Name: Rolling Stone Founder Jann Wenner Remembers Hunter S. Thompson
Uploaded: 2022-10-05T17:26:03.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Rolling Stone Founder Jann Wenner Remembers Hunter S. Thompson' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2022-10-05. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Rolling Stone Founder Jann Wenner Remembers Hunter S. Thompson' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2022-10-05. Transcript available.

- The Joe Rogan Experience.
- There's so much of, you know,
when people think about Rolling Stone,
a lot of people think about the early days.
They think about Hunter.
You know, they think about when you guys covered
his run for sheriff.
I mean, that was a giant moment in culture too,
that this fucking madman was running for sheriff
and the panic, the moral panic that people had about,
oh my God, what if this guy actually becomes a sheriff
and takes up all the streets
and locks up all the drug dealers
who are actually selling drugs?
- No, no, he wasn't gonna lock up drug dealers,
he was gonna lock up bad drug dealers.
- Right.
All the drug dealers that were selling drugs.
- They were selling bad drugs,
he was gonna put up stocks.
- Yeah.
- On the main square and you'd have to be in a stock,
like in, you know, old Williamstown, Massachusetts or something.
He wanted to, they sawed the streets
and always rip up all the asphalt
and make anything grass, which was a good idea.
Rename the city from Aspen to Fat City.
- Yeah.
- On the theory, Hunter came up with it,
it would be more difficult for land developers
to sell something called Fat City Estates
than Aspen Estates, you know?
And then you couldn't, the police had to be unarmed
and then there'd be a giant parking lot out of town
that you could park at, and nobody,
other than residents, residents couldn't hunt or fish,
non-residents couldn't hunt or fish.
But he came close to winning, and this was in a very wealthy resort town
that was starting to have a hippie population.
And when we published his piece about that, and it was the first thing he did
for Rolling Stone,
it was called Freak Power in Iraqis, or the Battle of Aspen.
So, it got such serious attention, and other press and film crews from New York
and all of you,
kind of, "Ho, ho, the hippies are going to try to take over the ski town.
Well, let's see what happens," you know?
So much press came in, it just raised the stakes.
It became quite a serious showdown campaign at this wealthy resort,
which they came very close to winning.
But, two things about Hunter just off the bat.
Hunter became just the DNA of Rolling Stone.
I mean, his spirit, his thinking, his sense of adventure, his sense of fun,
his commitment to a better America, were at the heart of what we did.
And these were the same things that I felt.
And so, we just fell, we became very fast friends.
I mean, we just locked in almost immediately that we saw something special
between us
that we did together.
He could write, and I could edit, and we were very partners in a very real
sense of the world.
There was never, after we first met, there was never a question of whether or
not
we would work, not work with either.
It was always, from now on, we worked together.
And he was always overseeing what we were doing at the magazine,
with ideas, stories, and writers.
And he felt very committed to making the magazine a success.
And he did his own career.
Hunter is a, and I love Hunter.
And to this day, I miss him terribly, terribly.
And I wrote in my book, I said, "Well, wherever Hunter ends up, I want to go
there, too."
You know, and who knows where that'll be.
You know, I mean, you know, he just meant that much.
Yeah, the documentary, the Gonzo documentary, that was the first time I ever
really got to
see you talk about him.
And, you know, you're kind of the glue that holds that documentary together,
because you're
sort of the rational observer that was there during all the wildest and most
mad times.
He had, I mean, everybody loved to be with Hunter.
You couldn't, you couldn't get enough of being with Hunter, you know?
And including me after having Hunter for so much.
When you're with Hunter, when you were with Hunter, you were, like, felt you're
going to have more fun and become close to the edge of craziness and danger
than you were ever working in your life.
You know, just getting in the car with Hunter, you know, he would always have
to do something
that would scare the piss out of you.
You know, U-turns in the middle of a snowbound highway.
And one night we were driving from Cambridge to New Hampshire to visit Norman
Mailer for some strange reason.
We had spent the night in Cambridge and we had taken some acid and we got on
the road, head full of acid, driving up in the middle of the night to Maine.
And it's all mountain roads.
And so we'd go along and then all of a sudden, like, Hunter would turn the
headlights off.
And, I mean, you have mixed feelings at this point.
I, by this time, developed this sense that I'm safe with Hunter, no matter how
crazy he is, he knows what he's doing all the time, which he did.
So, on the other hand, he liked the idea of freaking people out, so I would go,
"Ah! Oh, Hunter! Stop it! Stop it!"
