Hell’s Angels, Revisited (Hunter S. Thompson’s 1967 Classic, Part 2)
Culture, Chaos and Communism
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Read Part 1 (when I was halfway through the book) here
Well, I finished Hunter S. Thompson’s 1967 classic (and his debut), Hell’s Angels. It’s brilliant on multiple levels, of course. (How could it not be: It’s HST.) And yet, at only 273 pages it still feels too long to me. There was too much cultural “fluff,” meaning too much historical backstory and context—often initially interesting until stretched beyond its natural limit, when it becomes boring—around the Hell’s Angels and their ilk up until the mid-1960s. Frankly, this book could have probably been 100 pages shorter. It needed a solid, concise, eagle-eyed editor.
Thompson gets way into the literary and cultural boonies when, for example, describing the Hollywood influence a la The Wild One movie (1953, with a motorcycle-riding, leather-clad Marlon Brando) on “outlaw” biker culture (specifically the Angels), or when writing about how outlaw bike-riding initially got started around the end of World War II, when PTSD-saturated vets started pegging around on bikes made from scrap metal. Or else he does a seedy, Norman Mailer-like deep dive into the Hell’s Angels lust for “gang-rape.” And the Angels’ similar, ribald lust for media publicity, which they were getting a lot of in the mid-1960s.
HST circles the drain of incredible specificity when describing the above mentioned concepts, or when talking, say, about Sonny Barger—president and most famous 1960s Angel leader of the Oakland chapter—and how the cult of outlaw biker circles function. (Fascistically, from the top down. And yet there is a sort of “communistic” or “cult-like” or “family-feeling” as well: When an individual Angel is messed with, they all join in revenge against the offender, like a Mamma Grizzly Bear attacking anyone who screws with her cubs.)
*(Read my own personal drama with the Hell’s Angels in my dumb, sordid youth. I was 21.)
Some of the cultural material, though, especially from this period in the 1960s, is fascinating. From the Angels’ involvement with Allen Ginsberg and Ken Kesey (hanging out doing massive doses of LSD at his compound in La Honda), to the Angels’ famous assaulting of anti-Vietnam War protestors on the campus of U.C. Berkeley, it’s all capturing a moment, an explosive era we’ll never see again, and which in many ways created the modernity we live in now, for better and worse. The 1960s were a time of extremism and reaction, a post-war revolt against the tyranny of the 1950s “Man in the Gray Flannel Suit.” The 1950s represented, for the majority of young Baby Boomers born immediately after the war, a time of mass conformity and docile servitude, the nuclear family with 2.5 kids, a Labrador and a picket-white fence. It was the time of the heteronormative, complacent, boring Bourgeoisie.
Except, of course, there was a minority culture of Beats and other rebels who were fomenting chaos, rebellion, individualism and independence underneath this safe façade. Consider the fact that the movies The Wild One and Rebel without a Cause both came out in 1953 and 1955 respectively, not to mention Allen Ginsberg’s free speech trial over his famous poem Howl, and, perhaps most crucially, Jack Kerouac’s classic On the Road, a novel of decadence, drugs and demons, which came out in 1957.
Nevertheless, the media wouldn’t fully pay attention, wake up and take note, really, until the Hell’s Angels started causing manic panic in the early 1960s. From their cutoff jean vests to their “colors” with insignia and Death’s Heads to their long hair and long beards, their vitriolic attitude and their nasty stench, not to mention the gang’s incredibly loud engines which destroyed all silence and peace, the men riding two or three abreast along highways all over California—notably Highway 101—they scared the living shit out of people. And yet, just like another freak-1960s phenomenon which scared the crap out of America and yet totally spellbound them—Charles Manson—the populace was fascinated.
There were tales of grotesque, over-the-top barroom brawls, rapes, jumpings, fights using motorcycle chains, spectacular crashes, knifings and deaths. Add to this the fact that they sometimes literally took over whole [small] towns for a day or two (Bass Lake, for example, which HST describes in profound detail) and you’ve got a cultural monster which nobody can deny.
Angels began getting more and more press coverage. They were good for newspapers. Some members—especially Barger—were given lengthy interviews. Many members claimed to be “misunderstood” and said they rarely started fights; it was always someone else who got things going. Women came to them, they said. HST goes into detail around these themes, too: Women, sex, rape, gang-rape. There are various divisions of women, he writes, such as “Mammas” who are regular women who sleep around with many Angels, then regular wives, and then some women who are chosen for team-play.
All these women, they say, are more than willing. They find the Angels and join. Some even have “Property of Hell’s Angels” tattooed on their backs. This strikes me as highly believable. Truth is, throughout history: When you have one or more powerful men, there are a bunch of women seeking out that force. Just the way it is. Power, guts, rebellion, strength attracts beauty. Always has.
