, or at least a tough talker, was willing to get the best treatment for his leg and his hip. But like too many others in mental distress, he didn’t understand his brain also deserved the finest medical attention. Hunter Thompson suicide a selfish act By Bill Wineke Wisconsin State Journal I really wonder if we aren't going too far in romanticizing the life and suicide of Hunter S. Thompson. Thompson, the famed "gonzo" author of "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas," took his life last Sunday. He sat at the [counter] of his home near Aspen, Colo., took a sip of Chivas Regal, put a 45-caliber handgun in his mouth and blew his brains out. Thompson was 67, had spent a good part of his life high on drugs and on whiskey, and didn't really often write as well as he had when he was younger. His suicide has become the stuff of legend, as has his colorful lifestyle. His supporters, including his own family, boast that he "went out at the top," that not for him was an old-age filled with doctors and medical tubes. What isn't said is that there is something -- to my mind, at least -- selfish and brutal about killing oneself while one's son and grandson are playing a game in the next room. Thompson was a genius writer, but he was also a pathetic individual. If you take him at his word -- and I do -- he couldn't be creative without the assistance of vast amounts of whiskey and substantial amounts of drugs. I doubt very much that it was true; I don't doubt for a minute that he believed it to be true. He was a great writer. He was also a drunk. One thing that is true of drunks, genius or not, is that, as they age, they become more and more focused on themselves. Continued alcohol and drug abuse is a slow form of suicide in itself, and it isn't in the least bit unusual for it to end in a formal suicide. If a grandson happens to be in the next room, oh, well. Most of us who drink too much or who are addicted to drugs at least have the advantage of people around us who want us to change. They might plead with us. They might leave us or fire us or just try to stay away from us. We might lose our jobs or our homes or our families. Some of us end up on the streets. The world sends us messages that we should clean up our acts. That's not so if we are really talented or if we are really rich. Then, it seems, the world has a vested interest in keeping us addicted. The world didn't stand in judgment of Hunter Thompson, the world egged him on. We loved his outrageous behavior. We chuckled when he was characterized in cartoons. Some of us made pilgrimages to Owl Farm, hoping to share a Wild Turkey with the great one. So, too, did we glory in his suicide. His family said he was a "warrior." Various admirers [have] volunteered to help carry out one of his funeral wishes -- that his ashes be shot from a cannon. It [is] all so romantic. Even if Hunter Thompson had wanted to give up drugs and alcohol, we would have done our best to convince him otherwise. We didn't really notice that it has been quite a while since Thompson produced an original book. Nor did we care that his writing often became a parody of his earlier work. In fact, we liked it that way. There's one haunting question about Hunter Thompson, the answer to which we will never know: Just what might he have written had he given himself an opportunity to mature as a writer?  Thompson had end all planned, wife says By Troy Hooper The Denver Post ASPEN - Hunter S. Thompson not only planned his suicide, but he also provided instructions on how he wanted his legacy preserved, his wife, Anita, said Thursday in her first public interview since his death. "At first I was very angry; he was my best friend, my lover, my partner and my teacher," Anita Thompson said. "But I know he is much more powerful and alive now than ever before. He is in all of our hearts. His death was a triumph of his own human spirit because this is what he wanted. He lived and died like a champion." In recent months, he had repeatedly talked of killing himself, she said, and had been issuing directives, orally and in writing, on what he wanted done with his body, his unpublished work and his assets. Speaking Thursday from their Woody Creek compound known as Owl Farm, Anita Thompson, 32, said that her 67-year-old husband's suicidal designs put an intense strain on their relationship but that his motives were not rooted in desperation or fear; he simply felt his time had come. "I wish I could have been more supportive of his decision. It was a problem for us," said Thompson, who retreated to her parents' house in Fort Collins when the two quarreled. There, she said, he would fax her love letters. The couple, who married in April 2003, had a profound affection for each other, and though they occasionally feuded over the author's death wish, friends say they always reconciled. "Hunter loved Anita so much. They were a shining example of two people who couldn't keep their hands off of each other," said family friend Tim Mooney, a former manager for musician Jimmy Buffett who first met Hunter Thompson while working behind the bar at the Hotel Jerome in the 1970s. On Sunday, Anita Thompson called her husband from the Aspen Club & Spa, and he told her: "Come home so I can work on my column," she said. Then, she said, he set the receiver down, and she heard a clicking noise that she thought might be computer keystrokes but now believes was the sound of a gun. The father of "gonzo" journalism put a .45-caliber gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger. "I'm going to miss him horribly. You can't even imagine," Anita Thompson said. Juan Thompson, a Denver resident and the author's 40-year- old son; his wife, Jennifer Winkel Thompson; and their 6-year-old son, Will, were the only ones in the house when the shooting happened about 5:30 p.m. They told investigators the shot sounded like a book crashing to the floor. Juan Thompson found his father slumped in the chair in which he sat to write many of his classic works. Anita Thompson said she took a van from the club back to their home northeast of Aspen, where she was met by sheriff's deputies and tragedy. Inside, the phone receiver was resting on the kitchen counter next to the typewriter and a glass of the author's favorite whiskey, Chivas Regal, she said. Thompson married twice -- first to Sandra Dawn Thompson Tarlo, who is Juan Thompson's mother, and then to Anita. The night before he killed himself, Thompson gave his son a medallion he once received from Oscar Zeta Acosta, a prominent Chicano lawyer, writer and speaker fictionalized in the 1972 classic "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas," as well as an emerald pendant Thompson had worn since 1976. Anita Thompson said her husband told Juan to give the pendant to her after he died. She said that none of Thompson's family members knew when he planned on turning a gun on himself -- a la his idol, Ernest Hemingway -- and that she would have intervened and "called in a SWAT team" if she had known the end was so near. In an interview Thursday with The Associated Press, Juan Thompson said the only thing that surprised him about his father's death was the timing. "One thing he said many times was that 'I'm a road man for the lords of karma.' It's cryptic, but there's an implication there that he may have decided that his work was done and that he didn't want to overstay his welcome; it was time to go," he said. Juan Thompson said his father had been in pain from a hip replacement, a broken leg and back surgery, but "I really don't believe it was motivated by pain." Anita Thompson said she plans to carry on her husband's legacy as he instructed. "I have a lot of work to do, even more than before," she said, declining to reveal specifics of Thompson's final requests. But she did confirm the family plans to blast her husband's ashes out of a cannon on Owl Farm in spectacular fashion, as he had wished. "I think we should," she said. "The more explosions, the better." Blast into sky could be Thompson's last hurrah By Nancy Lofholm The Denver Post ASPEN, Colo. -- In what could pass for an