CHAPTER FOUR

Freak Power in the Rockies

Every afternoon our whole staff would end up in the Jerome Bar with Tom Benton and Hunter and a whole bunch of people. We all did mescaline, LSD, cocaine, opium if you could find it, but—this sounds funny—in moderation.

LOREN JENKINS

I don’t remember thinking anything bizarre about Owl Farm at all in those early days. I mean, hey, it was the sixties . . . what was strange? Everything was there, you sort of accepted it, and . . . we were all strange, right?

JOHN CLANCY

After Hunter moved to Woody Creek, I’d get a legal case in Denver, go skiing in Aspen, and then swing by Hunter’s place on my way home. One evening when I pulled up, Hunter had the stereo cranking good and loud. He came out of the house and put this big bag of pot up on the roof. One thing led to another, and Hunter dragged the couch out of the living room into the snow in the yard, poured gasoline onto it, and set it on fire. Then he walked back to the house with this huge ball of fire going up in the air. He looked me right in the eye and said, “I am a master of tools.” A friend of his was ducking up from behind the burning couch firing tracer bullets out of a machine gun over the couch, and then Hunter said, “Holy shit!” In the glare of the flames, it looked like there was a thousand pounds of pot up on the roof. We expected the police would be on us any minute. “Jesus,” Hunter said. “We’ll go to prison for life.”

GEORGE STRANAHAN was Hunter’s Woody Creek neighbor.

Before Hunter moved out to Owl Farm in ’68, he was in a little apartment in Aspen. My friend Bob Craig, who was the executive director of the Aspen Institute, and I were buying real estate in Woody Creek for protective purposes. Craig was making friends with Hunter and called me one day and said, “I think I have a good tenant for this place that we just bought together, namely Hunter Thompson. Maybe you’ve heard of him. Nice folk, a writer.” I now was Hunter’s landlord. He was renting the place, with about 140 acres behind it, for $375 a month.

If I did get a check from Hunter, which was irregularly, I usually got a little letter along with it. I think it was his way of apologizing, though he’d never actually apologize or write “I’m sorry.” Never.

I was still in my academic career—I was a theoretical physicist at Michigan State—so I didn’t meet Hunter until I came out the next summer. Sandy called my wife and said, “Hi, neighbor, we live down the road. We rent this house from you. Why don’t you come on down for dinner?” I drove up in an old jeep, and Hunter came out the door and said, “Oh, good, you’ve got your jeep. We have to go down and pull my motorcycle out of the creek”—those were his first words—which we then did. I admired his motorcycle, particularly the fact that it was a Bultaco Matador. Soon thereafter I ordered my own Bultaco, and I would get riding lessons from Hunter, which basically meant getting your wire cutters and maybe a pistol and going trespassing. We’d go across hayfields, and if there was a fence we cut it.

But then we went in for dinner, and Hunter said, “Eat these.” It was my first experience with pure, very high grade mescaline. Sandy had put the turkey in at about one in the afternoon—she told us that—and at about eleven she opened the oven to take it out. The mescaline was . . . I was hungry. The turkey, of course, just collapsed.

TOM BENTON was an Aspen-based graphic artist.

In 1965, I had a little gallery in Aspen, and I rented out part of the gallery to a girl that ran a frame shop. One day she came to me and said, “Tom, you gotta see these damn pictures from this crazy guy who came in and wants me to frame them.” And so I looked at them. They were pictures of Hells Angels, and some of them were kissing and touching tongues. When the guy came in to pick up the stuff, she introduced me to him. Right then, Hunter and I became friends. He seemed crazy enough.

JUAN THOMPSON is Hunter and Sandy’s son.

We moved into Owl Farm when I was around four. Before that, we rented a house on George Stranahan’s property. In some ways the experience was like that of any of the kids around Woody Creek whose parents were ranchers or farmers or whatever. Things like guns were a part of life. They were just lying around. Much later on, I moved them all to the gun safe, but for a long time they were propped up in corners by the doors. Very early on, there was a very clear understanding that you don’t mess with the guns. It never occurred to me to actually pick one up until much later. I got a BB gun first, and then a .22 rifle when I was eleven.

The hours my dad and I kept were quite different. He didn’t get up at a certain time every day. It would be three, or six, or seven p.m. Sandy would make dinner for me and then breakfast for Hunter. He’d be eating bacon and eggs and reading the paper, and I’d be finishing my dinner or doing my homework before bed. My friends at school thought that was funny, and at the time I thought it was funny too: My dad wakes up at five p.m., just in time for the evening news.

My mom provided a basic framework of functional childhood—meals and toys and reading and all that. Reading was very important. I read a lot.