You know, like, and it would just make him happier to know that I was freaking
out, you know, so it was partly just to keep him going.
But then I realized what he was doing is he was looking ahead to Ben's and
memorizing the curves ahead so they could turn off the lights, which is risky
in itself.
But we got to Mailer's, we were visiting some colleague of ours who was staying
at the Maher's house.
We had the night before and taken us and made a tape, an old cassette tape of
screaming, like an exorcism, you know, screaming in the house, "Ah! Ah! Ah! Ooh!
Ah!"
You know, the ghouls going nuts.
So we'd get up there at 7:00 a.m. in the morning and set the tape deck in the
kitchen of the house, punch it so it starts with the screaming at the top
volume, and run out the door and don't come back!
Well, he loved to do that. We'd steal restaurant signs and that. I mean, there's
all sorts of madness and crazy, and it was fun.
You know, and it was innocent. It was like being a kid. You know, in part,
Hunter was a big kid, but also, you know, he was just a wonderful guy and, of
course, the funniest writer ever.
I enjoyed his copy come in. I just laughed my head off of some of the things he'd
say. I mean, unbelievably funny.
I think the first thing I read was the Vegas story. That was one of the first
pieces I ever read of him. And I remember thinking, like, "Who the fuck writes
like this?"
Like, it was, I don't remember how old I was when I read it, but, you know, it
was before, I think it was before or around the time Johnny Depp played him in
the movie.
No, much before. No, I mean, when I read it. When I read it, yeah. Because I
think the movie introduced me to him.
The movie introduced you to Hunter? Yeah. Wow. I mean, you even believe such a
person took place? But that was a faithful portrayal of an individual.
And lucky me, he got to be my closest friend for many years, and we worked
together so closely and all the time for many years.
Johnny got him really well. Johnny loved him. He wrote Vegas in, I think it was
1970, I think was about the time, '70 or '71. No, '70 because '71, '72 was a
campaign trail.
He wrote that. It was when he was writing. He started writing it in my basement
in San Francisco when he was staying with us.
And he was on an assignment to do something else, some serious thing about the
Chicano uprising in East Los Angeles, but in the middle of that assignment he
had to go to Vegas to cover a motorcycle race for Sports Illustrated.
And they wanted like a 200-word caption, but he never turned that in. Instead,
he started writing this piece about going to Vegas saying,
"We were somewhere on the edge of Barstow when the drugs took hold."
And then the image of this red Cadillac in that trunk full of animals, uppers,
downers, guns, you know, just madness.
But that piece was so strong in two parts. It was a novel, you know, a short
novel.
It became regarded as a classic of American literature today, up with kind of
like Huck Finn or Catcher in the Rye, stuff like that.
You know, interesting, another story about the kind of adolescent spirit in all
of us, of men who just can't give up being little boys and cherish that
wonderful freedom and sense of fun that none of us ever like to give up, really.
You know, it still lingers. I look in your eyes, I can see it, you know.
But I've lost my point.
It ignited this appetite for chaos in people that were dissatisfied with the
narrative that they had been told about the life that you were supposed to live
and the way you're supposed to go about things.
And, you know, and then the 70s was just such a pivotal moment, too, because
they had legalized, they had made all psychedelic drugs illegal.
And there was this water that was being thrown on this movement and it so
quickly sort of evaporated so quickly that the shift between the 50s and the 60s
was kind of paralleled between the shift of the 70s into the 80s.
So at the end, you know, things change, I mean, that's complicated.
Let me just, what you said about it liberated the chaos.
Yeah.
It ignited an appetite for chaos in people.
Exactly.
That it was accepted, that it didn't have to, that you could live loosely or
openly or you didn't have to obey all these rules.
That's what, that's what Dylan was about, too, you know, about the complexity
of life and all things going on in your head and, you know, the two great Dylan
albums, "Bring It All Back Home" and "Hyper 61" are about chaos.
But, yeah, at the end of the 70s, I mean, the 80s was the era of Reagan.
I mean, once you have Reagan leading the country, things change.
You know, the mood is different.
The values of society seem different.
In the 70s, we had either a full-scale rebellion going on against Nixon, you
know, which was an exciting time to be alive and seeing the Watergate hearings
and just sort of triumph and all that stuff.
And then Carter, as the end of the 70s, you know, the first real rock and roll
president and who Hunter had a great love of and who Carter loved him.
You know, and Carter loved Dylan and was of that spirit.
It's a great, there's a great moment in the documentary where it talks about
Hunter being at Carter's speech and going back to get his tape recorder and
recognizing that this is a very unusual moment.
