Pshaw, I thought. You're just being nice.
The most exciting thing about the special took place behind the scenes. One Friday afternoon in September, while we were in production, someone called the switchboard at CBS and said, "Hey, there's a bomb." Employees were evacuated while police searched the studios.
In the dugout at the Eagles showdown with (from left) Dave Marsh and Jann Wenner.
The only bomb there was hit the air two months later.
The next year, the Eagles exacted revenge on us for that Leslie Ann Warren numberand for past critical grievances-at a grudge softball game in Los Angeles. After drawing national media attention, we, the Gonzos, faced the Eagles and some five thousand spectators on a field at the University of Southern California. Among the five thousand, all of whom seemed to be on the side of the millionaire rock stars, were Governor Jerry Brown, Joni Mitchell, Steely Dan's Donald Fagen, and Daryl Hall. "I'm here as an enemy of Rolling Stone," said Mitchell. And she wasn't joking.
The game quickly settled into a rout, and by the time I was called off the bench to pinch hit in the top of the ninth, we were down, 15-5.
Here's how the L.A. Herald-Examiner reported that moment: "In the top of the ninth, the Gonzos stage a rally. Wenner pops off the bench, lights a fresh smoke, and begins making lineup changes. Writer Ben Fong-Torres goes into the game and the crowd applauds when he is introduced.
"'My God,' Wenner says to his bench. 'Ben gets a hand.' He repeats in disbelief: 'Ben gets a hand.' Spotting writers Dave Marsh and [Joe] Klein together, he announces, 'All right, let's see who gets a bigger hand, Klein or Marsh."'
On the field, meantime, I faced drummer Don Henley on the mound and hit into a force out. Soon, despite having given up twenty hits, the Eagles marched off the field, triumphant.
Despite that setback, Wenner maintained an affection for Hollywood. In 1979, he got into the motion picture business. He signed a three-picture deal with Paramount Pictures and, acting as though he were simply assigning stories for the magazine, had three of us working on scripts. The first would be by Hunter S. Thompson, whose notoriety took off with the first sentence of his 1971 saga, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: "We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold..." His would be a drug-running story. The second certain Oscar-winner would be by Cameron Crowe, our boy wonder of a writer who, despite having turned 20, could still pass for the 16 he was when he began writing for the magazine. His would be a story about life in high school.
For me, Jann had in mind a romantic comedy set in the sixties in San Francisco. That was the extent of his idea. I came up with a title, Somebody to Love, and a story about a straight guy and a hippie chick, and their up-and-down love story, with a backdrop including the social, political, and rock revolutions going on in the Haight-Ashbury and throughout San Francisco and Berkeley. I wrote a treatment. Wenner gave me a great deal. I'd take a year off to write the script. Of course, I wouldn't get paid that year, but, by happy coincidence, my fee for the screenplay would be exactly a year's salary at Rolling Stone. Knowing nothing about the business side of the film industry, I jumped right in.
In the end, it was three strikes, we're out. My script reached a second draft, then went into the dead end that Hollywood calls "turnaround." Hunter, surprising nobody, never delivered a script. And Cameron bowed out, telling Jann he'd already committed his high school idea to another studio. Wenner reassigned the script to Charles M. Young. While the pinch hitter took the called third strike, Crowe produced Fast Times at Ridgemont High and found a new career.
Wenner would find his way into movies, but only as an actor. In the 1985 John TravoltaJamie Lee Curtis movie, Perfect, he played the editor of a rock magazine. And, if you knew what he looked like, you might have spotted him in Jerry Maguire, the Oscar-nominated Tom Cruise film written and directed by...Cameron Crowe.
WHAT IS THIS THING CALLED
his piece is for fans of Hunter S. Thompson: those who know where he lives, the real identity of his attorney, and even what "the mojo machine" was. (It was the early version of IBM's facsimile machine, which enabled Thompson to miss his deadlines in style.)
In 1980, BBC/Time-Life produced a documentary on Thompson, Fear & Loathing: On the Road to Hollywood. Focus, a magazine published by KQED, the Public Broadcast System affiliate in San Francisco, asked me to wax poetic, nostalgic, psychedelic, or whatever I wanted about the good doctor. The editor, John Burks (the same JB who'd been managing editor when I joined Rolling Stone), asked me to keep it short. Thus, I left out one of the better stories, about the time the magazine's brain trust gathered in Palm Springs.