SANDY THOMPSON

It was one of my jobs to get Hunter up. When he came to bed, I’d be asleep, and he’d wake me up and say, “Wake me up at one.” So I would, though he usually didn’t get up for a couple hours after that. I’d be busy making the right breakfast, because he had some very specific ideas about what breakfast should be, and there were maybe four different ones that he liked. One was a Spanish omelet with bacon. One was mayonnaise and peanut butter on top of toast with bacon on the top. There was some sort of a spinach thing. There was huevos rancheros. And then maybe six cups of coffee. With the last cup of coffee, he’d start in on the beer, and maybe four beers, five beers later he started on the whiskey. It was pretty orderly, pretty structured.

As I was busy making the coffee and the breakfast, he’d come out into the kitchen yelling about something or another. Sometimes it was directed toward me, and sometimes it wasn’t. Maybe even most times it wasn’t. But it was scary. Somebody comes in yelling, who’s big, and angry. It’s scary. It makes for that angst in your heart. You shake a little bit. And then later on in the day, when you’ve had a drink, it’s a lot easier.

Hunter didn’t drink fast. It was more like a drink an hour. Problem was, when you stay up for twenty-four or thirty-six hours, it accumulates. But Hunter could really hold his alcohol for a long time. And he could hold the drugs. I mean, I saw him with some powerful political figures when he was on acid, and no one knew the difference. The one thing that really brought him down was opium. I only saw him do that twice. Otherwise, he could function. I mean, was it completely changing the way he was, and what he was saying, what he was doing? Of course. But he could function, just like a functional alcoholic, or a functional coke addict.

JACK THIBEAU

I think Hunter preferred drugs to women, actually. And he liked women who understood that.

SANDY THOMPSON

At Owl Farm, you did a lot of cocaine, and at times you did too much. That’s not a problem. You just take something else. If you’re really bad, you take quaaludes. If you were not so bad, then you just smoked a good strong joint. But you could always go up. And you could always come down. There were so many options.

GENE MCGARR

Sandy and Hunter had some rough times because he just never stopped. I mean, he would fuck a fire hydrant. There were instances later, in front of the Jerome hotel in Aspen, when she would be howling up at him, “I know you’re there, you son of a bitch. I know you’re in there fucking somebody.” But it got to the point where you couldn’t get in touch with Hunter.

SANDY THOMPSON

One night Hunter and I went to a party in Aspen at the house of a woman who was a good friend of Jack Nicholson’s and had been close to Timothy Leary. Hunter was the big deal because he had written Hell’s Angels, and it was my first excursion into the world of him being adored. There were drugs around, and some very pretty women, and all of a sudden I was just this little wife in Woody Creek, and all these women were hanging all over Hunter. I went into one room and everybody’s drinking and high, and this woman was sitting on Hunter’s lap with her arms around him kind of cooing, and I went ballistic and ran outside, sobbing hysterically. Hunter came after me. It was a new stage of a never-ending drama, the beginning of all the attention. That was the beginning of “Oh, Hunter . . .”

Fortunately, during the time when we were married, I only knew about one woman, and I had thought that he ended that. But it turns out there were women the whole time. I just came across a letter in a box of my stuff from a woman to Hunter—about wanting to see him again, wanting him to know how she felt, da, da, da. As it turned out, my friends—or our friends—knew that I really, really couldn’t have handled the truth. I could not have handled Hunter going out with all the Jerome cocktail waitresses and everybody else. So I didn’t know about all of this until much later, which is very good, because I would have cracked up. I almost cracked up when I found out about the one.

GENE MCGARR

Sandy always answered the phone. And Hunter was always “not available.” She was shielding him from all the calls from friends of his that she didn’t approve of. And I was high on that list.

JACK THIBEAU

Sometimes I couldn’t tell his paranoia from his reality. He seemed to enjoy both. Sandy just got worn out, I think. He would take her out to dance, take her out every month to a party, and she would dance like a fucking Frank Zappa character out of one of the songs, and then he would wrap her up, throw her in a car, and take her back home for the night.

SANDY THOMPSON

I did cocaine for maybe two years. It’s a terrible drug. Marijuana—and some other drugs too—make you feel loving, make you feel connected, make you feel good, make you feel warm. With cocaine, it was all about the ego. You felt really sharp and really, really smart, and strong, and more powerful than the person next to you. But there was no sense of connection. It’s not a drug to make love with. Not a drug to be in a community with. It is a completely self-centered, egoistic drug.

But when I took LSD with him, I was clean. I didn’t have that angst anymore. I was absolutely at the same level as he was. He was still the king, but I was a very, very important queen. It was a great escape. And it was also great fun, mostly. I’ve had friends who used LSD to really explore things spiritually, but for me, and for Hunter too, it was really more of an escape.

PAUL SEMONIN

He called me in ’68, when I was living in New York, and wanted to meet in Chicago and go to the demonstration at the Democratic convention together. I was disillusioned with the way the whole country was going and just told Hunter that I wasn’t interested in that. But I always mark that time as when his political consciousness really kicked in. He wasn’t a part of the movement in that he wasn’t any kind of radical character. I don’t think he identified with any group per se, but he could see that some of the protest movement and the antiwar stuff was important. And of course he always had this thing about the Kennedys. When Bobby Kennedy was assassinated, that probably drove a stake into his heart.