This guy's different.
He was going up there and Carter was talking about the quality of justice.
Yeah.
You know, and talking about his spiritual ideas that he got from Reinhold Niebuhr,
if I pronounced that correctly, and quoting Dylan.
And very unusual for politicians.
Yeah.
And it was an accident.
Like, it looked like Teddy Kennedy was going to run for president then to be
the nominee.
So Hunter was following Teddy around and Teddy had to go to Georgia to be a
guest of honor at the law school there for Law Day.
And Carter spoke and gave this remarkable thing.
You don't hear people, politicians talk like that.
Then anyway, you didn't.
And Hunter was knocked out.
And we kind of got aboard the Carter campaign, wrote about Hunter almost, you
know, kind of, we became a part of it in a way.
And between Hunter's coverage of the McGovern campaign and the Carter campaign,
particularly the McGovern campaign, it put Rolling Stone on the map in a way,
although we'd done big stories and broken things before.
The idea that we were, the rock and roll magazine was covering national
politics.
And furthermore, the guy doing it was best known for covering motorcycle gangs,
you know, and plus sweating all the time because he's boozing and enjoying it.
That riveted everybody.
And it brought real attention to us because Hunter wrote the best coverage of
the campaign.
The best stuff about the candidates, the best about the political strategy and
also Rolling Stone was part of the annual big national story competing with the
New York Times.
Everybody else had on beat them all.
We were better than the rest of them.
Yeah, well that was, that was where it really sort of captured the way young
people were actually feeling versus the way it was being described.
Want some more of that?
I think I'll go with the water.
Okay.
I mean, that was, you know, what, what your magazine had covered and what he
had covered with fear and loathing on the campaign trail.
It was the way young people were feeling about it versus the way it was being
represented on television and in newspapers.
And it was people finally had a real voice that spoke to them and it really
resonated with people.
Yeah.
Because to see it through Hunter's eyes.
Also, it was the first time that 18 year olds were allowed to vote was in 1972.
And so that made it extra interesting to young people.
And also there was a war in Vietnam.
That's a big background.
I mean, that was, you know, that makes everything stand out a high relief.
Uh, but also Hunter was extremely fun.
They were pieces.
You don't have to know anything about politics to read those pieces.
They were so funny.
I mean, these things that is coming up with like Senator Muskie was shooting a
big gain on the campaign.
I mean, really people would come up to you and say, is it true about the either
gain?
Come on.
You know, you became being a drug from the pineal gland of some exotic South
African animal that enables you to stand still without making a movement.
But your functions and breeding cells for 24 hours and Muskie was having a
problem with this drug.
I mean, and people ask me if Hunter would give away his credentials to some
wild ass hippie to bribe them on the campaign trail.
It was a prankster.
I mean, you just couldn't have asked for anything better.
And as I say, that year of the campaign coverage, I just had the best time.
Occasionally I'd go out and meet him on the campaign trail.
The late nights were hysterical.
But the filing of the copy when he'd write this stuff and you just couldn't
understand where the hell did this guy come from.
Where did you come from?
You know, just...

Rolling Stone Founder Jann Wenner Remembers Hunter S. Thompson

- The Joe Rogan Experience.
- There's so much of, you know,
when people think about Rolling Stone,
a lot of people think about the early days.
They think about Hunter.
You know, they think about when you guys covered
his run for sheriff.
I mean, that was a giant moment in culture too,
that this fucking madman was running for sheriff
and the panic, the moral panic that people had about,
oh my God, what if this guy actually becomes a sheriff
and takes up all the streets
and locks up all the drug dealers
who are actually selling drugs?
- No, no, he wasn't gonna lock up drug dealers,
he was gonna lock up bad drug dealers.
- Right.
All the drug dealers that were selling drugs.
- They were selling bad drugs,
he was gonna put up stocks.
- Yeah.
- On the main square and you'd have to be in a stock,
like in, you know, old Williamstown, Massachusetts or something.
He wanted to, they sawed the streets
and always rip up all the asphalt
and make anything grass, which was a good idea.
Rename the city from Aspen to Fat City.
- Yeah.
- On the theory, Hunter came up with it,
it would be more difficult for land developers
to sell something called Fat City Estates
than Aspen Estates, you know?
And then you couldn't, the police had to be unarmed
and then there'd be a giant parking lot out of town
that you could park at, and nobody,
other than residents, residents couldn't hunt or fish,
non-residents couldn't hunt or fish.
