In recent years, I’ve come to discover the twisted, yet somehow unnervingly truthful ravings of one America’s literary geniuses, Hunter S. Thompson, or freaks, to use his own characterization. I’d heard his name here and there, but really hadn’t connected with his writing until I read his 1966 breakout book, Hell’s Angels – the Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs.
In Hell’s Angels, Thompson is credited with creating the first-person, immersive narrative style later termed “Gonzo journalism.” Instead of writing about the subject from the distance of a third-person observer, it involves active participation in the story, no matter how risky. Though he didn’t coin the term, he embraced it.
Of course, the motorcycle connection made his writing all the more interesting. His take no prisoners, seek no quarter attitude made everything he wrote a page-turner. Thompson always went his own way, even in his Hell’s Angels days. Instead of riding the mount of choice, Harley-Davidson, he went with a BSA that he bought in 1964.
He explained that bike in Hell’s Angels:
Then I bought a big motorcycle and began riding around San Francisco and the East Bay. The bike was a sleek, factory-style BSA, bearing no aesthetic resemblance to an outlaw Harley, and my primary road garb was a tan sheepherder’s jacket, the last thing a Hell’s Angel might wear.
Years went by without reading anything from Thompson’s collection. Then, I dove into his final book, published in 2003: Kingdom of Fear—Loathsome Secrets of a Star-crossed Child in the Final Days of the American Century.
In it, Thompson flails corrupt politicians, calls out hypocrites, tells of his own political campaigns, his personal excesses, and the overindulgences of others in the ’60s and ’70s. Amidst all that, he reprints his essay-style review of the Ducati 900SP from the March 1995 issue of Cycle World. That article was enigmatically headlined “Song of the Sausage Creature”.
As you may suspect by the fact that the title makes no reference to any motorcycle, let alone the idea of a review of one, Thompson’s approach was vastly different from the typical, technical, detail-rich motorcycle road test.
To Thompson’s way of thinking, all those exquisitely detailed lists of technical specifications common to virtually every other motorcycle review then in print were a waste of time. If you want all that jazz, get a brochure or talk to a Ducati mechanic. To HST, the philosophy of the rider and the emotional experience a motorcycle can provide are much more important. All you really need to know, you get from the seat of your pants—or somebody’s pants.
Some people will tell you that slow is good—and it may be, on some days—but I am here to tell you that fast is better. I’ve always believed this, in spite of the trouble it’s caused me. Being shot out of a cannon will always be better than being squeezed out of a tube. That is why God made fast motorcycles, Bubba….
His Ducati 900SP essay dispensed with all objectivity and rationality. Instead, it focused on the bike’s hormonal effect:
The brand-new Ducati 900 Campione del Mundo Desmodue Supersport doublebarreled magnum Cafe Racer filled me with feelings of lust every time I looked at it. Others felt the same way. My garage quickly became a magnet for drooling superbike groupies.
You don’t have to read much of Hunter S. Thompson’s writings before you realize the dude was no ordinary scribe. This may be due, in part, to his prose often being composed while he was experiencing a chemically induced altered state of reality. Much has been made about that, including by his own admission, though I’m not so sure it was the case as often as the legend suggests.
Thompson’s insights were often delivered with wit, embellished with toasty language, and thrown against the proverbial fan with a flourish of absurdity. I’m just not sure that can be achieved as consistently as he did if his cognitive compass was spinning like a turbofan, but, I digress.
In that 1995 article, Thompson eventually got around to briefly mentioning riding the Ducati. He wrote:
“Taking it on the road, though, was a genuinely terrifying experience. I had no sense of speed until I was going 90 and coming up fast on a bunch of pickup trucks going into a wet curve along the river. I went for both brakes, but only the front one worked, and I almost went end over end. I was out of control staring at the tailpipe of a U.S. Mail truck, still stabbing frantically at my rear brake pedal, which I just couldn’t find…”
It’s hard to imagine the nice folks at Ducati not being thrilled speechless with a “review” like that. Thirty years have passed since Thompson’s Ducati 900 SP essay was published. The company survived it and has gone on to do great things, including dominating MotoGP and building thousands of spectacular motorcycles. They are professionals, after all.
There is more, but I don’t want to spoil it for you, in case you want to check it and all the rest out in Kingdom of Fear. The book is available from the Simon & Schuster website for $20 in paperback. This edition features a new introduction by New York Times bestselling novelist Rachel Kushner.
In 2005, Thompson’s soaring, tail-spinning narrative, in combination with the splashy illustrations of his collaborator/illustrator Ralph Steadman, reached the literary heights only a few will achieve—a 202-page hardcover masterpiece re-publishing by the exclusive Taschen publishing house in 2005 of his controversial 1983 memoir, The Curse of Lono. Taschen is the publisher of a remarkable non-fiction book I reviewed in 2023—Ultimate Collector Motorcycles.
The Curse of Lono recounts Thompson’s trip to Hawaii to cover the Honolulu Marathon. As you might expect, it is a trippy yarn with intonations similar to his Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, which tells of his technicolor recollections from covering the Mint 400 race in the desert around Las Vegas. The Taschen reprint fetches around $2000 on the open market.
Hunter Stockton Thompson died by suicide 20 years ago today.
