#hellsangels

berkeley, california 1971

hell's angel

HB Hunter!  Dr Hunter S Thompson was born this day in 1937 in Louisville KY, and would have been 86.

According to Thompson, their meeting came at the apartment of a pot-dealer whom they both knew:   I met Allen in San Francisco when I went to see a marijuana dealer who sold by the lid. I remember it was ten dollars when I started going to that apartment and then it was up to fifteen. I ended up going there pretty often, and Ginsberg—this was in Haight Ashbury—was always there looking for weed too. I went over and introduced myself and we ended up talking a lot. I told him about the book I was writing and asked if he would help with it. He helped me with it for several months; that’s how he got to know the Hell’s Angels.

Of course, this story has all the hallmarks of Gonzo mythmaking. … Indeed, when I recently dug up a hitherto-unpublished  interview Ginsberg gave in 1993, I was not exactly shocked to see him directly contradict Thompson’s story. The first question was “When did you first meet Dr Thompson?” Ginsberg replied:

If you look at the poem, “The First Meeting at Ken Kesey and the Hell’s Angels,” there’s a description of a party where Kesey invited the Angels down to La Honda, his house. I was there and Thompson was there. So that’s where we first met.”  

Exerpt from today’s guest post at allenginsberg.org today by @davidswills, author of the forthcoming “High White Notes – The Rise and Fall of Gonzo Journalism”  Photo: Allen Ginsberg, Boulder CO July 17, 1989