For me, the memory of a book that I could not finish lives long in the mind, usually with the firm intention that I will go back one day and do it justice. My younger self failed miserably to get on with Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, so when the opportunity to read and review Hunter S. Thompson’s seminal contribution to the gonzo journalism movement came along, I grabbed it in the hope of at least partially redeeming myself. Having enjoyed Jay Dobyn’s No Angel recently, which is a very modern take on the Hells Angels phenomenon, I was also interested to go back in to their history, some might say their heyday, the period when they acquired their considerable notoriety and with it their place in popular culture.

When Hunter S. Thompson started hanging around with the Angels in 1964, they were on the verge of their fame – their origins as a gang were debatable and relatively recent (post-WW2), they numbered a few hundred members maximum, were confined basically to California, which is a good place for hooning around on motorcycles most of the year, and were little known outside their home state. By the time he finished his association, finally deterred by getting a ‘stomping’, the Angels were regularly making national headlines, and their legend was becoming hard to separate from the reality.

Thompson does a convincing job of arguing that, while the Angels undoubtedly committed offences and did cause disruption, they were hardly a national scourge. But when California’s Attorney General Lynch issued a report to all California law enforcement agencies identifying the Hells Angels as a major menace, an elite band of dedicated lawbreakers, no-one considered that he was overstating the case – and from there, the legend grew, in a spiral of hysterical reporting (Thompson is scathing of many of his colleagues in the fourth estate), police over-reaction, Hells Angels posturing and occasional outbreaks of real criminality. The parallels with both earlier and later Red scares and terrorist panics in America are clear.

Thompson was present to witness some of the major standoffs, ‘biker invasions’ and panics of 1965 – and in doing so he gained a better understanding than most of his journalistic peers about what makes the Angels run. Like Jay Dobyns so many years later, he marvels at the inherent contradictions in the HA philosophy: a group of rebels and outlaws who claim to reject society and yet band together in rigid and often surprisingly formal associations, complete with rules, roles, hierarchies and conventions.

By the time Thompson got ‘stomped’ the Angels were living their own legend, courting the media and inviting controversy by picking sides in the Vietnam War unrest (initially they were anti-, then they became converts to the patriotic pro-war orthodoxy, perhaps surprisingly for a bunch of ‘outlaws’). The scene had changed, prompted in large part by the distinctly asymetric conflict between a few hundred greasy bikers on shining Harleys and the tens of thousands of law enforcement officials across America. Probably there was no-one better suited than Hunter S. Thompson to at least try and give the Angels a chance to by sympathetic, and you sense he tried hard – but ultimately, they come across to him, and thus even more so to us, as socipathic and basically pretty damn mean. A great book, for me and a step on the road to revisiting Fear and Loathing.

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