Okay, now you still want to get your name in magazines you want 500 dollars a month
What is it come from we work one gig this month?
And now so what do we get?
$200 for this gig up here if we're lucky if we're lucky we'll get 200 and it'll be two weeks before we get it
Probably I mean after all
What is all this shit in the newspaper?
We've got such a big name. How come we're a good starving man?
This we're a good fan of starving
They've been best starving for three years. I realize it takes a long time
But goddamn does it take another five ten years from now?
There's some months when you're not gonna work as much as other months
There's some months when you're gonna make a lot of money and if you average it out
You do make more than two hundred dollars a month
Expenses sure I do
We'd all been living in California. It would have been different. It's all been living in California
You wouldn't work at all. That's true. Well, we're not working in now anyway
Well, we're one gig this month Frank
What's wrong with getting two months in the role of this good money?
Are three months in the role then we can afford to take three or four months off and everybody can
After the first month I can get just enough ahead
But if I had two more months, man, I'll get ahead
Because I'm not living very extravagant. I'll tell you for sure
This is KZSU
Santa at the Western edge of the Western world where the sun goes under and things are different
If we'd all been living in California working for Frank Zappa, we'd all be starving
If you average it out it comes to more than two hundred dollars a month
Come on Frank you can do better than that
Starvation wages not withstanding
I'll take the mothers of invention over the gluttonous silicon valley any day
Better uncle meat than the Facebook boys or our California musketeers
Did I say our California musketeers? I meant our Tesla Souserans
[Music]
8-2-Cool
[Music]
To all you members of the lean brigade welcome back to entitled opinions no starving ban members here
But an ongoing feast
Today I'm back in the studio of KZSU with writer and journalist Scott Thomas Anderson
Three months ago on January 18th to be exact we aired a show with Scott on California writers
Where we focused on a few 19th century figures among them Ambrose Beers John Raulin Ridge and A. May Crocker
We promised to follow that show up with California writers part two and here we are ready to go
Before we get started a quick reminder that Scott Anderson has been writing and producing a documentary podcast series called
Drinkers with writing problems
Which explores the connection between drinking cultures and creative literary legacies
Season one includes episodes written and recorded in Ireland, Scotland, Spain, New Orleans and Hollywood
Season two premiered this past January and featured some California writers
The documentary series is available on most podcast platforms
Really great stuff well worth tuning into Scott Thomas Anderson welcome back to entitled opinions
To be back
So in my introduction to our previous show I mentioned in passing Frank Zappa's line about if we'd all been living in California
And a few listeners wrote in wanting to know where the quote came from
So I thought I would start today by playing that clip
It's actually an exchange between Zappa and one of his band members that by chance was caught on tape in the recording studio
And typical Frank Zappa Zappa included it on his album uncle meat anyway. Thanks for bearing with me there
Multum in pyrovo there is much in little that Latin phrase applies to our show today because instead of talking about a slew of 20th century
California writers which we could have done
We've decided like last time to limit ourselves to three maybe four of them
And they're not the most well-known names by any means
We're gonna start with the poet Robinson Jeffers then move on to the novelist Oakley Hall
And then on to the Gonzo journalist Hunter S Thompson
They're very interesting writers and characters and you've written profiles of all three of them for the San Francisco Chronicle
So let's get going with Robinson Jeffers
Many if not most of our listeners have probably never heard of him
So could you tell us who Jeffers was and why in your entitled opinion? He is such a significant literary figure
I think Jeffers
He is a poet who died in 1960 who seems to
He seems to be made for the moment we're in right now in terms of
This prophetic view he had of where we were going with the natural world and the kind of
Jeopardy and danger we would ultimately end up in through
The kind of hubris that's that's natural to our species I guess and so Jeffers was
He was born in Pennsylvania in 1887
He'd come out to California just after the turn of the century
to study
medicine and forestry and I think that's very
significant in how he
Ultimately developed creatively and his approach to nature writing
Because he becomes arguably
one of the most important nature writers in the history of the American west coast if not the if not the nation
in around 1918
He wrote about the time he had decided he really didn't want to do forestry full-time
He didn't want to also didn't want to be a doctor these were careers that he had thought long and hard about and had a lot of training for
But he ultimately felt the call of poetry and literature and so in 1918 he moved to Carmel
California and for your listeners that don't know in 1918 it was just a tiny hamlet along the big sir coastline
It's not a terribly bigger today, but it's certainly certainly more developed and more people living there
It is a very small town when he moved there in 1918
And he bought a piece of property with his wife, Una, on on a bluff overlooking the Pacific coast and
This sort of bluff that overlooked the waves crashing against the rocks below very majestic view that he had and he
Over time started
both writing poetry about
The landscape and the wilderness that he observed all around him in the in the big sir
area of the coastline
And also he was at the same time he was slowly by hand building a house and a tower out of stones
And ultimately he built
This this place today we call tor house and hawk tower and I
It's very difficult to describe to someone who hasn't seen it. It's this very evocative
Strange-looking house and tower that's built out of rocks and stones that
That came from all over the world people who would visit him and bring him stones from all over the globe a lot of obviously a lot of the rocks and stones came from the
Natural landscape where he was living
And he started writing poems
That we would essentially call nature poems
It's been argued by writers like Dana Joya that
Jeffers is the most important
Nature writer in American history
You know more so than people like Robert Frost because he could channel
His observations and experience into his lines in a very powerful way without making himself
making the poet making
humanity
The center of what was happening in the poem
And so it's a much more
Pure raw connection to the natural experience. It's not
It's striving to not project the the human lens on it so much and
Understand it for what it is
So he established a pretty wide audience and became very well known
but then
Sort of in his middle the middle period of his life
He he had two sons. He was very close to and that were young men when World War II
started and in Jeffers was very much against the war
and he wrote a poetry collection called the double axe
that really really hurt his reputation and in terms of
there was a
Sort of a patriotic fervor going on in the country at the time and the double axe was
very much against the war
Some people read into it that it was somehow dismissive or apologetic for
What the what fascist forces were doing in other parts of the world
But it was more it was more just an anti-war
Piece of literature and with a lot of concerns about
Maybe the benefits of isolation from world conflict
But in the moment it did not go over very well and it absolutely sort of destroyed his
professional reputation for
years if not decades
The other reason people may not have heard of Jeffers is there's been kind of a
In some corners of critical circles in academia there's been sort of a concerted effort to dismiss and forget him
He's there he's certainly never been popular with certain quarters of the critical establishment and the academic establishment
Because he takes such a different tact
on
nature writing then
Virtually almost any other nature
Writer or poet or novelist that you would think of so there's the problem of how you fit him into
canonical thinking and then there's also the problem of what for you know group think in terms of what's good and if you have one writer who's just
so far off course and charting his own path to that degree then then maybe he doesn't get the attention
One would think he would get
But he became an incredible influence on a lot of important writers
So even though his name
began to fade a bit after the 1940s he would have been a very well-known writer between the 1920s and the 1940s
And then after the because of what happened in World War II and the fallout from that his his name did start to recede
He did get a lot less attention for himself and his work
But at that same time he was becoming profoundly influential on
a whole host of important people
To start with the famous mythologist Joseph Campbell was a big fan of Jeffers work
John Steinbeck was living just down the road from him when he was a young writer starting out John Steinbeck
was living over in
Pacific Grove not far from where Jeffers wasn't Carmel and discovered his work and really admired it
I believe he went and visited him once but was that sort of
Kind of admiring from a from a close distance he but he thought he was amazing and so did Steinbeck's famous
Biologist friend Doc Rickets they both thought Jeffers writing was incredible and they loved his
His approach to nature and the wilderness and the wild and the sea
The groundbreaking photographer Ansel Adams was in a sense a disciple of Jeffers
He he often said he was trying to do with photography what what Jeffers did with poetry
later down down the road
Jeffers influenced
More contemporary writers that your listeners would know today some of whom they might guess like the poet
Gary Schneider or the poet Dana Joya these are
Hugely influenced by Jeffers
But also Charles Bekowski I would always say Jeffers was one of his favorite writers when that was a surprise to me
I wouldn't have assumed that connection
so his creative atoms are sort of
Spread out everywhere
And the other thing I think is just absolutely fascinating about him is in 1960 before he died
He wrote one of his last poems was a vision of the polar ice caps melting and swallowing all the coastal cities
And and sort of entombing them in mausoleums of ocean life again
And the reason that's interesting to me is the term global warming didn't exist in 1960 one part of the popular neck
Lexicon until the mid 80s climate change was not well understood in 1960s and yet Jeffers connection to
nature seems to have been so
In so mysterious and profound and ways that are hard to understand that he could he could see it before
Definitely before other writers. He could see it all all ahead of them. Yeah, so in terms of his style
I can understand I mean understand is the wrong word, but I can see why
He was never a popular academic
poet I mean a poet for the
Academic because he's not a modernist in any classical sense of modernist poetry as you said, you know the whole realm of subjectivity is
Taken out as much as he could
From the poems and yet there is nothing conservative about the verse that you read he is
The idiom is distinctly modern it's not sentimentalizing poetry at all and it's very hard to categorize and this
Attempt to allow the object to become the center of you know the poetry is
Sometimes there's not a lot academics can do with this kind of poetry because it doesn't lend itself to elaborate explanations and
Let me show you how
What you haven't seen in this poem all those things that are hidden and that the professor ends up looking very brilliant when he
first she
illuminates all the
Subtexts and invocations and metaphor anyway, would you consider him a
Did he have a mystical temperament because if he did it doesn't really come through in his poetry in the at least the typical genre of
mysticism where you have this
Very palpable longing for the infinite or the the transcendent my impression and I have read Jeffers
A couple of his books of poetry my impression is that he is very much attuned to the specific
Surroundings in which he finds himself. Yeah, I would agree with that. I think whatever
Mystical wonders exist in the universe for Jeffers are right in front of you if you're if your eyes are open and if you're listening and if you're your senses or
Sort of alive to what's around you one thing I would I would ask you about from the academic perspective is do you think the overarching themes of his
poems are part of why he's
not of interest because I you know he a couple times in his career
I believe I believe he referred to himself this way
Definitely the term cropped up around him whether it started with him or not
But I think it started with him was he called himself an anti-humanist and
By that he meant that he just did not think humanity had to be at the center of not only the universe
But but the natural cycles of the world and and if you have any friends that are you know
Biologists or physicists. I mean that's that's just a given and but within the humanities it's
So again, it's it's hard for
the academic humanities to have a lot of work to do with with someone for whom
Humanity is not at the center of the story
He that view of his also led him to be accused by some critics as being a mis and trope. There's a line in hurt
Hawks where
He says I would sooner kill a man than a hawk and
Lines like that have
caused some to
very much like Mark Twain in his later years
This this idea has
has grown up that that Jeffers was a bit of a mis and throw and
Actually think the arguments holds more water with Twain in his later years than Jeffers
But I don't agree that either of them work. I just don't personally believe anybody would go through all the
Emotional and psychic labor of writing if they were truly a mis and throw what what would be the point
What are your thoughts on that well my thoughts are that it's very difficult for nature poets
genuine nature poets to it get a
Much of a hearing in academic humanities for some reason
The Academy is it's almost you feel like people have distance themselves and put nature as far away from you know
The horizon of consciousness. I've done a show on the poet AR Ammons
Who is the in my view you know if Jeffers is the great nature poet of the pre-war period?
I think ammons is the great American nature poet of the post-war period and
very modern very you know
Brilliant politically and yet it's hard for
Him to get any kind of traction among academics because academics are much more at home in the urban world and with urban the urban psyche
and
So it's a hard sell and it doesn't necessarily have to do with
Jeffers being a mis and throw or perceived as a mis and throw, but I just think
And it's surprising because eco criticism is a huge sector of the literary humanities nowadays
not only literary and you would think that Jeffers would be rediscovered big-time, but I
don't know maybe
You would know better than me whether there was a perception of his political leanings that might play into
You know, he was I think he was viewed as a political contrarian
For the most part, but it's a very simplistic way to look at him
But I do think that's the treatment he got at the time as a as being a
an out-of-touch political contrarian not understanding the threat that the axis powers posed to the freedom of the world and
I understand that entirely why that would be perplexing at the time giving what was happening
But it was just his it was just his view in prison that
No country should be contributing to the conflict
and that
That would just lead to more death and destruction and possibly the end of the planet and of course now we're all thinking about those questions again this year
But he's a he's a very interesting writer and he's very attuned to
Some writers who came before him such as words were he's he's also very similar to some writers who came just after him or had a little crossover with him
but
yeah, he when you talk to
Some of our great poets that are in California today such as Dana Joya or Gary Snyder
I mean, it's it's his influence is just incredible. So we want to
move on because we have another two writers to cover in our in our show and and
We're just gonna have to encourage our listeners to go and read Jeffers on their own and see what they make of him
Is there one particular volume or a title or or things that you would recommend I would just go to poetry dot org
And they have a lot of his his very straightforward
But beautiful and intriguing nature poems are on there. So hurt hawk
Carmel point these are they're not long poems either that you can
read them very quickly
but
You know and definitely the flavor of California that that coast they
For your listeners who have not been to the Monterey
Carmel area, you know, it enjoyed that particular area enjoyed two incredible writers between Jeffers and John Steinbeck both being based there and
between Jeffers poetry, which is
so
Sort of intensely focused on the landscape and the wildlife and then Steinbeck which is sort of how to
communities in that area of an all-social strata interact with that
Those landscapes and wildlife that Jeffers is writing about between the two writers you you can get a sense of just one an
incredibly beautiful
part of the world that it is
So that's a kind of bio regional dimension that we
Keep in mind
Now we're staying within the same general bio regional area when we move on to Oakley Hall who
Was a more of a San Francisco based eventually
Not a poet a novelist as well as an essayist and
Why did you choose Oakley Hall in this reduced canon of our three three writers?
To start with full disclosure. He's one of my favorite novelists
But also because some of our greatest known
Novelists working today in California the the novelists we have that are that have readers all over the world
sort of agree that he is
Vasley under appreciated and that he is like Jeffers a massive influence on on the California literary voice of the second half of the 20th century
so Oakley Hall was a
actually directly a teacher of
Michael Cheban
Louis B. Jones
Amy Tan
Richard Ford so
very well-known and highly esteemed California writers actually
Oakley Hall taught them and they all seemed to have walked away with
Believing that that was critical and pivotal to their development as writers so there there's this influence to start with
But I probably would focus just more on the fact that he was a great novelist
so he's born in southern California in the San Diego area and
You know, I believe in the 20s so
By the time World War two happened he was a teenager and he you know like almost all young men his age
He went into the war and he served in the war as soon as the war was over
He got married and he moved to San Francisco and he started working towards his career as a novelist his first couple novels were sort of
contemporary fictions pretty straightforward
But very well written books just about sort of life and development in life
But then he began trying his hand in different forms of genre writing and this is another interesting thing that might be
We're talking about like it is there is a question with some of his pupils his students his disciples about whether
That is why he's not better remembered or better appreciated by the critical establishment is because so much of his great accomplishments as a writer
We're in genre fiction western westerns and crime novels
He's I mean for my money. He's one of the best western
Novelists ever along with the Cormac McCarthy
So to those are my who I think are the two best that I've read
I know there's some other good ones
But I mean I think those the two of them are sort of at the top of that heap
But he wrote yeah, he wrote crime stories. He wrote Westerns
He wrote historical fiction everything from sort of story sent me in the Aztec Empire to you know
The conquistadors he he just tried imagining stories and a lot of different types of settings
But he was very invested in
solid well-functioning plots
And that's where
So like Michael shape on who's one of the peeled surprise and the various steam writer and Sanford in the Bay Area right now
I mean he told me in an interview that that's what that was the main thing he learned from Oakley Hall
And he learned it in the first couple weeks. He was being taught by him was the value of plot and
If you look at the book Michael shape on wrote that one of the Pulitzer the amazing adventures of Cavalier and Clay that book has a
Phenomenal plot to it so you know those things are related
In a sense because shape on told me before before he really studied under Oakley Hall
He was just much more invested in an entirely character driven stories
I think he was it just you know young writer just sort of being influenced by whatever he picked up
But it wasn't until he was taught by Oakley Hall like what an amazing device a plot can be to get readers invested in a story
Louis B. Jones told me that Oakley's writing style his fine prose style was you know something that always stayed with him
Amy Tan has written some essays about what Oakley sort of the way he built her confidence up and gave her the fortitude to believe
She could do it and so you'll hear these all these great writers have their own little thing they took from encountering him
But yeah, so in 1959 and novel he wrote called warlock was a finalist for the Pulitzer and it didn't win
I can't remember
What won that year, but it's hard for me to wrap my mind around because that's probably one of my favorite novels of all time
Warlock in fact, it's I think they the year after it was published. It was a pretty well-known movie that came out with Richard
Windmark and some other Henry Fonda. I don't yeah, so a lot of people know warlock when
The older generation from from the movie he was a mentor to a
bunch of young students you mentioned some of them, but he also had a community of writers that they would meet once a month
They was it was it that I want every few times a season up in
Olympic Valley up in the Sierra's and so he founded the he was the co-founder of the community of writers
Which is a right to the exist to this day. It's a very influential
Writers retreat that happens up in the high Sierra mountains between California, Nevada in the in the Olympic Valley also known to squad Valley
the other thing
To be mentioned maybe is because we spoke about Ambrose Ambrose beers in our first show is that he was very taken with
Ambrose beer himself and he wrote a few books that were kind of fictional accounts of real events and
and and like
beers he was extremely
committed to the denunciation of corruption and
You know the robber barons and and all that kind of
You know that wild west story of of power
imposing itself on the powerless, no yeah
one reason I was able to write such an
Sort of in-depth profile of Oakley Hallford and San Francisco Chronicle was because
so many people in his circle are still with us
And but also because Oakley's house where he wrote all these amazing works of literature a
beautiful old Victorian that survived the Great earthquake one of the only buildings that survived the Great earthquake on
on on that particular
Hill in San Francisco and and pieces of Ambrose beer says world that Oakley could see and walk through when he lived in San Francisco
Or still there so there was this was an interesting story to write for the Chronicle because not only did I have access to Oakley's
entire family and all of his famous students, but I could go to this
amazing house on Mcondrey Lane where he created all these magical books and
I could see from his deck the vantage point of all these amazing
historical structures and from San Francisco's
Bygone era that that he could see from his deck and that he looked at every morning as he was writing and that's very important
When we get to that series of books he wrote about Ambrose beers
So Oakley Hall towards it was in the much it was in the later part of his career, but he began writing a mystery a historical
fiction
Mystery series in which his lead detective was Ambrose beers
Ambrose beer is the investigative reporter slash newspaper man and he
Oakley used a bunch of historical things that had happened in San Francisco at the time
For his plots things that had happened around beer as a journalist and he would then use the character of beer as a journalist to sort of unravel
These mysteries the way a mystery works of not only did he write crime genre and in Western genre
But towards end of his life he got very skillful at the mystery genre and that was through these Ambrose beer snawls
there
especially the first two are
brilliantly written
There are a lot of fun to read and the research that he did was so meticulous and both his daughter said I'm
Even some of his students said he had the he built the most incredible
Home library for California history one could imagine and he just really at that point in his life loved doing the research
He was just obsessed with California history so the research was very fun to him too as he was writing these books
So apart from warlock you would you recommend in this number two slot maybe one of the
Beer's novels no in the number two slot. I would recommend the work the Western he wrote immediately after a warlock or not long after a warlock called
The Badlands Badlands is goddamn fantastic and
It's just like warlock. I it's
It's unbelievable that it's not better known and more red and that it's so under appreciated
But I mean I see warlock as a masterpiece and I see Badlands as a near masterpiece. They're both so good and but I do recommend
If people want some shorter novels that are faster to read if you know if they want something that's a little
Funner and upbeat then yeah, I would say the the first two or three Ambrose beer snawls are all like a lot of fun to read
I don't know what to make of the fact that you know Jerry Garcia
The first name of the Grateful Dead was warlocks, you know before I don't know if it was inspired by Oakley Hall
I always assumed that it was but we do you know there was a western rock band that named themselves Oakley Hall
Oh, no, I didn't know yes and and
Believe in the 90s is when they were playing all over the country and they they called themselves Oakley Hall
Because they loved warlock so much. Yeah, I believe I believe they he did he met them
They when they played in San Francisco and he was invited to their show and he and some family members went and got to meet them and
I wanted his daughters told me it was kind of funny because it was
He he listened to like classical music and opera and jazz. So this was
Musically it was not his scene, but he did really appreciate
The nod to him that they done by naming themselves. So I think he did have a pretty good time when he went and met them
I'm sure well, I don't know if if the warlocks for
If the dead were inspired by Oakley Hall, they probably would have had contact with them and it would be on record
So I don't know what to make that I'm not sure about that but certainly they were in San Francisco in the same time. Yes, for sure
So Scott we we want to talk about
Hunter S Thompson as well because he's a fascinating character now. We're moving in a bit
closer to our time I guess and
Thompson's well known as being
the originator of this so-called Gonzo journalism
first
How would you define Gonzo journalism and then we will talk about Thompson himself. I would define it as a
very
extreme
unorthodox
uncontained form of journalism that
requires one putting themselves
in the dead center of the action
typically not very faithful to
factual reporting or
Or a well-sourced details not like your journalism another right well
You know
the one
Reason people gravitated towards Gonzo journalism or we'll say hunters style of Gonzo journalism is because
even though it's
Using a lot of invention even though it's it's this
You know oftentimes there's sort of no proof at all that parts of the narrative happened if someone were to try to fact-check it or
Sometimes there's a bit of a trolling effect on purpose to it or you know
Kind of intentionally gaslighting the reader for fun now Thompson's not the first
Writer to come through California to do those things that would have been the young Mark Twain did all those things as a journalist
But back when Twain did it, you know, this is the time when
There's just no way to fact-check anything or know what's true
What's not true that you're reading and it was just a lot easier to write something that totally off the wall and crazy that has a lot of
Invention mixed in with a lot of fact and just get away with it a particularly if it's the whole point of the thing is to play an elaborate
prank on a community, which is what Twain like doing so
But but the Tom Thompson's around it's a whole different world, but I
Think the reason his form of Gonzo journalism resonated so well at the time and has continued to have a deep abiding
Fan base is because for all the invention for all that for all the sort of Jedi
Mind tricks that are involved in it. There's an it often gets at an essential truth
In a way that standard mainstream codified writing at the moment is not doing
So you would call him primarily a journalist I
Would call
There's one of his biographers called him an outlaw journalist. I think that's maybe a handy term. I would say he was a
literary journalist who took a
Great deal of license in it while carrying out that work very well known for two books in particular. Yeah
the first one being his
book on the Hells Angels
Yeah, well, let me just get the let me probably get in full disclosure for your listeners
I'm in the middle of doing a podcast documentary on Hunter S. Thompson's time in the California Bay area
And so I'm interviewing a bunch of people right now who knew him and encountered him and some
very immersed in Hunter's life in
Sort of
between San Francisco and Berkeley
between
1965 and
1974 is what I'm really focused on right now and fortunately there's a lot of people around who
Had encounters with him or who worked with him that are still living in the area and then have you know pretty vivid memories of all that
So Hunter got to San Francisco around
1965
He was a regular freelance reporter for a newspaper at the time called the National Review
Excuse me the National Observer so and he was a really at that time
He was a young journalist. He was a really talented skillful writer
He pretty much wrote in a mainstream fashion with literary flourishes and it's it's very good work
It's very solid and it's very readable today
So when he arrived in San Francisco
He was because of the student protests that have started happening in a Berkeley and because of the counterculture movement that was beginning in San Francisco
He just thought it was a ideal place to be positioned as a freelance reporter to sell stories to national magazines
He just he thought this was one of the places where the action was so he wanted to be on the ground
So he could get the best stories if anyone has ever tried to make their living as a freelance journalist
It's it's all about constantly trying to sell ideas to different editors
So he just that's what originally brought him here
Wasn't going terribly well at first and then
The nation which was pretty new at the time the nation magazine asked him to do
Profile of the Hells Angels motorcycle club
now
The California Attorney General's office that year had released
A report called the Lynch report
That was portraying the Hells Angels as public enemy number one in the state of California
It accused them of a slew of terrible crimes all up and down the state
Without signing a lot of details or evidence to back it up by the way
But this damning report had been issued the Lynch report about the Hells Angels
And so that got the media's attention
Couple national newspaper sent reporters down but those reporters couldn't get anywhere near the Hells Angels
So they just what they ended up writing was not very interesting. It was regurgitation essentially of the Lynch report
The nation asked Hunter
Knowing that he
How desperate he was to make you know a living and and I think probably knew by that time
I'd heard from the national observer that Hunter was
Had a little bit of craziness to him in terms of his fear factor
They asked him to try to write a profile of the Hells Angels
At the time the San Francisco Chronicle had a police reporter named Bernie Jarvis who had been a member of the Hells Angels
So Hunter knew Bernie Jarvis
Bernie Jarvis helped Hunter actually track the Hells Angels the San Francisco chapter of the Hells Angels down
And he ended up meeting them one night at a place called the DePah Hotel which
Best I can tell in all my research was somewhere around the central industrial waterfront near Hunter's point
And it doesn't exist anymore
But he spent an entire night drinking with the Hells Angels
He told them he was going to write a story about them no matter what so and he basically said you have nothing to lose
By cooperating with me because if you don't cooperate
Me my story will be just as mediocre as the last two that came out
But if you cooperate with me, I'll I'll be fair and I'll try to you know
I'm gonna write what I'm gonna write but I'll I'll try to come at it for more fair perspective
So I think it was simply the fact that he was he could drink so much that impressed them
They just spent some hours and hours drinking cheap beer and wine together
And at one point Hunter took five of them back to his apartment where his new wife and baby were and was showing them
His guns Hunter was already a gun not at the time which might have endeared him a little more to them
And they could see he was not at what they would call the square
He was not someone like them but he was also not a square
He was something to them that was just different. He was just kind of his own thing
He wrote that piece for the nation. It got a lot of attention
All over the country got a big readership and he was immediately offered a book deal to do a nonfiction
journalistic book about the Hells Angels
What the actual agreement was initially with them is really been disputed over the years
But some kind of agreement was reached where Hunter could be for lack of a better term embedded with them for about a year
So a lot of the time he was following them in a rambler like as they'd go on these rides all over the up and down
California, but he eventually got his own hardly too and would ride alongside them
He followed them for roughly a year and then he wrote his book about them
The book was a blockbuster hit
Really really well received critically
So I think today like
The critical establishment doesn't consider it a hundred percent Gonzo so to speak, but it really showed
the most
Sort of flamboyant over the top but well executed style of riding Hunter was capable of
I think it's probably better written in a lot of respects than what would later be called Gonzo
Because he still had a foot in that other world of he had one foot in the world of sort of mainstream writing and the one foot in the world of
Rebel outlaw writing for lack of a better word when it came to literary journalism. So that book is a nice
A amalgam of those two things
So that was his first big hit
The Hells Angels didn't like the book so much and he had tensions and problems with them for several years after that
But it did
did serve its purpose in making him a national you know and writer. Yeah
Amazing chapter of his life in writing
And of course the title that he's probably even better known for is fear and loathing in Las Vegas
Yeah, that he was kind of away from the Bay Area when he wrote that book
But that book got the attention and was published by Rolling Stones
Rolling Stones that had not been around very long. They just started a book division
So they published his man. They'd read Hells Angels
Young winners and and his team had read Hells Angels really loved that book
So they ended up publishing fear and loathing in Las Vegas
Then in serial form
And then they got this idea
To have Hunter be their political reporter for the upcoming presidential campaign
And that's a I would see that book
Which ultimately came became known as fear and loathing on the campaign trail is of a book that's in even though he
Travel all over the country to write it and was in Washington DC a lot
It's a book that's intimately tied to the California Bay Area because he was working for Rolling Stones
He was checking in with Rolling Stones constantly in San Francisco
And then he finished writing the book in the city of San Francisco while he was staying at the seal rock
over by Sutton's point
and so
In fact, it's a really interesting story. He did not know how to finish the book and he just ended up going on a long
isolated drinking binge at the seal rock in and was not
Delivering the manuscript to Rolling Stones and they were coming up against their deadline to publish the book
Ultimately, their book editor Alan Rinsler had to go over to the seal rock
And risk Hunter beating him up basically and just talk him into and help him finish the book and Alan actually played a huge role in that book
Getting the final chapter finished and getting the publication
I
Will confess that I've not read him. I haven't read the Hells Angels book nor the fear and loading but
If I had to start with one or the other which one would you recommend
Somewhat depend on how interested you interested you are in crime or politics because the Hells Angels book isn't so much about crime
It's about social ideas about crime
And what constitutes social threats
So it's it's someone in the crime genre
Even though there's not a lot of actual crime reported in it
It's but it's very much about who the public views as criminals and whether whether or why they do that so it's very interesting
It's sociological kind of study in a lot of ways. I think in my Chronicle piece. I called it outlaw ethnography
So that's one way to think about Hells Angels
Where if you're somebody who is really into politics or political history then fear and loading in the campaign trail might be
More interesting that has some of his famous most famous passages he ever wrote are in fear and loading in the campaign trail
He has this passage where he has a dream a nightmare
Of Richard Nixon turning into a werewolf and it's one of them
It's probably the most brilliant passage he ever wrote another interesting thing about that is
Hunter first and counter Richard Nixon in San Francisco at the Republican National Convention when Barry Goldwater was the nominee
Hunter was assigned to cover that convention for the National Observer
So when Barry Goldwater got up on stage and gave his famous speech about
extremism in the defense of liberty
Hunter was right there on the floor in front of him and Richard Nixon was on the stage behind Goldwater and when the crowd erupted
Wildly it and when Goldwater said that hunter had a
Premonition about a lot of
Sort of terrible things that were going to happen in the country in the near future which he turned out to be right about
So he would definitely fit the category of a drinker with a writing problem, right? Yeah, I actually hesitated in season one
I had access to a lot of these same folks and some of my
journalist friends were perplexed that I didn't ultimately end up doing an episode on hunter in season one because I had
access to
A lot of people who knew him and worked with him
I had some conflict on it because he's such an extreme example of a
Drinker with a writing problem and alcohol alcohol absolutely
Absolutely destroyed his writing ability and his life in the long run
But that is also true of Brendan Dean who I did my very first episode on
I just I guess I didn't want more than one figure like that in one season. That's maybe what it came down to I
So Brendan I already had Brendan B. N. In season one who a very similar story is Hunter in terms of
The alcoholism got so out of control that first it took his writing in his talent and then it took his life and that's true of hunters too
well
I should point out for reader your listeners. He don't know hunter took his own life
But the the alcohol took his talent and took his writing ability and took him to a place where
That sort of thing might happen similar to similar to his idol or earnest Hemingway
I mean that was one of that was one of hunter's great idols and
Hunter chose to go out the exact same way
A drinker obsessed with guns as well
Both of them Hemingway and Thompson, but you know it's it's not so much a parallel and
It's more of a hunter modeled himself after Hemingway in a lot of ways
You know, so it's not that I don't think it's independent of each other
It's I think it I don't think it's a coincidence that hunter had modeled himself on Hemingway so much that
That he thought you know he decided to end the last chapter the same way
Well, that's great Scott. We
Got through our part two of the California writers
Thank you for coming on to entitled opinions again
and if I
Was trying to encourage you to think about doing something down the line on Malcolm Lowry and under the volcano and and his
Story that down in Mexico and talk about a you know drinker with a writing problem
That's Malcolm Lowry and if you go in that direction you got to let me know
Well, I think if there is a season three of drinkers with writing problems
I'm just right in the middle of season two if there ends up being a season three then Mexico's almost certainly
Gonna be part of it so that that's one of the reasons I would do a season three is I really want to do an episode on Mexico
But it did not work out for a whole lot of reasons because of the pandemic and a lot of logistical issues that came up with the pandemic
So well you do one on Mexico and you will have you back here at KZSU. All right title opinions. Okay
Thanks again. We've been speaking with Scott Thomas Anderson
Ryder and journalist here in California, and I remind you that he has a documentary series
Into the second season now called drinkers with writing problems and it's available on all the podcast platform
So tune into that so thanks again Scott will be in touch soon. Okay. Thanks. Bye-bye
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