Thompson writes a great deal about the Angels’ use of the swastika as an emblem. They painted it on their bikes, on their jackets, even tattoo it on their bodies sometimes. Despite many members using “The N-Word” frequently, and there being almost no Black members, the claim is that they aren’t actually racist but simply use the emblem for “shock value.” This also strikes me as believable, especially in the 1960s.
Punk rockers and even 1960s musical maniacs like Iggy Pop, among many others also used swastika emblems, and for the same reason. It was about shocking polite, conventional bourgeois society, not about proclaiming their righteous white supremacy. That’s not to argue that some Angels weren’t racist. Some surely were. Then again: In the 1960s this was sadly much more common than today. The Civil Rights Movement was still going on. The Angels fought with Black bikers sometimes, but they also coexisted and drank with, sometimes, Black biker groups like the East Bay Dragons, an all-Black outlaw clan. Barger and the Angels existed, after all, in Oakland most prominently. They were a minority, both racially and culturally.
But basically: The Angels were white lower-class bedraggled loser outlaw-bikers who felt alienated from society and wanted to show their egos, pride and individualism. Barger in one interview referred to his tribe of bikers as “individualists.” They took no overt political stands, though they did fight against the Berkeley student anti-war protestors and saw these kids as unpatriotic. They rejected LBJ’s so-called “Great Society.” Many of them worked part-time jobs some of the year and many collected part or fulltime unemployment insurance, paid for by everyone’s taxes. A smaller percentage worked regular jobs more or less fulltime, such as driving as truckers or being plumbers, electricians, etc. The vast majority of members were young, in their twenties.
These men were, however, make no mistake about it: Working-class. From the doldrums of lower-income American culture. Reading the book I couldn’t help but think, These guys would have been Trump supporters in 2024. They felt angry, rejected, denied, outcast. They were punk before punk, On the Road but with iron horses. In the 19th century they would have been wild cowboys fighting against Natives during westward expansion into unknown, forest-covered lands. Bonnie and Clyde. Rebels without a cause; literally. To the extent that there was any sort of “cause,” it was surely the collectivization of failure. They had been and felt they were failures in society’s beady, judgmental eyes. And so they said Fuck It and hopped the freight train of outsider culture, never to return.
In the end of the book, Thompson famously got beat up by a handful of Angels. By then he’d spent over a year with the group, driving around in his car following them around California going on “runs,” allowing them into his apartment to drink and fight, gulping down beers with them at bars all over the state, and, thankfully, recording and writing it all down as he did. He became friends—if that’s the right word—with some of them. But in the end they didn’t trust him, or got sick of him, or just didn’t like his vibe. They associated him with The Media in general, which was losing interest by later in 1966. The press often “got it wrong” according to the outlaws, and they felt misunderstood and shit on by the media in many ways.
Someone had to pay a price for that. Why not the journalist they’d taken under their wing. HST had even purchased a motorcycle. He’d seen some shit. He’d really penetrated—to whatever extent he could—their inner womb. One member punched him one day in a bar, out of nowhere, and suddenly he went down and all he saw were fists. Tiny, a gigantic member who liked him, broke it up after not too long. Thompson fled to his car and took off, heading south along 101 to the hospital. It was the end of an era, both for him and for the Angels. And it was the start of a brilliant writer’s career.
I think the overall lesson of the book—at least from a historical perspective—is that every action has an equal and opposite reaction. The Great Depression, in many ways, brought World War II (read my essay on Hitler’s rise to power here). After the war, the 1950s Era of Conformity arose. Against that came the flaming, nutty 1960s which created more war, pre-punk, free love, hippies, a new wave of rock-n-roll, and the Hell’s Angels. Each generation has rebelled against the one that came before it. My parents’ generation—the Boomers—reacted against their Silent Generation/Depression Era folks. My generation—Millennials—reacted against our Boomer parents. And I think we’re now starting to see Gen Z and even the generation younger than them rebel against Millennials.
HST saw this phenomenon and wrote about it in terms of rebellion and outsider-status. We can learn a lot from looking at what the people society “rejects” do. In the case of the Angels, almost everything they did seemed symbolic of a middle-finger against authority, morality, convention. Punk rock wasn’t much different a decade later, and they even dressed similarly; they just sliced off the beards and replaced the long hair with mohawks and chaos-spikes. But then in the 1980s metal music brought back the long rebel hair which had become The Anti Thing in the 60s.
Do we learn more about who we are by looking at “us” or by looking at the ones “outside”? I don’t know. Probably we need to look carefully at both.
I liked that you touched on that in your book, the odd hypocrisy of authority and hierarchy within a supposedly anti-authoritarian groups. Seems inevitable.