It was November 1972, and we-editors, spouses, and a few other companions-were being hosted by a wealthy friend of Jann Wenner's, an investor in Rolling Stone. As the meetings wound down late one afternoon, Thompson showed up. And, soon, we were all raving on a psilocybin high-all except Dr. Thompson, that is. He'd quietly handed out the little tablets, muttering that he wasn't sure what they were.
I remember that dinner was extremely difficult to navigate. Holding a knife and fork over my slice of steak, I asked someone for directions. When darkness came, our host began projecting a movie. While some of us freaked out over the images and sounds, others tried to relax in the Jacuzzi. And here came Hunter, carrying a carton of Roman candles he'd found. He couldn't make out the instructions in the dark, so, naturally, he lit a match up near the box. Fortunately, the fireworks never went off.
As we began to come down from whatever we were on, I staggered into the kitchen. On a tray were a dozen or so slices of cake that the kitchen staff had apparently planned to serve. We figure that, once they saw us in the throes of drugged dementia, they fled.
Thanks, Hunter.
I D o N ' T REMEMBER what day or, for that matter, what year it was. All I know is that it was about 9 in the morning-that's because no one had shown up for work yet at the offices of Rolling Stone magazine. Except for this thumping bass/drum beat blasting out of the large corner office usually occupied by the editor. But since the editor usually went to sleep around 9:00 A.M., it had to be someone else.
I tossed my stuff into my office and made my approach. But as soon as I saw the overstuffed, four-foot long canvas bag outside the door, with an IBM Selectric typewriter sticking out of it, I knew that the doctor was in.
I walked into the room and yelled good morning at Hunter S. Thompson. The Doctor (of Divinity, he says) turned from the editor's typewriter; he looked startled at the sight of another human being-he'd apparently been by himself for quite a few hours-but recovered quickly and yelled back, "Got any good rock and roll records?" He waved his head at the four overhead speakers, as if dismissing jazzrock fusion noise. "Got any Stones? Dead? Anything! I need volume!" I put on the Stones' Exile on Main Street for him and made my escape. Back in my own room, I had some trouble rapping out my own story, what with the distant yet immediate accompaniment of Bill Wyman's bass and Charlie Watts' drums. But in the other room, a miracle was unfolding: Hunter Thompson was meeting a deadline, and all was well.
When I go to high school press conventions or college journalism classes, the first question in the Q & A sessions afterward is, invariably, "What is Hunter Thompson really like?"
I remember responding, once, "Don't take anything Hunter says seriously. In fact, don't take anything Hunter takes." Which got the cheap laugh it deserved, but was hardly to the point. Hunter simply can't be dismissed with a one-liner. I mean, we're talking about:
• Hunter, who rode with the Hell's Angels, got stomped by them and lived to write about it.
• Hunter, who stumbled into what has become known-and, in college circles, quite revered-as "Gonzo journalism" by fouling up while on a story: then, reporting on his experiences, he'd give vent to all his adrenalized emotions and, in the process, tell more about the event than any objective facts or highly placed sources ever could.
• Hunter, the demented, acid-eating, sp
eedfreak journalist who went to Las Vegas with his attorney to look for "the American Dream." On assignment, of course.
• Hunter, who scored a scoop on the campaign trail by interviewing George McGovern while the two stood at adjacent urinals.
• Hunter, the comic strip hero in Doonesbury (he's called "Duke," as in "Raoul Duke," Thompson's sportswriting alter ego) who's gone Hollywood. Not only is there the BBC documentary, Fear and Loathing on the Road to Hollywood, and a film version of his book, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, but there is a feature film about him (Where the Buffalo Roam, starring Bill Murray as "Dr. Gonzo"), and there is a screenplay being written by Hunter himself, for Paramount Pictures. Something about drugs, I hear....
That, aside from straight bio material, is Hunter Thompson. Some straight bio material: Born in Louisville, Kentucky maybe forty years ago; sportswriter in Florida; worked as South American correspondent for The National Observer; wrote Hell's Angels: a Strange and Terrible Saga, in 1966; moved to Colorado and ran for sheriff in Aspen as part of a movement called "The Aspen Freak Power Uprising": wrote for Rolling Stone, also published in Playboy, Esquire, The Nation, Ramparts, and The New York Times Magazine.