outlandish scene from the pages of one of Hunter Thompson's books, actor Johnny Depp and others who were close to the Gonzo journalist are searching for a cannon to grant the author's wish that his remains be blasted into the sky. "If it can be done, we will do it," said Boston entertainment attorney George Tobia Jr., who represented Thompson for about 15 years. "Maybe it will be part of a public thing, or maybe one night a shot will ring out and people will know. ... " Thompson's unusual send-off is not the only posthumous bang that can be expected from a prolific writer who turned journalism on its head with his incisive and manic observations of everything from the Hell's Angels to hoops games. Tobia said many unpublished works are forthcoming. When Thompson committed suicide Sunday night at his home here, he left behind numerous collections of unpublished writings, including a novel called "Prince Jelly Fish," reams of essays and scads of letters. Some of the writings are in manuscript form. Some are included in Thompson's detailed files of everything he ever wrote going back half a century. Many are in faxes. President Bush's re-election was a frequent topic. Janet Jackson's wardrobe malfunction merited at least one essay. "He has a voluminous legacy of work," said Tobia, who has also represented the interests of famous beat writers, including Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg. "There was hardly a day that went by when Hunter didn't send out a fax. And it wouldn't be a two-line fax. It was always a screed. They were so well-written." Tobia and other representatives of Thompson's estate will be sifting through the unpublished writings to decide when and in what form they will be published. But first, they have to take care of the matter of the cannon. Thompson liked to joke that he was cannon fodder, which led to his oft-expressed wish for one final blast. It's a wish that legally could fly. "I think if someone wanted to fire a cannon on their own property, I think they could do that," said Pitkin County sheriff's investigator Joe Disalvo. "I think by statute it would be OK." Thompson was cremated in Glenwood Springs, Colo., yesterday. Depp became part of the cannon search because he and Thompson have been close friends since working together on the 1998 movie version of Thompson's seminal political tome, "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas." Depp played Thompson's alter ego, Raoul Duke. Thompson fans may be able to witness that unusual send-off, but they will have to wait. Thompson's close friends and family will have a private gathering March 5. A public ceremony is planned to take place in the spring or early summer.  Hunter's Kitchen By Troy Hooper Aspen Daily News Hunter Stockton Thompson lived and died in the kitchen. The hard-living, self-destructive gonzo journalist's story instantaneously richocheted around the world Sunday evening after he blew a .45-caliber bullet through his head and completed the final chapter of his storied life. The 67-year-old writer's 40-year-old son, Juan, told investigators he found his father lying in the kitchen of the fortified compound known as Owl Farm after hearing what sounded like a book crashing to the floor. The time of death was approximately 5:42 p.m. Anita, the author's wife of almost two years, was not home at the time. Thompson's 6-year-old grandson, William, was the only other person in the house. "I can't believe it. It just doesn't make sense that Hunter would do this. But we all know there were a lot of times Hunter didn't seem to make sense," said Gaylord Guenin, a Woody Creek Tavern chieftain and neighbor of Thompson who knew him for 36 years. "He was an intricate part of the valley. It takes something like this to make you sit back and really appreciate it." Ever since moving to the rural, funky neighborhood of Woody Creek in 1967, Thompson's kitchen at Owl Farm served as his office, his gambling parlor, his political war room, his rehabilitation clinic and, simply, a place to hang out. Pitkin County Sheriff Bob Braudis, a regular betting partner and close friend of Thompson's, described the kitchen as "a salon reminiscent of Paris in the 1920s. It was full of artists, politicians, winners, losers -- and Hunter made the house rules, especially when it came to wagering." Whatever the situation, the counterculture author known best for the 1972 classic "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" spent much of his time perched on a stool behind the kitchen counter that supported the typewriter he used to create some of his best work. In recent years, Thompson began to spend more and more time there. He suffered a broken left leg in December 2003 at the Kahala Mandarin Oriental Hotel in Hawai'i after he "executed a sharp turn at the mini-bar" and fell on the polished floor of his ninth-floor suite. Actor Sean Penn chartered a private jet costing more than $30,000 to fly him back to Colorado. Up until his last days, Thompson's leg continued to plague him with pain. He also had an artificial hip, and he recently had back surgery. A simple journey to the bathroom forced the cult writer to hold onto his loved ones for support, as he limped across the room. "I knew he was dying from a distance. It hurt him being in so much pain," said Jimmy Ibbotson, a longtime neighbor and former singer-guitarist of the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band who, like others before him, had been 86'd from Thompson's kitchen for poor behavior. Ibbotson isn't the only one to feel Thompson's wrath. The musician's 14-year-old dog, known affectionately as Noble Columbo Scarface Sire of Woody Creek, found itself on the wrong end of Thompson's gun. "We call him Scarface because Hunter shot him years ago," said Ibbotson, pointing to a long scar across Columbo's forehead. "Hunter told me he'd shoot my dog if he kept messing with his peacocks — and he did." Behind "Keep Out" signs and the security personnel who stood guard at Owl Farm's front gate, Thompson's family and close friends comforted one another the day following his death. "The family is hugging, huddling and supporting each other through a difficult time. There has been literally hundreds of phone calls from friends, admirers and people all over the world," the sheriff said. Presidential historian Douglas Brinkley, who has been in the midst of archiving Thompson's material for Tulane University, was en route to Aspen on Monday night to set up a media command post for the Thompson family. Over at the Woody Creek Tavern, one of Thompson's favorite haunts, a grubby mix of ex-cons, alcoholics and drug addicts exchanged shots of Chivas Regal and wild stories about their famous neighbor who lived up the road. "I haven't ruled out that this is all part of an elaborate hoax," said Ibbotson, half-jokingly. "There are times when you've had enough of fame." Talk also turned to Thompson's fascination with firearms. He kept an arsenal of weapons in the house and enjoyed experimenting with explosives. On Super Bowl Sunday, a bomb technician from the Pitkin County Sheriff's Office had to be deployed to his home to remove an old, potentially explosive keg of gunpowder. But at the end of the day, all stories led back to Thompson's kitchen. "Dr. Thompson indelibly transformed journalism with his gonzo flair, but we should remember that his best stuff was rooted in reporting and sharp-eyed observation," Walter Isaacson, president and CEO of the Aspen Institute, former managing editor of Time magazine and one-time chairman of CNN, wrote in an e-mail. Like many in the mainstream media, Isaacson had spent time in Thompson's kitchen, where groundbreaking prose flowed as freely as the whiskey and wine. "He sure stomped the earth, but he also knew how to write sentences that, because of their deft embedded clauses and personal riffs, and the way they were juxtaposed with short declarative eruptions, had a syncopated rhythm that delighted the ear," Isaacson wrote. "He was a wonderful talent. The whole gonzo journalism thing and the idea of inserting himself into the story was something he