Farewell, My Friend

Welcome to the season of loss. I’ve lost some close friends recently. At this age, perhaps it’s expected, but that makes it no more welcome.

My friend Tom Corcoran has died. Let me tell you about this wonderful, generous man.

Corcoran in Key West, May 1979

One morning many years ago, I awoke to an interesting message in my email inbox. “I put ‘Bob Dylan’ and ‘Hunter Thompson’ into Google and your name came up. Why?”

I told this unknown correspondent that I’d written books on Bob and Hunter and was, in fact, in the middle of writing another book on Hunter. He’d killed himself the year before and I wanted to write the first whole-life biography of Hunter Thompson. I wanted to talk about his work and the real man, whom I’d met years before and with whom I maintained an intermittent correspondence.  To much of the world. Hunter Thompson was a drug-addled clown. I was revolted by that and sought to write a book that would focus on his art and craftsmanship.

So anyway — after the email from a stranger, then came the phone.

After several minutes of banter, Corcoran revealed that he knew Hunter well. He’d babysat Hunter during the time he lived at Jimmy Buffett’s Key West home in the late Seventies.

In return, Uncle Hunter babysat Corcoran’s young son, Sebastian. Hunter was reliable, if eccentric, caretaker. A bullhorn was essential to his surrogate parenting style. (For more details, read Outlaw Journalist.)

So now, years later, a pre-breakfast email and a phone call. A Potsdam conference was in order. 

Corcoran lived squarely in the middle of Florida. I was upstate at the University of Florida, so I took a day off and made the two-hour drive to meet this guy.

Visiting Corcoran was like two middle-aged men having a play date. He had so much stuff – books, art prints, mementos – that he had two houses, side by side, to hold it all. I also discovered that in addition to a rich archive – this dude saved everything – that he had a steel trap mind. 

While everyone around him had been snorting coke and getting drunk, Corcoran had managed to remain relatively clean and sober.

There’s no doubt that meeting Corcoran enriched my book. Historian Douglas Brinkley served as Hunter S. Thompson’s literary executor. After Thompson’s suicide, there had been a lot of books devoted to the iconoclastic writer. But Brinkley said my book stood out, in part because I was the only one to deal with the “missing years” of Thompson’s life in Key West.

All credit, of course, to Corcoran.

I was nearly finished with that book (Outlaw Journalist, available wherever fine books are sold) when Corcoran began telling me that I needed to write a book about Key West in the Seventies. 

He even showed me a message from Thompson, dated less than two months before the suicide, suggesting that such a book must be written.

“Why don’t you write it?” I asked.

He was too close to it, he said. It needed to be written by someone on the outside. It needed to be me, he said.

It didn’t take a lot of convincing. I’d married a woman from Key West and both of her families went back several generations on the Rock. I had always wondered what a life hatched there would be like. 

Yet my wife spoke of “getting out” of Key West, as if it was something bad, a place to be avoided. It was paradise, yes, but also dangerous. 

As I thought about that era and considered the writers working and playing in Key West, I began to see it as a parallel to Paris in the Twenties, when Ernest Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein and the others redefined the landscape of American literature. Key West in the Seventies even had Thomas McGuane, the writer so often called the “new Hemingway” that he probably flinched at mention of the name. 

Even before I’d read a book by McGuane, I knew who he was. Like Thompson, he was a writer so famous in his era that even people who didn’t read books knew who he was.

McGuane in 2010, on the Raw Deal Ranch in Montana. I took this picture.

McGuane was portrayed as that drug-crazed new Hemingway they talked about in all the magazines, the one who was doing all that crazy stuff and getting married every 20 minutes or so down there in Key West.

That had been the public portrayal, at least. I’d seen what being a celebrity writer had done to Thompson. Yet I knew McGuane and his friends not only survived but prospered.

Whether that press portrayal was accurate or not, it intrigued me enough to want to know how McGuane, novelist/poet Jim Harrison, painter Russell Chatham and the others lived their lives. 

Hunter Thompson playing front-yard football with Sebastian Corcoran in Key West in the Seventies.

I’d gone on to read their books and saw writing this book as an opportunity, among other things, to revel in their work. 

I saw the potential of the story that Corcoran had told me. After generously giving me the idea, he stepped back. I think he had no interest in being the focal point of the book. That part was my idea.

That book, Mile Marker Zero, could not have been written without Corcoran’s monumental help, cooperation and steadfast kindness.

After Outlaw Journalist, I wanted to write a book with a happy ending. (Spoiler alert: Hunter Thompson kills himself at the end.)

I saw the Key West book as a redemption story. After earning fame as the greatest drug and alcohol user of his generation, Tom McGuane got sober. After being wed three times in 18 months — once to my dream woman, actor Margot Kidder — McGuane was thirty years into what he called a “jubilant marriage” with Laurie Buffett. (Yes, Jimmy’s sister.)

That was the story I wanted to tell. Redemption. A happy ending, on a Montana ranch.

But as I wrote the story, weaving together the adventures of McGuane, Harrison and Chatham, I realized it was really a book about Tom Corcoran and how he held together this world. 

Over the years I’d worked on the books, I learned all about Corcoran’s life, including his marriage to Judy. They’d had problems — don’t we all? — but in his case, that relationship was unresolved. Judy went missing. She was with friends, sailing on a spectacular afternoon in the Keys. Everybody jumped in the water to take a swim. All were high. 

They never found Judy.