JAMES SILBERMAN

All his writing was about the loss of some mythic world that he may once have inhabited. It was no accident that Gatsby was his favorite book. I said to him at one point, “You’re really writing one lifelong book called The Death of the American Dream.” And that stuck.

PAUL SEMONIN

I don’t think he ever felt identity with the political ideas. He felt identity with the rebellion; he could see how it tarnished the ideals of an American identity. He was never very ideological about his thinking. He didn’t join any groups and was kind of a maverick character all along.

SANDY THOMPSON

I saw Hunter cry exactly twice in my life. One had to do with our dog, and the other was the night he got back from Chicago. He broke down telling me what had happened. The police had fired tear gas into the crowd of people demonstrating at the convention, and he was right in there. He talked about people being hit, and brutally hurt, and the violence, the horror of it all.

GAYLORD GUENIN was the editor of the Aspen Illustrated News in 1969.

Our offices were in the basement of the Jerome hotel, and one day in comes this madman with a letter to the editor, screaming and yelling. I couldn’t understand what he was saying; I didn’t have a clue who he was. His letters to the editor were all signed “Martin Bormann”—Hitler’s deputy after Rudolf Hess was captured. I asked an editor at the paper, “Who the hell is this guy?” I thought he was a wacko. He’d come into the office on almost a daily basis just to see what was going on, or he’d have some grievance about one of the politicians in town. His letters to the editor were essentially political, attacking or complaining about the local sheriff, or police, or whatever. And at that time, Aspen was really going through a transition. The old guard was still pretty much in political power, and the young people, like Hunter and a lot of others, were coming to town, and we were a hundred times more liberal than what was here.

JOE EDWARDS was living in Aspen in the spring of 1968.

I had just graduated from law school and was sitting in my office when some guys from the physics institute in town walked in and said, “Are you aware of what’s going on in municipal court?” I wasn’t, really, but they said, “Well, it’s really appalling. The city police are harassing these hippies. . . .”

Haight-Ashbury was breaking out, and hippies were drifting across the country. They were coming to Aspen and hanging out. There had been a petition from the businesspeople to the city council to get rid of undesirable transients, and there were six kids that had been thrown in jail for hitchhiking—and everyone got sentenced to three months. One of them was fourteen. He’d been in town ten minutes and now he was in jail with no shirt and no shoes. Guido Meyer, the police magistrate, a Swiss who came over after World War II, looked over his reading glasses and said, “You dirty hippies are messing up our town. We’ve got to clean you up. Ninety days.” That was the whole trial.

I filed the first civil rights suit in Colorado under the federal laws that were being used to help the blacks get registered to vote—against the city police, the city magistrate, and the city council. We had our preliminary hearing in Denver, and the chief judge lambasted the city and said that this was the most outrageous situation he’d ever seen. The city promised they weren’t going to do this anymore.

Suddenly I’m the hippie lawyer. Anybody that gets busted for smoking dope, they come to see me. And that’s how Hunter had heard of me. He called me one night about two or three in the morning, woke me up, and introduced himself and started saying that we needed to straighten out this town, that things were out of control. And they were, a little bit. Carrol Whitmire was the sheriff, and he and his staff were of the same mind-set as Guido Meyer. His staff would beat up handcuffed prisoners, spit on them, and kick them with their cowboy boots.

PAUL PASCARELLA is an artist who moved to Aspen in the fall of 1969.

There were a lot of us coming here who had more or less dropped out and come to Aspen in the span of a year or two. It seemed like the mountains around the town were some kind of huge two-dimensional protective barrier with a superstructure behind them holding everything back. At the time, Aspen wasn’t a hip place. When you left New York and said you were going to Aspen, people said, “Where? Colorado?” They didn’t know where Colorado was. You either went to California or Chicago or something, maybe New Orleans—but Colorado was definitely not on the map.

JOE EDWARDS

When we all came here in the sixties, or sometimes even earlier, Aspen was a fixed-up old mining town. The main street through town was paved, and nothing else. There were no stoplights. There were no condominiums, and no big hotels or lodges other than the Jerome, which had been there for a hundred years. Everybody was living in these old miner cabins or Victorian houses that had been fixed up, and suddenly in the summer of ’68, while this was all going on with the hippie trial, a developer from Chicago came in and built what’s called the North of Nell condominium, and across the street they built these Aspen Square condominiums. Most of them were a block long and three stories high. Before that, you could walk around downtown and see the skiers coming right down into town a block away from you, and in the summer you’d see the wildflowers, and people would just carry their lunch bag up on the ski hill and sit down or go for a hike. When I first came to town, we’d ski off the mountain and down the streets to the bar and leave our skis outside. All of a sudden, you couldn’t even see the ski hill anymore.