legitimized," agreed Larry Kramer, former Chairman and CEO of MarketWatch, now an executive for Dow Jones. Kramer was executive editor at the San Francisco Examiner during the 1980s when Thompson was a weekly columnist for the paper. "He made the stories more real. He was a larger-than-life character, but it really was him. ... By making it so entertaining, and by making it so outrageous, he captured a very broad constituency. He did it at a time when there was a lot of social activism and he would call a spade a spade -- and go further. He'd say things a lot of people thought, but would never say." Aspen resident Tim Mooney, a former manager for musicians Jimmy Buffet and John Denver, reminisced about his times in the kitchen with The Good Doctor. "The kitchen was the center of the family business. The nourishment was intellectual ideas: sports, gaming, current events, politics, sex, drugs and rock and roll. The family business ran 24 hours a day, eight days a week, and it was as relevant to be as close to the refrigerator and the ice machine and the toaster oven as it was to be next to the phone, next to the typewriter, next to the drawers full of the tools of the lifestyle that were catalogued with the Dewey Thompson Decimal System," said Mooney. "Hunter could watch the front door and the back door at the same time. Nobody could sneak up on him. He could perch himself eye-level with a constant revolving bulletin board full of information. He was constantly re-layering his thoughts and his writing on this bulletin board the size of his piano. ... Hunter had a decorum of politeness that he learned as a Louisville Southern Gentleman. If you talked out of turn, or out of your ass, you would be put in your place. It wasn't because you didn't deserve some slack; it was because it was impolite. The scene was totally controlled by Hunter because he was the one who had the deadline," Mooney said. "Everybody else was there for amusement, either Hunter's or their own."  Hunter, what were you thinking? By Mark Shaw Aspen Daily News Through the years, there was always Hunter Thompson to save the day. When everyone else was parading about life with no sense of what the hell was occurring, you were there to remind us that we needed to question everyone and everything that was happening. Your words shook people up, made them stop and think, wonder, ask questions, ask again, never take no for the answer. You were not afraid to speak your mind, to probe, to investigate and to write with a wonderful gift of words provided to you by God almighty. In the 1970s, I can easily recall you sitting at the Jerome Bar, cigarette holder in hand, debating the important issues of the day. Whether you were stone-cold sober (not a recurring event), drunk out of your mind, or stoned to the gills, people listened to you because they knew you weren't bullshitting them. If you ask Dr. Hunter Thompson a question, you got a straight answer - no fluff, no feel-good. When you ran for sheriff, I voted for you because you were a principled man, one that believed that we had too many rules, too many barriers to human development. "Just let people take care of themselves," was your credo, a strong message to those that wanted to decide for the populous what was right and what was wrong. This was an individual decision, you preached; just leave people alone and they will make the right choices. Were you a pompous ass, unreliable, crude, unreasonable, stubborn, unruly, and a bastard in every sense of the word? Absolutely, but you were also creative, loveable, caring, distinguished, a genius of sorts and a warrior for the downtrodden that never backed down even though criticism came your way from every direction. You just said, "Fuck you," and moved on, certain that you were the one person who could make a difference and you were. When I set up an interview with ABC's Good Morning America as their correspondent in the late 1970s, you agreed to participate and to be at the Jerome at 8 o'clock. That time quickly came and went, and you called at 10 a.m. and said you were on your way. Three hours later, you called and said that you were in your car on Highway 82 headed for Aspen. At 3 a.m., we finally gave up when I turned to a sleepy cameraman and said, "Yeah, that's Hunter; that's just the way he is." When I saw you the next day, it was like the interview mess never occurred. I never said a word about it, and neither did you and our friendship didn't blink. We had a drink and got stoned and started talking about the sorry state of the world, both of us of the opinion that you should run for president and show the big-time politicians what the country really needed. Through the years, your books amazed me. They were written in such a distinctive voice, a rabble-rouser, someone screaming for change and for people to wake up. As an aspiring writer, I read and read and read some more to gain an understanding of that magical talent you had for storytelling. Who knows what was fact or fiction, but it didn't matter. The words jumped off the page like a Bob Dylan song. You made me mad, you entertained me, you shouted at me, you made me stop and think. And you made me a better writer by having had the privilege of reading your fascinating prose. So, why Hunter have you disappointed me, and perhaps millions of others, who always believed that you would be writing and scolding those in power with your dying breath? I have no idea what demons may have infested your brain and soul, or if you were sick with some debilitating disease, but the Hunter Thompson I respected would have fought and fought some more and never have let down his family, his friends, and those who admired him by simply shooting himself in the head. Now, your life and career will be tarnished, at least in one man's mind, by the fact that you decided Hunter was more important than the world that needed you. What a shame.  Hunter S. Thompson: Death of an American Original Muckraker, and a writer for readers; Rolling Stone journalist could live a good story By David Weir The San Francisco Chronicle One afternoon in the late '70s, two of Rolling Stone's star writers, Hunter Thompson and Howard Kohn, met up in downtown Washington, ostensibly to discuss a joint speaking engagement scheduled for later that evening at the University of Maryland. As was typical on these occasions, alcohol was procured and drinking was done, especially by Dr. Thompson. As the afternoon turned to dusk, Kohn, by a considerable margin the more sober of the two, started to express concern as to whether they were going make it to their speaking venue on time. Thompson indicated that he was too busy drinking to worry about time and that Kohn should just go on ahead without him. So Kohn dutifully drove the 15 congested miles out past the Beltway to College Park, Md. As he was walking up to the hall where they were to speak, he worried how he could ever even hope to cover for the infinitely more colorful, entertaining (and famous) Dr. T. Suddenly, out of the sky, a helicopter appeared, setting down noisily on the campus green to discharge a cheerful, if tipsy, Thompson, balancing his latest drink, ready to roll. "How's it goin', Howard?" he called out to Kohn, standing agape amidst a growing crowd of adoring students. Dr. Hunter S. Thompson always knew how to make a grand entrance. He knew how to write a good lead, too. In fact, perhaps the main thing worth remembering about Thompson is what a talented writer he was, and how much care he took in the telling of his stories. Thompson knew about leads, and lively sentences, how to set up his characters, plus a thing or two about plot and action and pacing and drama. He knew how to get up close on the central mystery in his story, whether it was what makes a Hells Angel rev or a senator lie. He covered presidential politics better than anyone else of his day. He had what editors and writing teachers call "voice." In fact, his voice came through so loud and clear that his critics thought it pretty much overwhelmed whatever facts he might have been intending to convey. Maybe that's why in their remembrances