The Gang That Wouldn't Write Straight: Wolfe, Thompson, Didion, Capote, and the New Journalism Revolution (39 page)

Hinckle was so thrilled with the story that he gave Thompson and Steadman another assignment, the second of a projected multipart series about the strange mores of significant annual American events. The two would converge upon the America’s Cup yachting race in Newport, Rhode Island, and provide a gonzo story similar to the Derby piece. Thompson had more artillery for this misadventure, namely, a large supply of psilocybin or “magic mushrooms.” Steadman, who had progressed from bemused fellow traveler to Thompson’s willing coconspirator, had never taken any drugs aside from an occasional marijuana toke and one acid trip, but he was game.

It didn’t take long for the drugs to wend their way into the pair’s adventure. While attending a party on a three-masted schooner in Newport harbor, Steadman fell ill with motion sickness, and after three hours of severe discomfort on board finally asked Hunter for a dose of magic mushrooms, thinking that it might alleviate his nausea. “Hunter was sleeping really well in Newport, and I thought the drugs might have the same effect on me,” said Steadman. But after a while, “I started seeing red-eyed dogs emerging from the piano. My hair felt slick and I felt it coming down my forehead like Hitler. The psilocybin just gouged out my interior; it scraped it right out and hit my consciousness. It was terribly frightening.”

Thompson had other ways of instilling fear in Steadman. “A friend of
mine had a dreadnaught that had parking privileges in the port, so I gave him some
Scanlan’s
money to let us aboard,” said Thompson. “The security was tight, like military security, but I noticed that you could access the boat from the ocean side.” Thompson and Steadman rented a row-boat and armed themselves with several cans of spray paint; Thompson’s goal was to deface a luxury yacht with some witty graffiti scrawl.

But the sound of the shaking paint ball inside the spray cans gave them away; a sentry light found the rowboat just as Steadman was about to do his handiwork. “I thought of everything except the paint ball,” said Thompson.

It was a fool’s errand;
Scanlan’s
folded before Thompson and Steadman could make it back to New York. Hinckle and Zion had burned through a million dollars in less than a year, leaving Thompson without a regular outlet for his work. It was a bitter disappointment for Thompson, who enjoyed the creative freedom that Hinckle had given him—an all-access pass to write as he saw fit about whatever subject came to mind, despite his constant gripes about magazine work being no better than “writing copy for [Ford Motor Company] pamphlets.”

There were other projects to keep him busy, not the least of which was another book, which he had held off for close to three years. After floating a number of ideas past Jim Silberman at Random House, the two agreed that Thompson would chronicle the death of the American dream, the rogue reporter casting his jaundiced eye on the dry rot of contemporary culture, as he had done in the Kentucky Derby piece. But the idea was so broad and abstract that Thompson had trouble getting his mind around it. What, exactly, was the death of the American dream, and where was his entry point? “I wish I could explain the delay,” Thompson wrote to Silberman in January 1970. “In a nut, my total inability to deal with the small success of the H.A. book has resulted—after three years of useless, half-amusing rural fuckaround—in just about nothing except three wasted years.”

There was plenty of material to work with, mostly research for abandoned articles about gun control and the oil industry, but Thompson
couldn’t organize it all in a way that would cohere as a book. He suggested other approaches to Silberman—perhaps an anthology of pieces like Tom Wolfe’s
The Pump House Gang
or Mailer’s
Advertisements for Myself
, the latter a book that had been a formative influence on the young Thompson.

Thompson was thinking about a new composite form that would combine reporting and fiction in ways that blurred distinctions between the two: “a very contemporary novel with straight, factual journalism as a background.” Thompson had been groping toward this style with the Kentucky Derby story—ratcheting up the clamor of the South’s ignoble savages to a fever pitch—but now he wanted to delve into an invented persona and tinker with form. In doing so, he could get away with just about anything and become a man of action with no restrictions. He would call his alter ego Raoul Duke: “semi-fictional,” he wrote to Silberman, “but just hazy enough so I can let him say and do things that wouldn’t work in first person.”