Hunter started saying that we’ve got to get politically active, that we’ve got to take over and foster a recognition amongst the younger kids that they’ve been disenfranchised. He had me meet him at the Wheeler Opera House, which was showing this movie called The Battle of Algiers. After the movie, we went over to the Jerome hotel and sat in the bar for a couple hours and talked politics, and he went over his point again: that we needed to organize all the young people, all the bartenders and ski bums, the kids working the ski lifts and in the restaurants and bars; that we had the numbers; that if we could just get them registered and get them interested and get them to participate, we’d have the political power to change the town.

At this same time, the dozen or so lawyers in Aspen got together and put a petition to the city council to remove Guido Meyer from the magistrate’s office. Guido ran a restaurant in town and had no legal experience at all, and he had this almost Nazi attitude. The DA brought to the attention of the district judge the prisoner abuse that was going on, primarily by the undersheriff. So the undersheriff was removed from office by order of the district court, which was highly unusual, and Guido Meyer was replaced by the city council as a result of this embarrassment. Things were changing, and Hunter wanted to push it even further.

PAUL PASCARELLA

We weren’t even really hippies. Some of us had long hair, but we were ex–Special Forces and marines, so that didn’t go so well either. We were all peace and love, and we were stoners, but we didn’t take any shit from anybody. Hunter became this sort of figurehead, the leader of the underground, and we all sort of rearranged Aspen.

JOE EDWARDS

One thing led to another, and a group of people coalesced around Hunter and I, and he brought in people that he knew that I didn’t. He brought in Bob Craig, who was the president of the Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies and who lived right next door to him in Woody Creek, who gave us his office in the redbrick building catty-corner from the Hotel Jerome to use as our campaign headquarters, and all of a sudden I was running for mayor.

TOM BENTON

Hunter, myself, and Joe Edwards had formed something called the Meat Possum Press, really just to expose the “greedheads,” as we called them. There was a board of directors—friends of Hunter, like Oscar Acosta, John Clancy, Bill Kennedy, Loren Jenkins—and Hunter and I were editors. The first thing that the Meat Possum Press did was purchase a fifty-millimeter flare gun, and we would go out at night in the middle of town and fire off these beautiful flares just for the hell of it. If you fired them up in the air, this red or green parachute would pop open and float down to the ground, but if you fired it down an alley it would bounce off buildings for a whole block and then shoot across the block. It was wonderful. I still have the gun.

That’s when Hunter and I started calling ourselves doctors. At some point somebody had bought me a subscription to the Los Angeles Free Press, and every week I’d get it, and the back page always had this ad—“Get your doctorate of divinity degree for $10”—so I went to Hunter and said, “Look, man. Wouldn’t it be nice if we called ourselves “Dr. Thompson” and “Dr. Benton?” And Hunter said, “Yeah, that’d be good.” So I said, “Well, give me ten bucks.”

It was through a thing called the Missionaries of the New Truth, and it was run by Alan Baskin in Evanston, Illinois. They had some guy in a basement there cranking these certificates out. We got them, and Hunter said, “This is great, because you get cut rates on hotels. And you know, it always sounds good in an airport when you hear ‘Paging Dr. Thompson.’”

Since Hunter was now a doctor of divinity, he could marry people legally, which he tried once. When I saw him afterward, he said, “It didn’t come off very well.” He had this electrotherapeutic machine with him—when you turned it on, this blue flame would go shooting up the tube, and if you got it close to your skin it would arc across—but apparently he was waving it at the couple and he got the thing too close to her nose, and the current leapt across and hit her nose and scared the hell out of her. He said, “I’ll make a deal with you. You do all the weddings and I’ll do all the funerals.”

JOE EDWARDS

We’d be up in our law offices in the second story of the Wheeler Opera House, and Hunter would climb up the fire escape at ten o’clock at night and come in the window with his six-pack and a bottle of whiskey and cigarettes, and we’d sit and talk until the wee hours planning our campaign strategy and designing the advertisements.

I wound up being six votes short of winning, but the probusiness candidate, who was endorsed by the city council, lost by a landslide, and all the other people we were supporting won office. The police chief was fired, and the whole mood of the city shifted. We still had this issue of Carrol Whitmire over in the sheriff’s office, though, which is a separately elected position. Whitmire had jurisdiction over the whole county. That’s how Hunter decided to run for sheriff. When I lost, there was criticism that my candidacy was just too far out there. Hunter thought he would widen the “out there” span quite a bit and be the farthest-out candidate you could possibly imagine. He originally did it, I think, as a lark, not really having any serious thought that he might win.

ED BASTIAN met Hunter in the summer of 1969 at a Sunday afternoon volleyball game at Owl Farm.