this past week so much of the mainstream press has more or less politely dismissed Thompson as the father of the '60's style "new journalism." While true, that doesn't begin to tell his story or describe his place in history. Rather, it seems more accurate to see him as part of a much older strain of reporting, the one Teddy Roosevelt in a famously frustrated moment spat out as "muckraking." The kinds of stories Thompson did were much like those of the early 20th century writers Upton Sinclair, Lincoln Steffens or Ida Tarbell (or even further back -- Mark Twain). Those writers, too, spoke in a fearless, passionate voice, occasionally blended fact with fiction and, like Thompson, refused to bow before the God of objectivity that seems to act as a constraint on so many young journalists today. The muckrakers saw through society's hypocritical veneer and wasted no time sharing their view with us. Far from being "objective," they breathed outrage. At their best, the muckrakers were fair, but they took no prisoners along the way. They never apologized for telling it as they saw it -- which was, in retrospect, proved to be pretty much the way it was. I always liked what the Bay Area's own Jessica Mitford, the "Queen of the Muckrakers," had to say much later in the 20th century. "Objectivity?" she quipped. "Sure, I believe in objectivity. I've always got an objective!" Which describes Hunter Thompson and his story-telling style quite nicely. This grand tradition lives on rather modestly today, more prevalent among bloggers than in the mainstream press. But, as history shows, these things tend to go in cycles, and it would be unwise to consign muckrakers to the margins -- or the past -- of American culture. They may well re-appear again, perhaps some day quite soon in a news outlet near you, as social conditions evolve and new opportunities emerge. Last Sunday evening, when he went into his kitchen, placed his gun to his head and blew out his brains, Hunter Thompson wrote the end to his own story. It was said he asked that his remains be shot out of a cannon. Just as with his leads, this was a man who knew how to write a pretty good kicker.  As his creative collaborator and friend, Ralph Steadman remembers Hunter S Thompson, who has shot himself at the age of 67 The UK Independent Hunter said these words to me many years ago: "I would feel real trapped in this life if I didn't know I could commit suicide at any time." I knew he meant it. It wasn't a case of if, but when. He didn't reckon he would make it beyond 30 anyway, so he lived it all in the fast lane. There was no first, second, third and top gear in the car - just overdrive. He was in a hurry. "Drive your stake into a darkened heart in a red Mercedes-Benz. The blackness hides a speeding tramp. The savage breast pretends. But never mind the nights, my love, because they never really happened anyway." So we wrote in a Beverly Hills house one drunken night. I wrote the stanzas, he wrote the chorus. "Don't write, Ralph," he said, "you'll bring shame on your family." "Those Weird and Twisted Nights." That was the song. On Sunday morning, I had just finished signing the 1,200 title pages for a limited-edition Taschen version of The Curse of LONO, which Hunter had signed so uncharacteristically - obedient and mechanical - over the month of December. I thought that was very strange. He has to be cajoled like a child to do anything like that, so I drew his portrait across the last sheet, glaring out, his two eyes in the two Os of LONO, put the cigarette holder with long Dunhill prodding upwards in his grimacing mouth, signed it with an extra flourish and closed the last of the four boxes. The old bastard! He waited to make sure I had finished the task. Then he signed himself off. I knew it was too good to be true. Now I will be expected to build the monstrous cannon in Woody Creek, a 100ft-high column of steel tubes, with the big red fist on its top and his ashes placed in a fire bomb in its palm. "Two thumbs, Ralph! Don't forget the two thumbs!!" It was the Gonzo fist and he really believes I can do it! Such were his demands as he tipped at his windmills. People were fucking with his beloved Constitution and he was born to banish the geeks who were doing it. In that way he was a real live American. A pioneer, frontiersman, last of the cowboys, even a conservative redneck with a huge and raging mind, taking the easy way out and mythologising himself at the same time. He spent a lot of his early years of rejection writing; verbatim excerpts from Hemingway, Faulkner and Conrad, trying to imagine what it was like to write some classic text. He could be very persuasive. As a boy he was hired by the milkman to collect bills outstanding from the citizens of Louisville, Kentucky, but he was shunned by his neighbours and especially the literary establishment in the town, so he had a score to settle. I had only just arrived in America in late April of 1970, and was staying with a friend in the Hamptons to decompress. I got a call from JC Suares, art editor of Scanlan's Magazine in New York. He said: "How'd ya like to go to the Kentucky Derby with an ex-Hell's Angel who just shaved his head, and cover the race? His name is Hunter S Thompson and he wants an artist to nail the decadent, depraved faces of the local establishment who meet there. He doesn't want a photographer. He wants something weird and we've seen your work." The editor, Don Goddard, had been the New York Times' foreign editor and he thought I was naïve enough to take this on. I was looking for work - so I went. Finding Hunter - or indeed anyone covering the prestigious Kentucky Derby who is not a bona fide registered journalist - was no easy matter, and trying to explain my reasons for being there was even worse, especially as I was under the impression that this was an official trip and I was an accredited press man. Why shouldn't I think that? I assumed that Scanlan's was an established magazine. I had been watching someone chalk racing results on a blackboard while I sipped a beer and I was about to turn and get myself another when a voice like no other I had ever heard cut into my thoughts and sank its teeth into my brain. It was a cross between a slurred karate chop and gritty molasses. "Um-er, you-er wouldn't be from England, er, would you-er? An artist maybe-er -what the ...!" I had turned around and two fierce eyes, firmly socketed inside a bullet-shaped head, were staring at a strange growth I was nurturing on the end of my chin. "Holy shit!" he exclaimed. "They said I was looking for a matted-haired geek with string warts and I guess I've found him." We took a beer together and sat in the press box. Somehow, he had got our accreditation and we were in. He asked me if I gambled and I said only once, in 1952. I put two shillings on Early Mist to win in the 1953 Grand National. And it did. I picked a horse but didn't bet and it won so then I picked another, backed it with a dollar, and lost. "That's why I don't gamble," I said. "I thought you had been picked up," he replied. "Picked up?" I didn't quite understand. "Er, yes, the police here are pretty keen. They tend to take an interest in something different. The, er-um, the beard. Not many of them around these parts. Not these days anyway." I was beginning to take in the whole of the man's appearance, and his was a little different too. Certainly not what I was expecting. No time-worn leather, shining with old sump oil. No manic tattoo across a bare upper arm and, strangely, no hint of menace. This man had an impressive head chiselled from one piece of bone and the top part was covered down to his eyes by a floppy brimmed sun-hat. His top half was draped in a loose-fitting hunting jacket of multicoloured patchwork. He wore seersucker blue pants and the whole torso was pivoted on a pair of huge white plimsolls with a fine red trim around the bulkheads. Damn near six foot six inches of solid bone and meat holding a beaten-up leather bag across his knee and a loaded cigarette holder between the arthritic fingers of his other hand. Arthritis was to plague him all his