For months, Thompson grappled with the death of the American dream and Raoul Duke, but nothing came of it. In order to stave off the anguish of writer’s block, Thompson turned his energies to extracurricular activities—shooting his .44 Magnum into the gloaming on his Woody Creek property near Aspen, Colorado, a ranch house he called Owl Farm; dropping mescaline and blasting the Jefferson Airplane and Dylan at ear-wrenching volume.

Politics became another diversion; it appealed to Thompson’s desire to change the order of things. He marshaled his creative energies into the mayoral campaign of Joe Edwards, a twenty-nine-year-old Colorado lawyer and biker who was running in a three-way race against Leonard Oates, the hand-picked successor of Aspen’s outgoing Republican mayor, Dr. Robert “Buggsy” Bernard, and local small business owner Eve Homeyer. Thompson viewed the race as a crucial battle for the agrarian soul of Aspen, which he felt was being destroyed by the rapacious greed of big real estate interests. The liberal Edwards would mobilize the “freak vote” in Aspen, the under-thirty hippies and heads who would put a stop to the unchecked growth and plant the seeds of reform.

Thompson devoted all of his energy to the race, which, unlike writing books, offered the promise of a quick and unambiguous resolution. Then he received a cold call from Jann Wenner, the editor in chief and
owner
of Rolling Stone
magazine in San Francisco. Wenner had obtained a copy of
Hell’s Angels
in galley form while working at
Ramparts
as an apprentice editor and consumed it in two days. “It knocked me out,” said Wenner. “It was such a vivid piece of writing. I was so impressed with the fact that he had the balls to hang out with Angels. It seems tame now, but then it was the height of adventure and courage.”

Now Wenner wanted Thompson to work for him. Thompson’s style—irreverent, angry, anything but detached—would fit in perfectly with Wenner’s young magazine, the only mainstream periodical that bothered to cover youth culture with rigor, taste and intelligence.

A graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, Wenner had scraped together $7,500, some of it from his future wife’s parents, to start the magazine, relying on the sage counsel of his mentor, Ralph J. Gleason, the jazz columnist for the
San Francisco Chronicle
, to steer a steady editorial course. In three years,
Rolling Stone
had not only become the definitive magazine for rock music coverage—due in no small part to critics such as Jon Landau, Lester Bangs, and Greil Marcus—but also long investigative pieces on the Altamont killings and the Manson Family, the antiwar movement and the battle for environmental preservation.

Wenner was a native of Marin County. His father, Ed, was an engineer who had served in the Army Air Corps, a resourceful and avuncular man who tended to defer to his wife, Sim, when it came to taking disciplinary action against his three children. Sim was headstrong, a former Navy lieutenant junior grade during World War II who became the owner of a successful baby food business shortly after her discharge.

Jann caught Sim’s entrepreneurial spirit early. In third grade he published a gossip sheet called the
Bugle
, printing all the dirt on his classmates, but the
Bugle
had to fold when a few too many kids threatened to shut Wenner’s operation down with a bloody nose. When Jann was fourteen, he was sent to Chadwick, a boarding school outside of Los Angeles; his parents divorced shortly thereafter.

At Chadwick, Wenner threw himself into his own endeavors with brio and determination. He sang in the glee club, ran for office, acted in school productions (he was the lead in
Dr. Faustus)
and started up a newspaper called the
Sardine
. Wenner was a model student, if not exactly a typical boarding-school do-gooder. He wore his hair long and developed a taste for European art films and editorial insurrection, publishing
critical articles about the school administration that resulted in stern warnings and expulsion threats.

In 1964, Wenner enrolled in the University of California, Berkeley, just as the school administration was about to come under siege by a clutch of student firebrands led by a brilliant twenty-one-year-old philosophy student named Mario Savio. Wenner, who was working as a stringer for NBC radio in between classes, was enthralled by Savio and the Free Speech Movement, volunteering his services for a “countercatalog” that rated college courses according to their political and sociological criteria. But Wenner had little use for political cant and the internecine battles between Berkeley’s numerous leftist organizations. While he abided by their principles, he was not going to immerse himself in radical protest. Exactly what he was going to do with his life was not entirely clear to him, at least until he saw the Beatles’ movie
A Hard Day’s Night
.

