"It had been a bad trip
fast and wild in some moments, slow and dirty in others, but on balance it looked like a bummer."
That's how Hunter Thompson concludes his time embedded with the Hell's Angel in his career-launching 1967 book, Hell's Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs. The work, an investigation of the counterculture after World War II, grew out of an article reported for The Nation in 1965.
"On my way back to San Francisco, I tried to compose a fitting epitaph," Thompson continued. "I wanted something original, but there was no escaping the echo of Mistah Kurtz’ final words from the Heart of Darkness: 'The horror! The horror! Exterminate all the brutes!'"
Giving words like those some much needed levity, nonprofit studio Blank on Blank compiled several archival interviews with Thompson about the outlaw gangs, expertly cutting and animating them for a series produced in collaboration with PBS Digital Studios. Have a look.
Thompson spent a year on and off the road with the Angels' San Francisco and Oakland chapters and their president Ralph "Sonny" Barger. He was introduced by Birney Jarvis, a former club member turned police-beat San Francisco Chronicle reporter. Thompson actively participated in the Angels' debauched episodes, with the gang frequently crashing his San Francisco apartment at 318 Parnassus Avenue to terrify his neighbors.
Thompson often joked about violence with the members of the Hell's Angels, saying he would kill them before they could kill him. But, as mentioned in the animation, the writer did receive a brutal "stomping" that soured his relationship with the group.
"Only a punk beats his wife," the reporter told a Hell's Angel who was doing just that, incurring a beating himself.
In a television interview with Thompson and another Angel, the same subject comes up, but fortunately — perhaps thanks to the cameras — no "stomping" takes place.
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