On ‘Hell’s Angels: A Strange & Terrible Saga ’

The year is 1965. Writer Hunter S. Thompson, not yet a household name for the gonzo antics immortalized in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas writes an article for The Nation on the Hell’s Angels Motorcyle Club. Over the course of the next year, Thompson embeds himself in the club with the intention of writing a book. In Thompson’s mostly true but not embellished first book, he lives, eats, parties, and rides with the biker gang and lives to tell the tale. Thompson offers the first serious, stark and sobering sociological account of the Hell’s Angels and it’s implications for American society. 

A peculiar episode occurs in the last third of Thompson’s novel and serves as a sort of climax, a moment when the outlaws might have laid down their anger and violence. The Angels had made threats that they would stomp anti-war protestors at an upcoming Vietnam War protest march. Thompson introduces the gang to another California subculture, the Merry Prankster’s. The two groups who couldn’t be more different, though both threatened to upend the entire American experiment.

Ken Kesey had put up a sign outside his La Honda home which read “The Merry Pranksters Welcome the Hell’s Angel’s”. At that first meeting the Angels, Pranksters and Thompson dropped acid together to see if they could get along. This fateful meeting of the thugs and outlaws outlaws might have united them, to stave off the insanity of the American military industrial complex bent on destroying Southeast Asia while simultaneously crushing the anti-war and civil rights movements at home.  Allen Ginsberg wrote a poem for the occasion, urging the Angel’s to get on the side of peace and love. 

The Angel’s didnt stomp the hippies but soon tired of them. Thompson himself would later get stomped by the gang before one of the group’s toughest, Tiny, jumped in and saved the writer. Alas, the Hell’s Angel’s lived up to their anti-everything antics - to be ‘for’ anything would be against their creed. 

Thompson was perhaps the only writer tough enough to be up to the task of chronicling the Hell’s Angels (he kept a loaded shotgun in his home at all times) and the book is a shocking, eye-opening and honest account from deep inside the Angels camp. 

Until next time,

KW