It was an epiphany, the night Wenner found his life’s purpose. The visceral energy of the Beatles’ music sent a charge through him, conquered him head, body, and soul. From that point on, nothing would be as important to Wenner as rock and roll. It was more potent a cultural force than Savio or the FSM, more vibrant and alive—the thrilling sound of an emergent generation giving voice to itself.

Emboldened, Wenner ventured out beyond Berkeley to La Honda, where he experienced his first acid trip under the auspices of Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters. In San Francisco, where an alternative culture rooted in rock and roll was simmering, Wenner attended concerts at places such as the Fillmore and Longshoreman’s Hall, reviewing the shows for the
Daily Californian
using the byline Mr. Jones—an homage to Wenner’s musical hero, Bob Dylan. He met Ralph Gleason at one such show and proceeded to pump him for information about the publishing business.

Despite the generational differences—Wenner was nineteen, Gleason forty-eight—Gleason recognized in Wenner the same passion for music that had seized him upon attending his first Bunny Berigan concert in New York’s Apollo Theater in 1945. Gleason, a soft-spoken man of somewhat patrician bearing who wore sport coats with elbow patches and smoked a briarwood pipe, was a jazz critic first and foremost, but he found merit in any musical genre that had integrity and soul. He was an early
champion of Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead, devoting extensive column inches in the
Chronicle
to both bands and other rock artists.

Gleason would be a crucial ally for Wenner when the Berkeley student dropped out of college during his junior year to try his hand in the publishing world. Taking the recommendation of Gleason, a contributing editor for
Ramparts
, Warren Hinckle hired Wenner to be the entertainment editor for a new Sunday edition of the magazine, but Hinckle had no empathy for the counterculture. In a cover story for
Ramparts
, he savagely decried the leaders of the movement, calling acid guru Timothy Leary “Aimee Semple McPherson in drag” and Ken Kesey a “hippie has-been.” That attitude made no sense to Wenner, but the final straw came when editor Sol Stern took a trowel to Wenner’s introduction to his Timothy Leary interview, making excessive changes to his text. Wenner tried to do an end run around Stern, inserting his original text into the edited version, and was caught. Hinckle reluctantly kept him on, but when the Sunday
Ramparts
folded, Wenner was gone.

He tried freelancing, writing a two-thousand-word review of the Beatles’
Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
for
High Fidelity
magazine that never ran. But the freelance life was too unpredictable. The days of toiling for editors, of being beholden to the capricious judgment of others, was over for him. It was as good a time as any to start his own magazine. Gleason would give him the credibility; the rest would be up to him.

The idea, as he had discussed it with Gleason, would be to combine the professionalism of
Time
and the hipness of the underground press with stories that would run as long as
The New Yorker’s
. But first he needed money, so he hit up everyone he knew. Gleason chipped in $1,500. Wenner’s stepmother was in for $500. Sim Wenner contributed $2,000. The rest of the money came from the parents of Wenner’s new girlfriend, Jane Schindelheim, whom he had met while working at
Ramparts
.

He used part of that money to rent an office on 625 Third Street in the warehouse district. He called the magazine
Rolling Stone
, which had a triple echo effect—it was the name of one of blues musician Muddy Waters’s greatest songs, a name that had been appropriated by Wenner’s favorite British band. His hero Bob Dylan had also kick-started his electric phase with a song called “Like a Rolling Stone.”

Like Harold Hayes at
Esquire
and Clay Felker at
New York
, Wenner
valued great writing more than political dogma;
Rolling Stone
was unapologetic about presenting itself as a “rock and roll newspaper” that framed its music coverage within the proper cultural context. Rock would never stray too far away from the foreground.

“We were off the map as far as mainstream magazines were concerned,” said writer Timothy Ferris, who was
Rolling Stone’s
first New York bureau chief. “We had this high-minded notion that we wouldn’t take any cigarette, alcohol, or car ads, but no one wanted to buy any, so it was beside the point. But we knew we were publishing innovative stuff, pieces that people just had to read because they were so good.” Within three years of
Rolling Stone
’s first issue in November 1967, circulation jumped to a hundred thousand—a huge number for a magazine running on a shoestring budget.