I had just helped manage Governor Rockefeller’s campaign when he ran for president in ’68 and then Governor Romney in New Hampshire and then a congressional campaign in Iowa. I really learned about organization, but after Rockefeller I became more radicalized. I was working in New York on underground films, and before that I had been in Vietnam as a photographer. Before that I had been in college in Iowa, where I was playing basketball and being a jock. Hunter sort of combined all these attributes—the jock thing, the political thing, the social-activist and human-rights philosophy thing—and there were just so many parts of our respective personalities that meshed.

Michael Solheim was the official campaign manager, and I ended up being a sort of manager of logistics. When I got involved in Hunter’s campaign, things were pretty chaotic. It was really running on his charisma, and there’d been some interesting work done with Tom Benton’s posters.

TOM BENTON

Hunter walked into my studio one day and said, “We should do an Aspen wall poster.” I said, “What the hell is that?” He said, “It’s gonna be one single-sheet thing, and it’ll have your graphics on one side and my writing on the other.” He would write about local politics and other things. We would get together at night at my studio and I’d work on the graphics while he would write the whole damn back page in one night. Of course, that night might take a day and a half. Hunter was always nocturnal. That’s one thing that kept our friendship going.

ED BASTIAN

Hunter shaved his head to look like a cop. There were a lot of elements in the campaign that were a kind of parody of what a real-world cop would be like or look like or act like. On one hand you had a very radical rhetoric and platform of tearing out the streets and sodding them over, and all bad drug pushers would be put in stocks in front of the courthouse and rode out of town on a rail, and there’d be no profiteering on drugs. But on the other hand, Hunter dressed himself up to look like an L.A. cop, with these serious sunglasses and a shiny bald head. He was quite an imposing figure already, and the shaved head also allowed him to refer to Whitmire as “my long-haired opponent.”

We conned the sheriff into a debate at the Wheeler Opera House. We filled the place with hippies, and there was poor Whitmire onstage looking very straight and trying to be a pleasant, amiable guy because he realized he had walked into a difficult situation. Hunter was up there next to him with his bald head and his sunglasses and cigarette holder and a can of beer, and he destroyed the guy. Hunter was really acerbic and was really playing to the audience. They were asked if they were going to enforce marijuana laws in Aspen, and Whitmire would say, “Yes, it’s my duty as a law enforcement officer to do that.” Hunter would say something about the unjust drug laws in America and how they lead to profiteering on drugs, which leads to the criminialization of drugs and so forth. He gave answers that were both very intelligent and very political. Whitmire was ridiculed, which precipitated some really tough stuff later in the campaign.

TOM BENTON

Whitmire knew how to handle drunks, car wrecks, cowboys, and that stuff, but had no idea how to handle the new wave of young people, or drug people—people with a different agenda. The business community was afraid. They thought that the new crowd on their way here was going to eat the local babies and cats, and all they did was make flutes. Some guy jumped up and asked Hunter, “What are you going to do about drugs? Everybody knows you take drugs.” He said, “Well, I’ll tell you what I’m going to do. This is the only time I’ll talk about it. I do not like needle-injected drugs. I’m dead against them, and I won’t chew jimsonweed on the job. Other than that, I don’t want to hear anything about it.”

Afterwards people were coming out of the auditorium, and one guy said to me, “You know, he didn’t sound like a moron. He didn’t sound like a freak to me. He makes a lot of sense.” And another guy said, “Well, hell yes. He’s got a degree from Columbia”—which was nonsense, of course.

ED BASTIAN

A guy who appeared to be a Hells Angel arrived at Hunter’s house on a chopper and said he was sent from California by Sonny Barger to tell Hunter to get out of the campaign or they were going to burn his house down and kill him. Then he rode off.

JOE EDWARDS

In the middle of the campaign, the existing sheriff retained this undercover agent, a guy who had worked for the Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms division of the Treasury Department as an informant. Whitmire paid him money to come to Aspen to infiltrate Hunter’s campaign and set Hunter up to be arrested for having illegal weapons. This ATF guy came to town dressed up like a biker, with a big leather vest and his Harley, and started hanging out at the Jerome hotel.

MICHAEL SOLHEIM

There was a lot of activity going on at the Jerome. We had our headquarters upstairs in Parlor B, and one day a guy named Chuck Bromley came up there to cause trouble. He thought it would be a good idea if some of the guys on the other side got the shit beat out of them, and he said he would do it, but he’d need a little help from our people. Then we got a call from somebody in Denver saying, “Watch this guy. He’s trouble, and he’s not what he seems to be.” So we kept an eye on him. He just kept wanting to start trouble. When we had issues with our opponents, he’d say, “You don’t have to put up with any of that stuff. That can all be handled.”

He accused us of a couple of other things, and then he left, and then he called Joe on the phone. He had just been over talking to the opposition, and he told Joe, “I will deny saying this, but if I were you guys, I would get Sandy and Juan out of that house up there. I would bring them into town. I would close down my election campaign headquarters”—which were here in the hotel—“and I would arm myself. These guys are furious.” We all went out to Hunter’s and armed ourselves to the teeth. Bill Kennedy was there, really stunned, I think, that he was on the floor of Hunter’s kitchen waiting for bullets to come zipping through the window.

