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 mi
llions 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.
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