“On Labor Day 1966, I pushed my luck a little too far and got badly stomped by four or five Angels who seemed to feel I was taking advantage of them. A minor disagreement suddenly became very serious….I got in my car and sped off, spitting blood on the dashboard and weaving erratically across both lanes of the midnight highway until my one good eye finally came into focus….I was tired, swollen, and whipped. My face looked like it had been jammed into the spokes of a speeding Harley, and the only thing keeping me awake was the spastic pain of a broken rib.”
That is from the postscript to Hunter Thompson’s Hell’s Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga. It was really the only ending possible to the book. Thompson, a young journalist trying to make his name, wrote a story about the Hell’s Angels and then decided to spend even more time with them to churn out a whole book. Sooner or later, it was inevitable that he would get beat to a pulp in the parking lot of a bar.
But, let’s back up a bit. Seemingly overnight back in the mid-1960s, the Hell’s Angles became a national news sensation. Coast to coast, the newspapers and TV were filled with tales of the terrors of a rampaging army of motorcycle terrorists. It was as if we had the modern media in the age of Genghis Khan providing vivid descriptions of the Mongol Hordes descending upon idyllic villages in bucolic settings.
This horde rose motorcycles, though, and not just any old motorcycles: Souped-up Harley Davidsons; really big motorcycles; really loud motorcycles. Imagine a group of those motorcycles with drivers in leather and nasty snarls tearing down the highway on their way to your town. You can lock up your wife and kids all you want; it won’t matter. That is some seriously gripping news right there. Guaranteed to sell a paper or some commercial air time.
One problem with the narrative: there were never really all that many Hell’s Angels. A couple hundred, maybe, split up over clubs in different cities scattered across California. They weren’t the only motorcycle gang at the time, but the Gypsy Jokers, for example, just didn’t have a name that sounded as threatening. Hell’s Angels. Marketing genius right there.
Hunter Thompson bought a motorcycle and spent some time riding with and hanging out with the Angels. What does he find? Well, if you turn you this book expecting riveting accounts of mayhem, you’ll be pretty disappointed.
Don’t get me wrong. The Hell’s Angels were thugs who reveled in their image and happily engaged in many a bar fight. An attack on one Angel was an attack on all Angels, so if you ever got into a fight with one, the whole gang would pile on. If you were a California bar owner in the mid-1960s, and a group of Hell’s Angles rolled in, it was a race between whether the profits from beer sales or the inevitable damage to your bar would be bigger. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. If you were a young female and you decided to spend a couple hours drinking beer with the guys, well, you probably didn’t win that bet. Like I said, these are not the sort of people you want to invite over to your backyard barbecue.
But, were they a national menace? For example: the police in Ketchum, Idaho actually mounted a machine gun on the top of the downtown drugstore just in case the Hell’s Angels ever rolled into town. (That fact was particularly fascinating to me—my grandparents moved to Ketchum when I was a kid, so I went there every summer. Alas, I didn’t know about the machine gun.) A report that the Angles might be coming to town was an event at the local police station.
Curiously however, it was not just the local police who paid attention to reports on where the Angels were heading. Thompson has an extended account of the year the Hell’s Angels descended on Bass Lake for their Fourth of July rampage. When they got there, the roads were filled with…tourists. Yes, tourists hoping to see the Hell’s Angels in action. One convenience store owner hired some thugs of his own to ward off the Angles…so the Angels bought all their beer at a different store. A couple of days of alcohol and drugs down by the lake, and they all headed home. You spend the whole time reading this account, just waiting for the violence to erupt…and it never does.
What was going on? As Thompson’s account makes clear, the individuals in the Hell’s Angles fit a description. They were, in a word, losers. Guys without stable jobs, drifting from one thing to the next. No real family or friends. And suddenly with the Angels, they had a family. The joined Hell’s Angles to get that sense of belonging to something, to having something bigger than themselves of which they could feel like they were part. The reputation of terror was part of the thrill; people were scared of the Hell’s Angels and suddenly a bunch of guys who nobody would have ever noticed were the center of attention. Indeed, one of the things that the Angles loved the best was to roll into a place, see the looks of terror on the faces of everyone there and then proceed to…be really nice.
The most remarkable thing about Thompson’s book is that it was published before the Rolling Stones thought it would be a great idea to hire the Hell’s Angles to provide security at the Altamont concert. Reading this book, you know exactly how that story would end. Bring in the Angels, ply them with lots of beer in a rather crowded environment, and…what could possibly go wrong? Of course the Angels killed a guy. Of course they did.
That the Hell’s Angels were a thuggish gang in the mid-1960s is really obvious. That doesn’t explain, however, why they were national news, why everyone was afraid of them across the land. There simply were not enough of them to pose a large scale threat. Then it hits you. The media were not any different in the mid-1960s than they are today. Imagine a small group of people—a few hundred in a nation of hundreds of millions—whose behavior is beyond civilized norms. It isn’t a big group, so without media coverage, you would probably never know this group even exists. After all, you don’t actually know a million people, so if a group’s size is one per million, you’ve never met anyone in the group. But get a few camera shots and write a story about the most egregious activities and never quite mention how small the group is, and voila, instant story! The small group of disenfranchised losers is suddenly the biggest menace to the nation.
The story of this book is indeed a strange and terrible saga. It is impossible to read this and not lament the lives destroyed by this gang. But the book itself also raises some really interesting questions about media attention to violent fringe groups. Was anyone’s life actually improved when the New York Times and Hunter Thompson himself, made the Hell’s Angels a household name?
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