ED BASTIAN

Oscar Acosta, the Chicano lawyer who had run for sheriff of L.A. County—who later became the “Samoan attorney” from Fear and Loathing—came in to advise on the campaign and to help Hunter and to be a buddy. Actually, a whole weird assortment of people showed up in town, some bringing guns. There was one lawyer who was carrying around a .357 Magnum pistol, and a couple of us had to take his gun away because we were scared that any violence that might take place would destroy our campaign. We were really minding our p’s and q’s, but we had to ride herd on this cast of characters that showed up.

Hunter and Oscar and I were sitting in the bar at the Jerome one night after closing, talking about the campaign and tactics and philosophy, and when we walked out at about two in the morning onto Main Street, a police deputy who was sympathetic to us stopped us on the street and said, “Hey, you guys should know—that guy that’s been hanging out in your office? Well, we found a car on Main Street parked in a place it shouldn’t have been and we towed it in and opened up the trunk and found a trunkload of automatic weapons. We found out where the guy is staying and we went to his motel and brought him in for questioning, at which point he showed us his identification as an ATF agent and says, ‘You can’t arrest me. I’m here on federal business.’”

The sheriff, we found out the next day, called in some people from the Colorado Bureau of Investigation, who said they had done some kind of a survey of the town and then had a meeting with Hunter and Joe Edwards and said, “We advise you to get out of the campaign; we found out that there are five or six direct threats on your life.” Suddenly we saw the other side of things. What began as a lot of fun with this wonderful way of doing politics with strong language, sometimes offensive language, sometimes poetic language, and pranks and parties to get out the vote, and all of that had become something different. Six months earlier, I had been studying Buddhism and making a film with the Dalai Lama in Dharamsala, India, and now I found myself involved in a political campaign with death threats—and I’m toting a gun? At that point, Hunter could have easily said, “Hey, that’s enough of this.” But we carried on.

JANN WENNER is the founder and editor of Rolling Stone.

Hunter sent me a letter out of the blue in January 1970. He must have been an early Rolling Stone reader, and he wrote, “Your Altamont coverage comes close to being the best journalism I can remember reading—by anybody.” Having been a fan of Hell’s Angels before I started Rolling Stone, I sent back an open-ended offer for him to write for us. He wrote that he was too busy to write, since he was running for sheriff of Aspen. Around this time, he was writing the Kentucky Derby piece. I suggested he write about his sheriff’s campaign, and in part it could be seen as a prelude to our push in 1972 to get our readers to register to vote. That was just after eighteen-year-olds were given the right to vote.

One day he called—I’m not sure if he had an appointment or not—and came in to the office to see me. At that time Rolling Stone was in a redbrick building south of Market, which was then an undeveloped warehouse and industrial area. In retrospect, what I saw was already classic, fully formed Hunter. Here’s this big guy, kind of awkward and clumsy—not knocking anything down exactly, but kind of lumbering in. He had his Converse sneakers and wore a pair of shorts and a polyester multicolored shirt, I think the famous one with red circles on it. He was also outfitted with a gray bubble-top ladies’ wig and had those small-lens dark glasses on and was carrying his leather satchel. And he had his cigarette holder.

I’d seen a lot of stuff, and I really didn’t know anything about the local Aspen legend, but this guy was strange. He sat down and put his satchel on my desk and started to slowly unpack things. I sat there watching all this—and at this point I was a pretty busy young budding entrepreneur trying to get things done—and he was very slowly unpacking his satchel, pulled out a couple six-packs of beer, a bottle of scotch or something or other, can openers, knives, cigarettes, smoking paraphernalia, notebooks. An air horn. He put everything out on the table, and then he slowly sat down after circling the room and started to mumble as he took more things out. Everything with Hunter was protracted. One thing that was always true of him was that any movement took fucking forever—and this was mild Hunter, the beginning of the gonzo Hunter. We sat and talked—or I should say he talked—for an hour and a half or two hours. He was charming, fascinating, and weird, but he was taking forever.

He accepted the assignment to write about the sheriff’s race. It brought national attention on Hunter and the political machinations in Aspen. Right from that point, I felt that we were on a crusade with Hunter. It was crazy but very serious.

From “The Battle of Aspen,” by Dr. Hunter S. Thompson (Candidate for Sheriff) Rolling Stone 67; October 1, 1970

Tentative Platform

Thompson for Sheriff

Aspen, Colorado, 1970

1) Sod the streets at once. Rip up all city streets with jackhammers and use the junk asphalt (after melting) to create a huge parking and auto-storage lot on the outskirts of town—preferably somewhere out of sight. . . . The only automobiles allowed into town would be limited to a network of “delivery-alleys.” . . . All public movement would be by foot and a fleet of bicycles, maintained by the city police force.

2) Change the name “Aspen,” by public referendum, to “Fat City.” This would prevent greedheads, land-rapers and other human jackals from capitalizing on the name “Aspen.” . . . The main advantage here is that changing the name of the town would have no major effect on the town itself, or on those people who came here because it’s a good place to live. What effect the name-change might have on those who came here to buy low, sell high and then move on is fairly obvious . . . and eminently desirable. These swine should be fucked, broken and driven across the land.

3) Drug Sales must be controlled. My first act as Sheriff will be to install, on the courthouse lawn, a bastinado platform and a set of stocks—in order to punish dishonest dope dealers in a proper public fashion. Each year these dealers cheat millions of people out of millions of dollars. As a breed, they rank with sub-dividers and used car salesmen and the Sheriff’s Dept. will gladly hear complaints against dealers at any hour of the day or night, with immunity from prosecution guaranteed to the complaining party—provided the complaint is valid. . . . it will be the general philosophy of the Sheriff’s office that no drug worth taking should be sold for money. . . . This approach, we feel, will establish a unique and very human ambiance in the Aspen (or Fat City) drug culture—which is already so much a part of our local reality that only a Falangist lunatic would talk about trying to “eliminate it.”

JOE EDWARDS

“The Battle of Aspen” was almost 100 percent accurate. Everything he said in there actually happened. Some of his writings can be wild exaggerations, but in this case, with very little exception, everything that he said in there was done.

ED BASTIAN

Hunter took all of this very seriously. Yes, he was a writer whose career was just taking off, but he was also a ringleader, and he became very good at getting involved with or creating events that he could write about.

The campaign was attracting a lot of attention, and Hunter was very charismatic, and the media were coming in from around the country and from England, but what I realized was that nobody involved at that point knew how to run a campaign. It took a while to get some serious strategy instituted, but we did, and I think that’s why we got as close as we did.

JOE EDWARDS

The polls started looking like he might have a chance of winning. The impetus and the steamrollers started going, and suddenly everything got more and more serious and more fine-tuned as that became apparent. We started getting even more energized.

ED BASTIAN

But then everybody was wondering, “What happens if we win?” Hunter never really saw himself as a working sheriff. He saw himself as carrying the vision, carrying the mission, making a big statement, and changing the culture of this town.

TOM BENTON

Hunter said, “I’ve got it all figured out. If I win, I’ll take my salary and the undersheriff’s salary and combine them and give them to one guy who knows how to run a nuts-and-bolts sheriff’s department. I will be the figurehead who will sit up and listen to the people and make decisions.”

The guy who was really going to run the office if Hunter had been elected was Dick Kienast, who was going to be his undersheriff. Dick had been a city police officer, but he quit because he disagreed with the heavy-handed attitude of the police. Dick had been a divinity student earlier, and he was soft-spoken and very smart, and a very good administrator.

JOE EDWARDS

On election night, Hunter wound up losing by, I think, 274 votes out of 2,000 or 3,000. It was pretty damn close. The night of the election was wild. The Jerome was packed body to body in all the halls and all the way up the stairs; you could hardly get in. Hunter was walking around with his cigarette holder and his shaved head and an American flag wrapped around his neck, and people were cheering.

JANN WENNER

Had he taken it a little more seriously at the start, or had it been his second try, he would’ve been elected sheriff.

TOM BENTON

If we’d had another two weeks, he’d have been sheriff.

PAUL PASCARELLA

I think what lost him the few hundred votes he needed was his idea of changing the name of Aspen to “Fat City.” These old people got all upset. But it was a very exciting time. It showed me that voting worked. We changed this little valley by registering to vote and coming out with some posters and doing the work and getting all the freaks involved.

ED BASTIAN

It was a big downer that night, but in the next few days we got over it. Hunter was a realist. I don’t think he was depressed about it. It was an experience, and he began moving on.

JOE EDWARDS

In between that election and the next one, the district court ordered the undersheriff removed from office, so Whitmire had further embarrassment. And the next time there was an election for sheriff, Dick Kienast ran and won and became sheriff for eight years. And of course the city police changed too, so now instead of wearing these militaristic uniforms, the police and sheriff’s departments started wearing blue jeans and blue-jean jackets. For a while, Dick Kienast had them not even carrying sidearms.

The attitude of the police became laissez-faire. They refused to cooperate with any of the federal undercover agents regarding marijuana, primarily because in those days everybody—at least everybody under thirty or thirty-five—was smoking dope. None of our officers would participate in their raids or their busts, and they didn’t have enough manpower to do it on their own.

The whole tension of harassing the younger people disappeared, and the whole attitude of policing in the community shifted from beating up people to helping them and seeing what their problem is and getting them to social services or rehabilitation. If they found you drunk, they’d help you home. And to a great extent it’s remained that way for thirty years.

Bob Braudis was Dick’s undersheriff, and Dick hired everybody who had the same attitude—let’s just keep things low-key, let’s be a service to the community and not a harassment. When Kienast decided he didn’t want to do the job anymore, Braudis stepped into his shoes and has been sheriff ever since. He’s continued that same program that Hunter originally had in mind, and it’s been just wonderful. Hunter changed the culture of this whole area. He was the catalyst that got the whole thing going.

GEORGE STRANAHAN

Our social club at that time was the Jerome Bar. It was Hunter’s court salon. Michael Solheim was manager of the bar and Hunter’s buddy.

MICHAEL SOLHEIM

The bar was being run totally wrong. The people who were running it thought it’d make a great African-themed bar, and the interior was filled with swords and spears and shit. The clientele was mainly winos and a low-end crowd. I told the owner when I started, “The group of people you saw here for the sheriff’s campaign will be back.” He loved that, because his hotel rooms were packed then, and there were people in the bar all the time. I changed the place back to a Victorian theme and made a whole different thing out of it, and it became popular fairly quickly; we were the only bar in town that was busy all the time, day and night, all year round. There’s no doubt that Hunter hanging out there was a draw, and there were a lot of girls coming through as well. Most of the colorful people in town seemed to hang out there.

Hunter and James Salter and I were watching the NBA play-offs there one day, and then another couple guys walked in and came over to us. One of them knew us, and I looked at the other guy that he’d come in with and said, “You know, you’ve got a familiar look about you. Aren’t you a friend of [ski racer] Billy Kidd’s?” As it turns out, he was a friend of Billy Kidd’s, but he was also Robert Redford. We all sat around and talked for a while. Redford wanted to talk to Hunter about Hell’s Angels. He really liked that book.

Another time Hunter and I were sitting there watching some football and who shows up but Allen Ginsberg. I said, “Hunter, here comes Allen.” And he said to me, “Don’t say a word.” Hunter owed him some time together. Well, here the fucker was, but Hunter didn’t want to pay him back that time. So we just stayed quiet and Ginsberg walked right by us.

PAUL PASCARELLA

One time, when we were watching football at Owl Farm, Hunter was threatening Juan with a cattle prod, but he was always great to Juan. He always really loved Juan. It’s kind of like that thing with dogs—if you rough them up a little, they like to play like that. In a sense it was never really anything harmful. He never pinned him down and drilled him with electric jolts or anything; it was just a threat and a lot of running around.

But Juan was always different; he was always so quiet. I don’t remember him being around all that much. I think he was off in some other part of the house or off with Sandy.

SANDY THOMPSON

I helped start the Aspen Community School, which is right next to Owl Farm. I think that really, really helped Juan. I had no idea how bad things were for Juan until we left. I really didn’t know.

JUAN THOMPSON

I’ve often wondered how much so-called childhood trauma is the result of an adult’s comparison and questioning of what they experienced with what they thought they should have experienced. At the time I didn’t question any of this. It’s only later, when you learn more and grow up a bit, that you can say, “Hey, this guy was always high.”

Given the time period, looking back now, the values look extreme, but at the time they weren’t. My mom and dad and their friends came out of the sixties and shared a system of beliefs and some similar assumptions about life’s problems. For the most part, drug use was taken for granted. In the environment in Aspen in the late seventies there was a lot of drugs, so it was pretty natural for kids to try them. There were two or three years where I tried them out on weekends—nothing that serious to where it became a problem.

Politics were very liberal. Some families were a lot more open, some were more structured. I do remember going over to a friend’s house when I was young and sitting down with his family for dinner and them saying grace. That was odd. But I just took it all in.

GAYLORD GUENIN

Every afternoon our whole staff at the [Aspen] Illustrated News would end up in the Jerome Bar with Tom Benton and Hunter and a whole bunch of people. We all did mescaline, LSD, cocaine, opium if you could find it, but—this sounds funny—in moderation. I mean, there was a period in Aspen, in the late sixties and the early seventies, where everyone was doing copious amounts of drugs. In the Jerome, not only would they sell drugs, but they had the mescaline flavor of the week. One week it’d be raspberry, the next week strawberry, the next week grape. Hunter’s real intake is one of those things that you cannot be certain of, because Hunter made such a show of his drinking. I’d wonder—was he really doing that much cocaine all the time? Or was it a lot for show? But if we’re talking an over/under situation, I’d take “over.”

PAUL PASCARELLA

The Jerome Bar was our base. Hunter always took up the far end of the bar where it turned, by the back door. Because there was a television, we used to watch sports there. There were some pretty big people floating around in those days—Bob Rafelson, Jack Nicholson, and Don Henley—but I remember at one point thinking that out of all my famous friends, Hunter was the only genius.

Back in those days, Aspen was really cool. It was adventurers, mountain climbers, exceedingly wealthy people that chose their own path. You’d be sitting in the bar and you could be sitting next to Hunter, or some bikers from Massachusetts, or some heir to some huge money thing—but you all looked the same. If you were just some rich person from out of town, that didn’t cut it. And if you didn’t know these people, you were out.