Which still doesn't answer the question, "What is Hunter Thompson really like?" Which, I figure, is a polite way of saying, "Is he really as screwed up as he seems to be?"
The answer is yes and no. Yes, he can be deranged, as indicated by the gibberish that makes up much of what he writes. Even at his most berserk in print, as Tom Wolfe explained in his anthology, The New Journalism: "That approach seldom grates in Thompson's hands, probably because Thompson, for all his surface ferocity, usually casts himself as a frantic loser, inept and half-psychotic, somewhat after the manner of Celine."
So, when he staggers on stage at one of his college lectures and mumbles his way through some alcoholic parody of a Hunter Thompson talk, he knows just what he's doing, much the way a Southern Comfort-swigging Janis Joplin knew just what she was doing. He may abuse himself, but he doesn't mean to hurt anyone else. He breaks rules, but then, more rules ought to be tested. And in searching for the American Dream, he paints screeching-ugly nightmare portraits of its presidents, its powers, its proles. Yet in the end, he, too, is an American dreamer, as in the last sentence of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, set in an airport somewhere in the Rocky Mountains:
"I took another big hit off the amyl, and by the time I got to the bar my heart was full of joy. I felt like a monster reincarnation of Horatio Alger ...a Man on the Move, and just sick enough to be totally confident."
-March 1980
Focus
Fifteen Years Dead
here were, in San Francisco, smoother-sounding bands. There were better-looking bands. There were more ambitious bands. But there was no band that more accurately represented the spirit of the city, circa the sixties, than the good old Grateful Dead. And if there was ever a more articulate spokesman for that scene than Jerry Garcia, who came to be known as "Captain Trips," let him stand, or forever hold his peace.. .and love.
From the first-from the first issue, in fact, when they were featured in a two-page pictorial in the aftermath of a dope bust at their pad in the Haight-the Dead were favorites of Rolling Stone.
We covered the busts and interband dramas that came along with the music; we covered the music, as it evolved from an amalgam of R&B and acid rock to a melodic blend of country, folk, and rock. In fact, the band was so proud of Workingman's Dead that they brought working tapes into our offices, as if we were a friendly FM radio station.
The world at large thought of them as freaky hipsters, but, over the years, it came around. Never comfortable in the recording studios, the Grateful Dead became a concert phenomenon, giving rise to a cult of Deadheads who followed them from show to show, and taped those shows, and traded those tapes with each other.
That's where the Grateful Dead were at when the band reached 15.
By 1980, Rolling Stone-and I-had gone through a number of changes. With the magazine headquartered in New York, I had kept an office in San Francisco and commuted to Los Angeles to oversee West Coast coverage. But after a couple of years-with a break for the screenplay-I'd begun to feel like an uneasy mix of outpost and outcast. Once central to the magazine's editorial decisions, I was now a voice on the phone at meetings being conducted in New York.
By the end of March, my voice would reach Manhattan from my home telephone, as we shut down the San Francisco office. Covering our closing of our doors, the local press bemoaned Rolling Stone's desertion of the city.
As if to mark the magazine's withdrawal from San Francisco, here I was, off to write, once more, about the Grateful Dead.
THEY DIDN'T SING "Happy Birthday" to the Grateful Dead, who turned 15 on June 7 in Boulder, Colorado. Not that they didn't try. Pockets of Deadheads in the crowd of fifteen thousand at Folsom Field, on the campus of the University of Colorado, attempted to work up the simple song. It wasn't that they were met with stony silence or anything. The problem was that it was impossible to be heard over this... rumble of noise that started as soon as Warren Zevon finished his set. The mix of whooping and whistling, of screeching and screaming, filled the air during the Dead's ten-minute tuning-up. It rose in volume with the beginning of each new tong and settled into mere pandemonium between numbers. But Boulder, where Deadheads had gathered by the thousands the day before, was calm compared to New York.