But he came close to winning, and this was in a very wealthy resort town
that was starting to have a hippie population.
And when we published his piece about that, and it was the first thing he did
for Rolling Stone,
it was called Freak Power in Iraqis, or the Battle of Aspen.
So, it got such serious attention, and other press and film crews from New York
and all of you,
kind of, "Ho, ho, the hippies are going to try to take over the ski town.
Well, let's see what happens," you know?
So much press came in, it just raised the stakes.
It became quite a serious showdown campaign at this wealthy resort,
which they came very close to winning.
But, two things about Hunter just off the bat.
Hunter became just the DNA of Rolling Stone.
I mean, his spirit, his thinking, his sense of adventure, his sense of fun,
his commitment to a better America, were at the heart of what we did.
And these were the same things that I felt.
And so, we just fell, we became very fast friends.
I mean, we just locked in almost immediately that we saw something special
between us
that we did together.
He could write, and I could edit, and we were very partners in a very real
sense of the world.
There was never, after we first met, there was never a question of whether or
not
we would work, not work with either.
It was always, from now on, we worked together.
And he was always overseeing what we were doing at the magazine,
with ideas, stories, and writers.
And he felt very committed to making the magazine a success.
And he did his own career.
Hunter is a, and I love Hunter.
And to this day, I miss him terribly, terribly.
And I wrote in my book, I said, "Well, wherever Hunter ends up, I want to go
there, too."
You know, and who knows where that'll be.
You know, I mean, you know, he just meant that much.
Yeah, the documentary, the Gonzo documentary, that was the first time I ever
really got to
see you talk about him.
And, you know, you're kind of the glue that holds that documentary together,
because you're
sort of the rational observer that was there during all the wildest and most
mad times.
He had, I mean, everybody loved to be with Hunter.
You couldn't, you couldn't get enough of being with Hunter, you know?
And including me after having Hunter for so much.
When you're with Hunter, when you were with Hunter, you were, like, felt you're
going to have more fun and become close to the edge of craziness and danger
than you were ever working in your life.
You know, just getting in the car with Hunter, you know, he would always have
to do something
that would scare the piss out of you.
You know, U-turns in the middle of a snowbound highway.
And one night we were driving from Cambridge to New Hampshire to visit Norman
Mailer for some strange reason.
We had spent the night in Cambridge and we had taken some acid and we got on
the road, head full of acid, driving up in the middle of the night to Maine.
And it's all mountain roads.
And so we'd go along and then all of a sudden, like, Hunter would turn the
headlights off.
And, I mean, you have mixed feelings at this point.
I, by this time, developed this sense that I'm safe with Hunter, no matter how
crazy he is, he knows what he's doing all the time, which he did.
So, on the other hand, he liked the idea of freaking people out, so I would go,
"Ah! Oh, Hunter! Stop it! Stop it!"
You know, like, and it would just make him happier to know that I was freaking
out, you know, so it was partly just to keep him going.
But then I realized what he was doing is he was looking ahead to Ben's and
memorizing the curves ahead so they could turn off the lights, which is risky
in itself.
But we got to Mailer's, we were visiting some colleague of ours who was staying
at the Maher's house.
We had the night before and taken us and made a tape, an old cassette tape of
screaming, like an exorcism, you know, screaming in the house, "Ah! Ah! Ah! Ooh!
Ah!"
You know, the ghouls going nuts.
So we'd get up there at 7:00 a.m. in the morning and set the tape deck in the
kitchen of the house, punch it so it starts with the screaming at the top
volume, and run out the door and don't come back!
Well, he loved to do that. We'd steal restaurant signs and that. I mean, there's
all sorts of madness and crazy, and it was fun.
You know, and it was innocent. It was like being a kid. You know, in part,
Hunter was a big kid, but also, you know, he was just a wonderful guy and, of
course, the funniest writer ever.
I enjoyed his copy come in. I just laughed my head off of some of the things he'd
say. I mean, unbelievably funny.
I think the first thing I read was the Vegas story. That was one of the first
pieces I ever read of him. And I remember thinking, like, "Who the fuck writes
like this?"
Like, it was, I don't remember how old I was when I read it, but, you know, it
was before, I think it was before or around the time Johnny Depp played him in
the movie.
No, much before. No, I mean, when I read it. When I read it, yeah. Because I
think the movie introduced me to him.
The movie introduced you to Hunter? Yeah. Wow. I mean, you even believe such a
person took place? But that was a faithful portrayal of an individual.
And lucky me, he got to be my closest friend for many years, and we worked
together so closely and all the time for many years.