So much for a happy ending. Before I turned the manuscript into the editor, I sent it to Tom, for fact-checking and editing suggestions. Corcoran was a brilliant writer and when he gave me a compliment — “You write like a pro, Bubba” — it made my heart soar like a hawk (Apologies to Thomas Berger for that one.)

When he read the section about Judy, he was taken aback. He’d told me the story but didn’t think it would be in the book. I was  ashamed of hurting him and said I’d take it out.

“No,” he said. “That’s part of the story.” This was followed my a long sigh. I offered again to take it out but he said the story was mine to tell.

We remained friends. When I was in cancer treatment, he sent me messages of support … and some good books.

He died of cancer, but we never knew he was sick. It wasn’t like him to share his pain. I have two extremely wonderful big brothers (one’s a brother in law, but he’s been in my life since I was 9.) But Corcoran was a big brother to me. I admired him so much. 

I wanted to be like him when I grew up. To quote Paul Simon, “Who’ll be my role model now that my role model is gone?”

Tom Corcoran with Judy and Sebastian in the Seventies.

Perhaps I ramble, so let’s gather the facts: Tom Corcoran has died. He was gifted as a writer, a photographer, a songwriter, a pal and a human being. He touched so many people and we all loved him.

Maybe I should just end this with the ending of Mile Marker Zero — one of our nights together, when we went out to dinner and had another evening of spectacular conversation.

Here:

Tom Corcoran now owns two houses, side by side, in a central Florida town at the outer reaches of Orlando’s gravitational pull. His adult son, Sebastian, lives in one, presiding over Corcoran’s huge, moody Russell Chatham lithographs and some of the artifacts from his life and career. Corcoran lives a few steps across the manicured yard in the house he reserves for his other possessions – a magnificent collection of books, more lithographs, more of his beautiful photographs of a golden age of Key West.

Corcoran in 1979, working on the screenplay for Cigarette Key in Buffett’s apartment, where his collaborator, Hunter Thompson, was bunking.

Corcoran sleeps here. 

It’s hard to find a seat. The place is more  warehouse than home. It is also where Corcoran works. There are no couches, no tables, no bar stools. The dining room holds most of the inventory for his small publishing business, The Ketch and Yawl Press. More books and boxes of Jimmy Buffett calendars, another Corcoran enterprise, fill the living room.

There are two chairs in the larger of the three rooms devoted to his library. One is a remnant from Buffett’s Waddell Street apartment. Corcoran could put a plaque on it and sell it to the Hard Rock Café: “Jimmy Buffett Sat Here.” It could also say, “Tom McGuane Sat Here” or “Hunter S. Thompson Sat Here,” but so far, no one has devised a theme restaurant built around literature.

In the office, where Corcoran writes his novels, there is a desk chair and a small chair for visitors, usually covered in piles of manuscript pages.

Tom Corcoran was long ago priced out of Key West, and lived in Fairhope, Alabama, for several years. Eventually, he found work writing about automobiles and became editor of a magazine about the cult surrounding the Ford Mustang. That job brought him back to Florida and he settled smack dab in the middle of the state this time.  He published three books about cars, but knew it was time for him to realize that long-dormant ambition to be a novelist. His muse, of course, was Key West.

He couldn’t afford to live there, but when he left the magazine job, he moved to the Keys in the Nineties, buying a home on Cudjoe and finally beginning to write the novels he’d always planned to write. They were mysteries set in Key West, built around a photographer who knew the island and all of its history. The character, Alex Rutledge, gets pulled into solving crimes.

“How much of Alex Rutledge is Tom Corcoran?” a visitor asks.

“Quite a bit,” he says.

Corcoran with Hunter S. Thompson on Sugarloaf Key, during their collaboration as screenwriters

In his fiction, he’s dealt – tangentially, mostly – with a lot of the real mysteries of Key West, including the disappearance of Bum Farto. He has not, and will not, write about the disappearance of Judy Corcoran. That would cause a raft of pain.

When his first novel, The Mango Opera, was published, his friends lined up to praise his books with dust-jacket blurbs that would be the envy of any American writer: Tom McGuane, Jim Harrison, Hunter S. Thompson, Jimmy Buffett. He became one of the best mystery writers in America. Though he does not sell books by the truckload, as does a Michael Connelly, he earns the praise of such masters of the craft. Connelly called one of Corcoran’s books “the reading highlight of my year.” 

He gave up the Cudjoe Key house some years back and now shares the twin houses with Sebastian. He goes to the Keys a half dozen times a year, usually staying with Dink Bruce.  He also writes songs with John Frinzi and Keith Sykes. He still collects a handsome royalty each year for a few minutes of collaboration with Jimmy Buffett three decades ago.

Out at dinner, he is kind and solicitous to his young waitress. The talk turns to music and Corcoran’s dinner companion tells her, “This dude wrote songs with Jimmy Buffett.”

“Really?” she asks. Though he’s grandfather age to her, you can see that celebrity remains a powerful aphrodisiac.

“Not only that,” the companion says. “He once wrote a movie with Hunter Thompson. And he’s a big-time mystery writer.”

“Really?” It’s drawn out three or four extra syllables.

It’s dark in the restaurant, so it’s not clear if Corcoran is blushing, but the smart money is on it.

He tells her a few stories about Buffett and Thompson in the old days in Key West. She’s smiling, ignoring all of her other tables.

“I’ve never been,” she says. “Key West, I mean. I’ve lived in Florida my whole life, but I’ve never been.”

“You should go.” