Hunter S. Thompson on Outlaws

Hunter Thompson, our guest, is a new kind of journalist. The journalist who is not detached, who becomes involved and in fact he was almost an honorary member, or a dishonored member of the the Oakland Hells Angels. You were with them for about a year or so?

About a year, yeah. They claim, the Angels anyway, claim that they don’t look for trouble. They just try to live peaceful lives and be left alone but on the other hand they go out and put themselves into situations deliberately and constantly, that are either going to humiliate somebody else or cause them to avoid humiliation by fighting.

You speak of foul fighting. They stomp someone. You were stomped. In which there’s the questions of rules involved here, just beating… violence for the sake of violence.

Well they have a rule: it’s bylaw either number 10 or 11. It says, “When an Angel punches a non-Angel all other Angels will participate.” So I was a victim of bylaw number 10 or 11. I should have known that, it’s a lapse of caution. All during this stomping I could see the guy who had originally teed off on me that just out of nowhere with no warning circling around with a rock about… must have weighed about 20 pounds, I tried to keep my eyes on him because I didn’t want to have my skull fractured.

Your observations are more than about the Angels. They’re about our society, and it’s since World War Two pretty much, isn’t it, this phenomenon has come to be?

I think the Angels came out of World War Two. This whole kind of alienated, violent, subculture of people wandering around looking for either an opportunity, or if not an opportunity then vengeance for not getting an opportunity. They get to be 30 and suddenly they wake up one morning and they realize there are no more chances. It’s all gone. It makes them meaner. They want to get back at the people who put them in this terrible, this dead end, tunnel.

Now who are these people they want to get back at?

They don’t know. It’s kind of “they”, paranoid. It’s you, it’s me, it’s whoever might come too close to them on the highway, a car. It’s somebody that makes a remark in a bar to them. They call them the citizens. Anybody who looks respectable and looks like he isn’t doomed, like he has some kind of option or money or a home, all the things they don’t have.

What do you see for us, for everything?

Christ, it’s bad. I’m not very optimistic. I think one of the most important things is to recognize that we do have this mounting violence in us and then to find the reasons.

Once you find that it’s like curing a boil. If people insist on saying, “I am a very gentle person and only these little bad gang of hoodlums over there is ugly and mean,” then it’s just putting off the recognition that the same venom that the Angels are spewing around in public, a lot of people are just keeping bottled up in private. I think this technological, the science of obsolescence, or the fact that people are becoming obsolete. The people who are most affected by this technological obsolescence are the ones least capable of understanding the reason for it, so the venom builds up much quicker. It feeds on their ignorance.

Until you recognize what’s happening, what makes you do these wild things … Christ, I used to throw beer bottles into bar mirrors and stuff like that and get stomped, always. I can’t remember ever winning a fight. I don’t do it anymore because I’ve finally caught on to what was happening. Until you recognize it, it’s like an albatross around your neck. I learned a lot about myself just writing about the Angels. I was seeing a very ugly side of myself a lot of times. I’m much more conscious of the kind of anger that lurks everywhere. I don’t do any… I keep my mouth shut now. I’ve turned into a professional coward.

I wouldn’t just call Hells Angels in Oakland the only violent part of our society. I think Lyndon Johnson would be a good Hells Angel, mentally, obviously not….. The Angels reflect not only the lower segments of the society but the higher, where violence takes a much more sophisticated and respectable form.