Johnny got him really well. Johnny loved him. He wrote Vegas in, I think it was
1970, I think was about the time, '70 or '71. No, '70 because '71, '72 was a
campaign trail.
He wrote that. It was when he was writing. He started writing it in my basement
in San Francisco when he was staying with us.
And he was on an assignment to do something else, some serious thing about the
Chicano uprising in East Los Angeles, but in the middle of that assignment he
had to go to Vegas to cover a motorcycle race for Sports Illustrated.
And they wanted like a 200-word caption, but he never turned that in. Instead,
he started writing this piece about going to Vegas saying,
"We were somewhere on the edge of Barstow when the drugs took hold."
And then the image of this red Cadillac in that trunk full of animals, uppers,
downers, guns, you know, just madness.
But that piece was so strong in two parts. It was a novel, you know, a short
novel.
It became regarded as a classic of American literature today, up with kind of
like Huck Finn or Catcher in the Rye, stuff like that.
You know, interesting, another story about the kind of adolescent spirit in all
of us, of men who just can't give up being little boys and cherish that
wonderful freedom and sense of fun that none of us ever like to give up, really.
You know, it still lingers. I look in your eyes, I can see it, you know.
But I've lost my point.
It ignited this appetite for chaos in people that were dissatisfied with the
narrative that they had been told about the life that you were supposed to live
and the way you're supposed to go about things.
And, you know, and then the 70s was just such a pivotal moment, too, because
they had legalized, they had made all psychedelic drugs illegal.
And there was this water that was being thrown on this movement and it so
quickly sort of evaporated so quickly that the shift between the 50s and the 60s
was kind of paralleled between the shift of the 70s into the 80s.
So at the end, you know, things change, I mean, that's complicated.
Let me just, what you said about it liberated the chaos.
Yeah.
It ignited an appetite for chaos in people.
Exactly.
That it was accepted, that it didn't have to, that you could live loosely or
openly or you didn't have to obey all these rules.
That's what, that's what Dylan was about, too, you know, about the complexity
of life and all things going on in your head and, you know, the two great Dylan
albums, "Bring It All Back Home" and "Hyper 61" are about chaos.
But, yeah, at the end of the 70s, I mean, the 80s was the era of Reagan.
I mean, once you have Reagan leading the country, things change.
You know, the mood is different.
The values of society seem different.
In the 70s, we had either a full-scale rebellion going on against Nixon, you
know, which was an exciting time to be alive and seeing the Watergate hearings
and just sort of triumph and all that stuff.
And then Carter, as the end of the 70s, you know, the first real rock and roll
president and who Hunter had a great love of and who Carter loved him.
You know, and Carter loved Dylan and was of that spirit.
It's a great, there's a great moment in the documentary where it talks about
Hunter being at Carter's speech and going back to get his tape recorder and
recognizing that this is a very unusual moment.
This guy's different.
He was going up there and Carter was talking about the quality of justice.
Yeah.
You know, and talking about his spiritual ideas that he got from Reinhold Niebuhr,
if I pronounced that correctly, and quoting Dylan.
And very unusual for politicians.
Yeah.
And it was an accident.
Like, it looked like Teddy Kennedy was going to run for president then to be
the nominee.
So Hunter was following Teddy around and Teddy had to go to Georgia to be a
guest of honor at the law school there for Law Day.
And Carter spoke and gave this remarkable thing.
You don't hear people, politicians talk like that.
Then anyway, you didn't.
And Hunter was knocked out.
And we kind of got aboard the Carter campaign, wrote about Hunter almost, you
know, kind of, we became a part of it in a way.
And between Hunter's coverage of the McGovern campaign and the Carter campaign,
particularly the McGovern campaign, it put Rolling Stone on the map in a way,
although we'd done big stories and broken things before.
The idea that we were, the rock and roll magazine was covering national
politics.
And furthermore, the guy doing it was best known for covering motorcycle gangs,
you know, and plus sweating all the time because he's boozing and enjoying it.
That riveted everybody.
And it brought real attention to us because Hunter wrote the best coverage of
the campaign.
The best stuff about the candidates, the best about the political strategy and
also Rolling Stone was part of the annual big national story competing with the
New York Times.
Everybody else had on beat them all.
We were better than the rest of them.
Yeah, well that was, that was where it really sort of captured the way young
people were actually feeling versus the way it was being described.
Want some more of that?
I think I'll go with the water.
Okay.
I mean, that was, you know, what, what your magazine had covered and what he
had covered with fear and loathing on th