life, as was the football knee-injury which left him with one leg shorter than the other, but it never truly encumbered his physical rage or his action-packed approach to a deep respect and love of writing - and righteousness. We found the decadent, depraved faces of Louisville by the end of the first week we spent together. They were staring at us from a mirror in the gents' toilet on the in-field, where the rest of the riff-raff, who are not eligible to stand in the privileged boxes of the chosen few, spent their time at the races, just like us. We spent many assignments together, bucking the trend, against the cheats and liars, the bagmen and the cronies; me an alien from the old country and him raging against the coming of the light. "Fuck them, Ralph," he would say, "we are not like the others." Well, he wasn't anyway, but I was easily led. Before Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas we tried to cover the America's Cup yacht race in Rhode Island for Scanlan's (who were just about to go bust and get on to Richard Nixon's blacklist) from a three-masted schooner. There was a rock band on board for distraction; booze and, for Hunter, whatever he was gobbling at the time. I was seasick and Hunter was fine. I asked him what he was taking and he gave me one. It was psilocybin [magic mushroom], a psychedelic hallucinogen, my first and only drug trip apart from Librium. I was the artist from England so I had a job to do. He handed me two spray-paint canisters. "What do I do with these?" "You're the artist, Ralph. Do what you want, but you must do it on the side of one of those multimillion-dollar yachts, moored hardly 50 yards away from where we are." "How about fuck the Pope?" I said, now seeing in my mind red snarling dogs attacking a musician singing at a piano dressed as a nun at a shore-bound bar. "Are you a Catholic, Ralph?" "No," I replied, "it's just the first thing that came to mind." So that was the plan and we made it to the boats and I stood up in the little dinghy with the spray cans and shook them as one does. They made a clicking sound and alerted a guard. "We must flee, Ralph! There'll be pigs everywhere. We have failed." He pulled fiercely on the oars and fell backwards with legs in the air. He righted himself and started rowing again. We made it back to our boat and while I was gabbling insanely, he was writing down all the gibberish that I uttered. I was now a basket case and we had to get back to shore and flee. Hunter shot off two distress flares into the harbour and we hailed a boat just coming in. The flares set fire to one of the boats, causing an emergency fire rescue as we got to dry land. There's more and I won't go on, but I guess that was the genesis of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Such a wild game was possible, but it needed all the genius and application of Hunter S Thompson to make it live. He has done that and he has proved that a redneck Southern gentleman who has the fire in his belly and the indignation in his soul can make it happen. I had the good fortune to meet one of the great originals of American literature. Maybe he is the Mark Twain of the late 20th century. Time will sort the bastard out. I have always known that one day I would know this journey, but yesterday, I did not know that it would be today. I leave it to others more qualified than me to assess and appraise his monumental literary legacy. See also: Fear and loathing at the Book Festival: Ralph Steadman on Gonzo  Remembering Hunter S. Thompson: Gatling guns, loose hogs and editing By David McCumber Seattle Post-Intelligencer The Gizzard of Darkness. Nixon and the Whale Woman. Bad Nerves in Fat City. Doomed Love in the Rockies: Hunter Stockton Thompson was, among other things, a great headline writer. Each of those lines topped one of the columns the inimitable Doctor Thompson wrote in the halcyon days of the San Francisco Examiner, and each of them, for me, is a memory of angst, exhiliration and exhaustion, in roughly that order, from the time when I "edited" Hunter's work. "We are, after all, professionals," he would say, calmly, after having tortured another deadline to the last possible second before the press began to turn. A day after his shocking death, I know those memories will mean more and more as I go about my duties in a Hunterless world. It will be weird, knowing when the phone rings at 4 a.m. that it really is bad news -- good news always waits 'til noon, as they say -- and not Hunter. He used the telephone like a weapon, and usually at an hour when the mortals he associated with, like me, were attempting sleep. It's a good reporting technique, and he used it well that way, too. He had great sources, and he certainly wasn't afraid to use them -- at any hour. Witness the last column he wrote for ESPN.com -- a wee-hours phoner with Bill Murray. Most of the time, he simply wanted to share a laugh. As savvy and skeptical as he was as a journalist, it's easy to forget his almost boyish sense of fun. Sometimes, it meant firing .22 tracers from his hand-crank Gatling gun across the Woody Creek-Lanado Road when he got irritated at the traffic, or blowing an old Jeep pickup into thousands of pieces of flaming shrapnel on his back forty. Sometimes, it meant posing in his hot tub with Mona, an inflatable doll -- the only one of her plastic ilk, I'll bet, who earned a book dedication ("To Mona, who made this outburst possible"). Sometimes, it meant driving crazy-fast through a blizzard with the top down in one of his two ancient red convertibles, negotiating four-wheel skids on icy curves while fiddling absently with the stereo, trying to get the lyrics to the Cowboy Junkies' "Where Are You Tonight?" Or posting crude steel vultures with glowing red eyes at the top of his driveway, or scattering dozens of plastic cockroaches in his refrigerator, or setting a large, live hog loose in a friend's restaurant dining room. At the same time, his accomplishments as a journalist and literary lion were monumental. He will be remembered with the likes of Twain and Mencken -- and should be. Thompson's early work was searing: the seminal book "Hell's Angels," followed by "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas," the drug-soaked epic that made his name and has been adapted twice to the screen. Then came his brilliant journalism in Rolling Stone, including reporting from Vietnam, from Chicago in 1968 and from the campaign trail in the next six presidential elections. Perhaps most memorable of this work, for me, was his endorsement of Jimmy Carter, which was at the same time hard-nosed and hilarious, and probably played a significant role in Carter's election. His analysis of why the Dukakis campaign was in trouble was equally absorbing and prescient. Later, he covered such disparate cultural events as the Super Bowl and the Roxanne Pulitzer divorce trial with the same fluid, inimitable, weirdly eloquent writing style. And the columns -- boy. What a ride. Back in '85, everybody at the Examiner figured Hunter's column would last maybe three weeks before it blew up in a bloody froth of disputes over deadlines, editing and expenses. (One of Hunter's truisms about journalism: "Given money for expenses, anything is possible.") Indeed, he and editor Dave Burgin clashed quickly -- and publisher Will Hearst decided somebody more expendable than the editor of the newspaper should handle Hunter's column, or that's the impression I got when he ominously invited me into his office to discuss being Hunter's new "control." When I said, "sure," Hunter burst out of Will's bathroom, fell to the floor, did 10 pushups, then grabbed two tumblers, filled them with scotch, jammed one into my hand, shook the other hand, and the hog, as he would say, was in the tunnel. He would write the column for five years, three of them with a little help from me, and the best of them would make a book, "Generation of Swine," that sold a quarter-million copies in hardback. Thanks, Hunter, for the past 20 years of friendship -- and for the incredible prose that will forever define the generation that somehow lost its grip on the American Dream. You were, after all, a professional.  