Three weeks earlier, the Dead had played Long Island's Nassau Coliseum. For three straight nights-well, for three consecutive nights, anyway-crowds of seventeen thousand Deadheads packed the joint and gave out a nonstop screech reminiscent of a Beatles crowd. The only quiet moments were for the sweet, slow songs that Jerry Garcia sang. Those were like campfire sing-alongs, everybody joining in on "Sugaree" and "Candyman," arms and cassette microphones swaying side to side in the air. The rest of the time, it was get up on the chair, Jack, and scream the night away-through two sets (three hours, plus the legendary "break"), through a fiery drum duet by Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzmann, and through songs ranging from "Johnny B. Goode" and "El Paso" to the newest stuff, like 'Alabama Getaway," which was received as an instant classic.
"New York," one of the Dead family had said before the first concert, "is extra intense." For the Dead, the East Coast has been intense for years. This time about fiftyone thousand tickets were sold with no advertising, save some radio station announcements. On their end of the deal, the Dead turned an arena into a cozy room, keeping the people wired with a mix of sixties vibes and eighties technology. Throughout the auditorium, one noticed the reach and clarity of the rented sound system.
Microphones, on stands, sprouting out of the packed floor area, invariably connected to expensive portable tape decks, such as the Nakamichi 500 being operated by a young man with a scarf on his head and a knapsack on his back. Near the middle of the hall, another mike was attached to a crutch, held aloft and angled toward the stage speakers.
The dancing, true to the Western-based music of the Dead, was free-form hoedown. "The Woodstock Sun Grope," as writer Cindy Ehrlich aptly put it, is alive.
The people doing the dancing, passing the joints, and making the tapes were by no means all time-warped hippies. Probably half the crowd was under 18, and there were even some first-daters making out in the balcony while the newest Dead member, Brent Mydland, performed "Easy to Love You." His is a plains-of-California voice, high like Neil Young's and romantic like Jesse Colin Young's. His keyboards-electric piano and organ-give the Dead the extra coloring they'd been missing in the last years of Keith and Donna Godchaux's membership in the band.
Fifteen years after arriving on the San Francisco scene, and after having gone through acid, financial burns, Haight-Ashbury busts, death, and creative highs and lows as extreme as drugs could take them, the Grateful Dead are still drawing bigger and younger crowds. As a band, they sound fresher than ever. And they may be on the verge of their first hit single.
Of cours
e, their albums have always jumped onto the charts-but that's because of the automatic 250,000 or so snapped up by Deadheads. The Dead have even placed a few singles on the charts "Truckin" and "Uncle Johns Band" reached the bottom half of the Top 100 ten years ago, and more recently, "Good Lovin"' (from Shakedown Street) threatened. But through the years, the Dead, saddled with an image as washed-up hippies, have been anathema to most radio programmers.
That is, until Go to Heaven and its first single, `Alabama Getaway." Showcased on Saturday Night Live in April, `Alabama" almost immediately became the most-played album track on album-oriented rock radio stations.
On the eve of the first concert in Boulder, Garcia sat on a bed in his Holiday Inn room. The beds were covered with blue velour spreads Garcia had brought in himself. In the tradition of touring rock artists, the TV set was on with the sound off. At 10 P.M., Garcia for once wasn't wearing shades, but his glasses were tinted a smoky gray. He wore-what else?-a plain black T-shirt and beige tennies. The subject was hit records, and Garcia was chortling.
"That's incredible," he said about the airplay 'Alabama" was getting. Of course, he's often thought about having a hit. "Oh, sure," he agreed. "We were sure our very first record was going to be a hit." He laughed heartily.
Fifteen years ago Garcia had no idea how long the band might last. "I wasn't thinking about time," he said. "I was hoping it would do something like what it's done. It went way past all my expectations."
Despite the years and the tolls the Dead have paid, Garcia sees few fundamental changes. "The only big difference," he said, "is that our functioning ability has gotten to a point where it's competent. On our worst nights we're competent. It used to be on our worst nights we were just bad." He chuckled. The Dead, after all, were famous for dropping acid before shows and, subsequently, for many musically wasted nights. "Now I'll walk away from the bad ones not nearly as wounded as I used to feel. And not only that, it's more the whole band will feel that we haven't had a good night rather than one of us. Used to be that thing where everybody might have a good night but me. That tells me that somewhere along the line our whole aesthetic has gotten more focused. We share more of a common vision."
Not Fade Away: A Backstage Pass to 20 Years of Rock & Roll Page 43