Rolling Stone obit for Hunter Thompson is out

[Bossy Monkey]

It's good, it's respectful, it's accurate; not exactly overflowing with either grief or gratitude, but I don't know if the Doc would have wanted either.

Hunter S. Thompson Dies

Famed “RS” contributor takes own life in Colorado

Hunter S. Thompson, the dean of gonzo journalism and a longtime contributor to Rolling Stone, died Sunday in his Colorado home of an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound. He was sixty-seven.

Thompson gave the phrase "fear and loathing" its cultural relevancy, writing the darkly comic altered-states novel Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and the maniacal political reportage of Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72.

His first book, Hell's Angels, published in 1966, was an inside look at the notorious biker gang. For his efforts, Thompson got himself roughed up by some of the gang's members. From then on, however, it was Thompson who did the roughing up, with words that he wielded like weapons. His political coverage was famously irreverent, often to the brink of viciousness. In a recent piece for Rolling Stone on the 2004 presidential campaign, he called George Bush a "treacherous little freak." To Thompson -- who once threatened to run for the presidency himself and narrowly lost an election in 1970 for sheriff of the Aspen area, running on the Freak Power Party ticket -- politics was a blood sport, and American politicians, so prone to corruption, were only too deserving of contempt. Observing President Bush's poor performance in a debate with "my man" John Kerry, he wrote for the magazine, "I almost felt sorry for him, until I heard someone call him 'Mister President,' and then I felt ashamed."

Reclusive and often unintelligible in conversation, Thompson had a persona that was ripe for caricature. Both Bill Murray and Johnny Depp portrayed him in feature films (Murray in Where the Buffalo Roam, Depp in the film adaptation of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas). He was also Garry Trudeau's inspiration for Uncle Duke, the loose cannon of the Doonesbury comic strip. Thompson's incorrigible behavior, his mumbling incoherence, his fishing hats, aviator frames and cigarette holders all made for a larger-than-life presence. He was a hardboiled writer of the old Hemingway school, terse and piercing, enamored of guns. Yet he will be forever associated with the counterculture of the hippie era for his ruthless dogging of the Nixon administration and his gleeful experimentation with psychedelic drugs, two subjects which he often wrote about in tandem.

(more)
http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/_/id/7045227?pageid=rs.NewsArchive&pageregion=mainRegion&rnd=1109044300570&has-player=false

Hopefully the link will work; if not, it's not exactly the toughest Google search.

[Fenris]

1. This amused me.

Thompson's first pitch for Rolling Stone was similarly the stuff of legend. A staffer later recalled the writer drinking a six-pack, playing with his wig and ranting non-stop for an hour with publisher Jann Wenner, who was sufficiently overwhelmed to hire him.

[two gun sid]

2. Thanks for the link. I looked at RS earlier for an obit but, ...

it wasn't up yet.

[saltpoint]

3. I owe thanks to Dr. Thompson for his ballsy prose --

-- and his gonzo captioning of the Nixon years particularly.

And as for descriptions of Dubya, "treacherous little freak" works for me.

My cousin put FEAR AND LOATHING IN LAS VEGAS in my hands as I got on a plane from Indianapolis to NYC years ago. I had no idea what the book was about or who Hunter Thompson was.

It was evidently a business flight, leaving after 5:30 or so, and the seats were filled with gray-suited business people with calculators and Wall Street Journals in their laps.

I started laughing as the pages went on, then laughing harder, and harder still at the outrageous shit going on in that book, until pretty soon the business people were discernibly alarmed at my condition.

Eventually it was difficult to breathe through the hard, deep laughter. I was gasping I was laughing so hard. Tears were rolling down my face and finally I had to put the book up or go to pieces altogether.

When the plane deboarded at LaGuardia, the other passengers made a strenous effort not to make eye contact with me.

[Kat45]

4. That book made the rounds of my friends in college.

It was the seventies, and we were stoners. One of my friends bought the book, then after he read it he passed it on to someone else, and so on and so on until it made the rounds of our whole group. We loved that book. The book was mentioned in the movie "Outside Providence," which was about a group of stoners in high school in the seventies. That movie brought back a lot of seventies memories for me, as it made good use of little 'icons' from the stoner culture of the time.

[saltpoint]

5. Good for you guys to pass it around like that.

That's the sort of book you do that with, too. God, it was funny.