As Gonzo in Life as in His Work By Tom Wolfe Opinion Journal Hunter S. Thompson was one of those rare writers who come as advertised. The Addams-family eyebrows in Stephen King's book jacket photos combined with the heeby-jeeby horrors of his stories always made me think of Dracula. When I finally met Mr. King, he was in Miami playing, along with Amy Tan, in a jook-house band called the Remainders. He was Sunshine itself, a laugh and a half, the very picture of innocent fun, a Count Dracula who in real life was Peter Pan. Carl Hiaasen, the genius who has written such zany antic novels as "Striptease," "Sick Puppy," and "Skinny Dip" is in person as intelligent, thoughtful, sober, courteous, even courtly, a Southern gentleman as you could ask for (and I ask for them all the time and never find them). But the gonzo -- Hunter's coinage -- madness of Hunter Thompson's "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" (1971) and his Rolling Stone classics such as "The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved" (1970) was what you got in the flesh too. You didn't have lunch or dinner with Hunter Thompson. You attended an event at mealtime. I had never met Hunter when the book that established him as a literary figure, "The Hell's Angels, a Strange and Terrible Saga," was published in 1967. It was brilliant investigative journalism of the hazardous sort, written in a style and a voice no one had ever seen or heard before. The book revealed that he had been present at a party for the Hell's Angels given by Ken Kesey and his hippie -- at the time the term was not "hippie' but "acid-head" -- commune, the Merry Pranksters. The party would be a key scene in a book I was writing, (The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test). I cold-called Hunter in California, and he generously gave me not only his recollections but also the audiotapes he had recorded at that first famous alliance of the hippies and "outlaw" motorcycle gangs, a strange and terrible saga in itself, culminating in the Rolling Stones band hiring the Angels as security guards for a concert in Altamont, Calif., and the "security guards" beating a spectator to death with pool cues. By way of a thank you for his help, I invited Hunter to lunch the next time he was in New York. It was one bright spring day in 1969. He proved to be one of those tall, rawboned, rangy young men with alarmingly bright eyes, who more than any other sort of human, in my experience, are prone to manic explosions. Hunter didn't so much have a conversation with you as speak in explosive salvos of words on a related subject. We were walking along West 46th Street toward a restaurant, The Brazilian Coffee House, when we passed Goldberg Marine Supply. Hunter stopped, ducked into the store and emerged holding a tiny brown paper bag. A sixth sense, probably activated by the alarming eyes and the six-inch rise and fall of his Adam's apple, told me not to ask what was inside. In the restaurant he kept it on top of the table as we ate. Finally, the fool in me became so curious, he had to go and ask, "What's in the bag, Hunter?" "I've got something in there that would clear out this restaurant in 20 seconds," said Hunter. He began opening the bag. His eyes had rheostated up to 300 watts. "No, never mind," I said. "I believe you! Show me later!" From the bag he produced what looked like a small travel-size can of shaving foam, uncapped the top and pressed down on it. There ensued the most violently brain-piercing sound I had ever heard. It didn't clear out The Brazilian Coffee House. It froze it. The place became so quiet, you could hear an old-fashioned timer clock ticking in the kitchen. Chunks of churasco gaucho remained impaled on forks in mid-air. A bartender mixing a sidecar became a statue holding a shaker with both hands just below his chin. Hunter was slipping the little can back into the paper bag. It was a marine distress signaling device, audible for 20 miles over water. The next time I saw Hunter was in June of 1976 at the Aspen Design Conference in Aspen, Colo. By now Hunter had bought a large farm near Aspen where he seemed to raise mainly vicious dogs and deadly weapons, such as the .357 magnum. He publicized them constantly as a warning to those, Hell's Angels presumably, who had been sending him death threats. I invited him to dinner at a swell restaurant in Aspen and a performance at the Big Tent, where the conference was held. My soon-to-be wife, Sheila, and I gave the waitress our dinner orders. Hunter ordered two banana daiquiris and two banana splits. Once he had finished them off, he summoned the waitress, looped his forefinger in the air and said, "Do it again." Without a moment's hesitation he downed his third and fourth banana daiquiris and his third and fourth banana splits, and departed with a glass of Wild Turkey bourbon in his hand. When we reached the tent, the flap-keepers refused to let him enter with the whiskey. A loud argument broke out. I whispered to Hunter. "Just give me the glass and I'll hold under my jacket and give it back to you inside." That didn't interest him in the slightest. What I failed to realize was that it was not about getting into the tent or drinking whiskey. It was the grand finale of an event, a happening aimed at turning the conventional order of things upside down. By and by we were all ejected from the premises, and Hunter couldn't have been happier. The curtain came down for the evening. In Hunter's scheme of things, there were curtains... and there were curtains. In the summer of 1988 I happened to be at the Edinburgh Festival in Scotland one afternoon when an agitated but otherwise dignified, silver-haired old Scotsman came up to me and said, "I understand you're a friend of the American writer Hunter Thompson." I said yes. "By God -- your Mr. Thompson is supposed to deliver a lecture at the Festival this evening -- and I've just received a telephone call from him saying he's in Kennedy Airport and has run into an old friend. What's wrong with this man? He's run into an old friend? There's no possible way he can get here by this evening!" "Sir," I said, "when you book Hunter Thompson for a lecture, you have to realize it's not actually going to be a lecture. It's an event -- and I'm afraid you've just had yours."  Hunter's life, like his work, was one long barbaric yawp, to use Whitman's term, of the drug-fueled freedom from and mockery of all conventional proprieties that began in the 1960s. In that enterprise Hunter was something entirely new, something unique in our literary history. When I included an excerpt from "The Hell's Angels" in a 1973 anthology called "The New Journalism," he said he wasn't part of anybody's group. He wrote "gonzo." He was sui generis. And that he was. Yet he was also part of a century-old tradition in American letters, the tradition of Mark Twain, Artemus Ward and Petroleum V. Nasby, comic writers who mined the human comedy of a new chapter in the history of the West, namely, the American story, and wrote in a form that was part journalism and part personal memoir admixed with powers of wild invention, and wilder rhetoric inspired by the bizarre exuberance of a young civilization. No one categorization covers this new form unless it is Hunter Thompson's own word, gonzo. If so, in the 19th century Mark Twain was king of all the gonzo-writers. In the 20th century it was Hunter Thompson, whom I would nominate as the century's greatest comic writer in the English language. George McGovern Thanks Gonzo Journo for Calling Him 'Best of a Lousy Lot' Editor&Publisher March 3, 2005  One of the vehicles Hunter S. Thompson rode to fame was the 1972 presidential election, which he immortalized -- not always in a factual manner -- in his classic "Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail."Today, in an op-ed piece for the Los Angeles Times, the antiwar Democratic candidate that year, George McGovern, who lost 49 states to Richard Nixon, thanked the late writer for at least calling him "the best of a lousy lot" in that race. "Thompson's position," McGovern wrote, "was that I was 'honest' -- except for one 'wicked moment' when I attended Nixon's funeral and said a few sympathetic words to his family and friends. 