Jeff Miers: Sound Check
The music of Hunter S. Thompson
“You might say Thompson craved the screech of the locomotive tracks and the silence of the backwoods — anything but the blase gray land known as neutral.”
This, from the collaborative 8,000-word essay co-penned by Johnny Depp and Professor Douglas Brinkley that so generously accompanies “Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson— Music from the Film,” and nails it better than anyone other than Hunter S. himself possibly could’ve.
According to that same essay, Thompson posted a note on the wide-screen television in the living room of his Woody Creek, Colo., abode that read “No Music = Bad Mood = No Pages.”
I know exactly what he meant.
Thompson used music, throughout his floored gas pedal of a life, the same way he used drugs and alcohol. They gave him the fire in his belly. They brought him to the edge of the abyss, the only place where he found his inspiration. They made him manic. They helped him steer clear of that “blase gray land known as neutral.” Staring into that abyss, his synapses fried but firing with impunity, fearless, Thompson saw what Joseph Conrad’s Mr. Kurtz did at death’s door in “The Heart of Darkness” — “The horror, the horror!”
His life’s work was to report on that horror. There has been no finer reporter.
You probably didn’t see “Gonzo,” the film tribute by Alex Gibney, when it was released, oh so briefly, in July. You’ll be able to, though, when it’s released on DVD Tuesday. It’s a profound piece of work, centered around Depp’s narrations, all of them culled from Thompson’s writings. It’s a love letter, not just to Thompson, but to the abyss itself, the dark heart of the country, the part of us that is willing to do anything and everything — without regard to the consequence to life and limb — in order to “eradicate the swine,” solely with the power of the intellect, the imagination, the zen-like still of the backwoods and the shrill whistle of the locomotive.
With the film comes this CD companion, a labor of love for Depp and Brinkley, work they performed with great joy, it would seem. It was not mere speculation that led the two to choose the songs here, the works that tell the story of Hunter in melodic and sonic form. They knew what songs the king of Gonzo would’ve wanted on this thing. Thompson never kept his love for any of them to himself, after all. He didn’t use music as background, window dressing, lifestyle accesorizing, or any of it. He played it at earth-rattling volume, and talked up whatever his latest passion was to anyone who would listen, and everyone who wouldn’t.
It was the obscure psychedelic R&B burner “Gonzo,” by the brazenly irreverent James Booker, that gave Thompson the moniker for the writings that would comprise his life’s work. Depp and Brinkley retell the legend of Thompson playing this hyper-charged slab of frenzy at top volume for Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters, right smack in the middle of a hallucinogenic Kool Aid bachannal. Ah, to have been a fly on the wall...
Thompson reacted to visceral music in a visceral way, but he also craved the mettle-testing intellect and passion for raw madness that he found in Norman Mailer’s writings. That meant he needed good lyrics, not the cliched tripe that so often passes for pop poetry. So his hero, he said again and again and meant it, was Bob Dylan, whose gold-tipped observation “To live outside the law you must be honest” became Thompson’s credo. Until the end.
Thompson and the late Warren Zevon — called by Bruce Springsteen, rightly, “one of the great, great American songwriters” — were kindred spirits, blood brothers codependant on the madness found in the great American backwoods. “Lawyers, Guns & Money” was Thompson’s favored Zevon tune, its tale of a desperado who has ventured out way past the breakers striking a chord with him for obvious reasons. He also favored Zevon’s “The Hula Hula Boys,” because as wicked, irreverent and appetitie-driven as he was, Thompson was also one of the great American Romantics. In this area, his friend Zevon was his equal.
Proof of this can be found scattered throughout “Gonzo’s” selections, most obviously with the inclusion of “Get Together,” the timeless, hair-raising piece of peace poetry by the Youngbloods. (You know the chorus — “C’mon people, now/Smile on your brother/Everybody get together, try to love one another/ Right now”. This was not a joke to Thompson, though he may not have been capable of living up to its demands. What matters is that he knew it was the barometer.)
There is the song Thompson penned with illustrator and unindicted co-conspirator Ralph Steadman, “Weird and Twisted Nights,” more hilarious than it is good. It does include a stanza that nails the heart of Gonzo, though:
“If you write words shocked through with truth/Hunger dirt and gutter sharp/Eat the words and spurn the gutter/Climb the rise and surf!”
Yeah, that’s the job.•