'Yeah,' Hunter told me, 'you went into the tank with that evil bastard.'" McGovern also recalled that Thompson had printed on the jacket of "Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail" a photograph of the two of them with the caption: "Pictured above is George McGovern urging Dr. Hunter S. Thompson to accept the vice presidential nomination." In retrospect, "I wish I had," McGovern concluded. "Perhaps then Hunter and I might both still be alive and well instead of dead and wounded, respectively." Gonzo but not forgotten By George McGovern The Los Angeles Times March 3, 2005 As the candidate who lost 49 states to Richard Nixon in the 1972 presidential election, I have always been pleased that among the precious few who thought I would have made the better president was Hunter S. Thompson, who went to his untimely grave saying that I was "the best of a lousy lot."  Thompson's position was that I was "honest" -- except for one "wicked moment" when I attended Nixon's funeral and said a few sympathetic words to his family and friends. "Yeah," Hunter told me, "you went into the tank with that evil bastard."Hunter relished such frightful words. "Evil," "wicked," "fear and loathing." These were the words that described the world best for him. Once, when he was pressed into the back seat of my car with three other people, he tried to escape to a nearby bar when I slowed for a red light in heavy traffic. Foiled by the baby lock that had been inadvertently clicked on, he raged at me: "Get me out of this evil contraption before I start killing." On the jacket of his now-classic book about the 1972 election, "Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail," he printed a photograph of the two of us with the following caption: "Pictured above is George McGovern urging Dr. Hunter S. Thompson to accept the vice presidential nomination." In retrospect, I wish I had. Perhaps then Hunter and I might both still be alive and well instead of dead and wounded, respectively. It's true, as many have noted in recent days, that Hunter did not devote his energy and talent to the pursuit of factual accuracy. But accuracy isn't everything. Frank Mankiewicz, the political director of my campaign, was right to call Hunter's book "the least accurate and most truthful" of the campaign books that appeared after the 1972 race. Hunter was disheartened after the campaign, and it fell to me on several occasions to try to persuade him not to give up on what he called "this fucked-up country." What I didn't get to tell him was that one of the reasons we should never give up on America is that from time to time, as we have been reminded recently, this country produces a genuine original — a Katharine Hepburn, a Ray Charles, an Arthur Miller, a Johnny Carson, an Ossie Davis, a professor Seymour Melman, or an inaccurate and irreverent and truthful Hunter Thompson.  Hunter Thompson (1939-2005) and the Art of Listening By Al Giordano Narco News Bulletin Two months after Authentic Journalist Gary Webb checked out, an elder statesman of Authentic Journalism does the same: Hunter S. Thompson is dead, and therefore immortal. The grandfather of “gonzo journalism,” he taught us: "Objective journalism is one of the main reasons that American politics has been allowed to be so corrupt for so long." (For those of you scratching your heads asking, “Who was Hunter Thompson?” here’s a link to a Denver Post obituary that is surprisingly comprehensive and fair.) I met Hunter Thompson just once, in 1976 when he was at the height of his fame. He was in New Hampshire covering that year’s presidential race, the first since the publication of his bestseller about the 1972 elections, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail. I expected to meet a flamboyant, loud, and extravagant party animal dancing on the head of the establishment to the rhythm of the frenetic clickety-clack of his manual typewriter keys. To the contrary, as I, starry-eyed, watched him conduct his craft the thing I noticed most of all -- the unexpected thing that elevated his entire concept of journalism for me -- was that he was, above all, a painstakingly attentive listener… Thompson created for himself a public persona of a wild man; a scary, gun-slinger, drug-taker, and irreverent defiler of social norms. I believe to this day that it was mainly a journalistic technique: to throw everyone off their carefully-constructed scripts and then be able to observe – and report – the essence of the characters: the politicians, the reporters, and everyone else he encountered while chronicling what he called “the death of the American dream.” He would hit them with behavior that nobody expected from a journalist, and then sit back, listen to them wail, watch them flail, and tell the tale as it really was – not according to the agreed-upon steps of the American political dance. It was January or February of 1976 – I was a lad of sixteen – in the Concord, New Hampshire office for Oklahoma Senator Fred Harris’ presidential campaign. Harris, with his calls for a “redistribution of wealth and privilege” was decidedly an underdog (he came in fifth in that first-in-the-nation primary). Not a single political reporter took the campaign of “Fightin’ Fred” seriously, and I’m sure that Thompson had no illusions, either, that the country was ready for a political leader who titled his manifesto The New Populism. Thompson walked up the stairs to the second-floor campaign headquarters on a snowbound North Main Street, with a back room where we, a posse of young volunteers, slept on old mattresses or in sleeping bags on the floor after long days of trudging through neighborhoods and towns, knocking on doors, handing out literature, and talking up Harris’ “Take the Rich off Welfare” platform. We had a campaign song that would likely be banned from any U.S. political campaign today: Take the rich off welfare Bust up monopolies Break up the oil and gas crowd Bring the big boys to their knees President Fred Harris His story we will tell We won’t just win the White House But our country back as well… He walked into the crash pad, not announcing his name, and sat down on one of the floor mattresses. He took out his pad and pen, and began asking quiet questions of the volunteers. He was polite, attentive, softspoken… in other words, the antithesis of his public image (that we, in those times, mainly got through his portrayal as a drug-addled “Uncle Duke” in Garry Trudeau’s Doonesbury comic strip that was a mainstay of daily newspapers back then). After an hour or two, one of the other volunteers whispered, “do you know who that is? It’s Hunter Thompson!” There he was: no booze, no guns, not apparently suffering from hallucinations… just a reporter, asking questions, taking notes, letting his sources speak, and evidently listening… and then listening some more. I am guessing that he felt sufficiently at home among this ragtag band of idealist campaign volunteers that he didn’t see a need to bounce off the walls in the grand acts of theater that so many today remember aloud of him conducting in the practice of his craft. Anyway, that’s the Hunter Thompson I remember from one short exposure to the man: a listener… a reporter… And as Hunter said to a public audience on the sad April night, years later, in 1989, when news had spread that Abbie Hoffman had committed suicide: “He lived courageously and he died with his boots on.” While everyone else was gnashing teeth or proclaiming assassination or some such thing, Thompson chose, rather, to simply salute the way the fallen comrade had lived. So before my email box runneth over with emails titled “HUNTER THOMPSON WAS M-U-R-D-E-R-E-D” and the similar nonsense that follows the frequent suicides of great men and women in a society all lathered up in denial that it has already, collectively, died, I’ll offer him the same worthy tribute: Hunter S. Thompson lived courageously… and he died with his boots on. In a meritocracy, his column, in place of being exiled to, of all places, the ESPN sports pages, would have been published in every daily newspaper. But it wasn’t. Those same newspapers are today penning obituaries and eulogies to Thompson’s public persona, and none of them seem to “get” that the joke was on them. But, now that all has been written and done from his outpost in the mountains of Woody Creek, Colorado, I’d like to point out that Hunter S. Thompson was a better listener than all of ‘em – and that is what made him the most unique observer of “the death of the American dream.” The dream is dead inside those borders, and this is especially true of the journalism sweatshop in which he labored. There simply wasn’t a shred of dream left for him to cover. And to those who follow, or wish to follow, in his gigantic footsteps, I’ll repeat: Look south, young Americans. After all, it’s no accident that Thompson himself cut his journalistic teeth as a Caribbean and South American correspondent before returning to the United States in 1963 with the hawk eyes able to observe the absurdity of a land that has forfeited the right to take itself anywhere near as seriously as it does. He killed the king named “objectivity” and created the model of a journalist as a sniper and sharpshooter, rather than a mere obedient foot-soldier of false norms and decayed politesse. And it was Hunter Thompson’s subjectivity – in defiance of the doctrine of journalistic objectivity that some dinosaurs, the walking dead of the profession, still practice – that made him interested enough in his subjects to be able listen authentically… and to therefore be able to observe and chronicle history as it really was and is -- messy, tumultous, and above all, human -- and not merely as the weak-minded control freaks who call themselves "objective" want it to be.  Party's Over by Corey Pein Columbia Journalism Review A famously irresponsible gun owner, The Doctor had plenty of weapons to choose from, and he no doubt put some thought into which one he would use to end his life. The inspired works of Hunter Stockton Thompson may be forgotten, as legions of hacks fight to claim his memory for their side. (And they will, inevitably. They fight over anyone whose words mattered but isn't around to speak for themselves.) Whether it was righteous indignation or simply a superhuman metabolism that fueled his adventures, what made Thompson's writing so powerful was his honesty: About his sometimes-malicious desires, about the self-destructive pandering tendencies of a pseudo-objective press, about the times as he saw them. After the 1972 presidential campaign, which he covered for Rolling Stone as an open advocate for McGovern, Thompson wrote: This may be the year when we finally come face to face with ourselves; finally just lay back and say it -- that we are really just a nation of 220 million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns, and no qualms at all about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable. As for the "profession" -- a word Thompson would have derided -- itself, he was equally ruthless. Here's his capsule description of television news operations (one clipped and saved by more than one talking head): [A] cruel and shallow money trench through the heart of the journalism industry, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free and good men die like dogs, for no good reason. Whatever you think of his opinions, Thompson's honesty is something all writers could stand to emulate -- even inverted-pyramid traditionalists who fear the royal "I," and straight shooters who might look at a man with such a chemical diet and wonder whether he could possibly be human. But for it all, Thompson was, as his partner Ralph Steadman accurately depicted, a man among reptiles. A loaded and freakish and lonely man, but a man still.  Shutting The Door, Painting The Windows Black By Kurt Loder MTV In the 1970s, Hunter Thompson inspired a legion of young journalists to believe that the best way to cover a story was to get tanked to the gills on drugs and alcohol, present oneself in a state of near-psychotic meltdown at the scene of whatever one was covering, and record the affronted and sometimes violent reactions of the people one encountered. Concepts like "facts" and "objectivity" were to be regarded as quaint, if not entirely notional. The author became the story. This was "gonzo journalism." What Thompson himself never felt the need to point out — although other practitioners of what at the time was called the New Journalism, like Tom Wolfe, were quick to note it — was that his gonzo style rested on a foundation of solid journalistic experience. (Although he hadn't actually graduated from high school, Hunter had studied journalism at Columbia University, and he later worked for such publications as Time and the New York Herald Tribune.) Getting loaded didn't make you a journalist; nor did it make you a talented writer (another key requirement of the style). Getting loaded, in the case of most of his many young admirers, simply made them loaded — a time-honored way of avoiding the annoying work of actually sitting down to write the story. Hunter had immersed himself in the California biker culture to write a 1967 book called "Hell's Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs." (Still a good read today.) But his later gonzo style only began to emerge in a 1970 article for Scanlan's Monthly called "The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved." Returning to his home town of Louisville to cover the annual horse race, Thompson had been teamed for the first time with Ralph Steadman, an English illustrator with a spattery, apocalyptic style. "Neither of us had brought any strange illegal drugs," Thompson wrote, "so we would have to get by on booze." Hunter was subsequently assigned by Sports Illustrated to go to Las Vegas and cover something called the Mint 400 motorcycle race. He took along an associate, Oscar Zeta Acosta, a 250-pound Chicano legal-aid lawyer. They rented a car for the trip, and used Hunter's expense money from the magazine to stock its trunk with, as he later wrote, "two bags of grass, 75 pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half full of cocaine, and a whole galaxy of multi-colored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers ... and also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of Budweiser, a pint of raw ether, and two dozen amyls." Sports Illustrated rejected the resulting story, but Hunter kept writing down his feral impressions of the Vegas trip ("Pterodactyls lumbering around the corridors in pools of fresh blood ..."), and he eventually took this material to Rolling Stone magazine — possibly the only outlet where such surreal ravings could have been published at the time. The editors loved what he'd written, and told him to keep going. Then, as he was finishing up the piece, they sent him back to Las Vegas to insert himself into a convocation on narcotics and dangerous drugs organized by the National District Attorneys Association. This seemed like a perfect Thompson event, and indeed it turned out to be. Hunter's very long chronicle of his two Vegas trips — with Thompson billing himself as "Raoul Duke" and Acosta described as his "300-pound Samoan attorney" (much to his later irritation) — was published in two parts in Rolling Stone in November of 1971. It was titled "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream," and it was blazingly illustrated by Steadman in a raw and horrific manner reminiscent of the German expressionist painters George Grosz and Otto Dix. Thompson's writing was exhilaratingly warped and free-associational, and the tone of the piece was unforgettably set in its now-famous first sentence: "We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold." "Fear and Loathing" made Hunter Thompson a star. He went on to gonzify the 1972 presidential campaign for Rolling Stone in a series of dispatches called "Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail." And then ... well |
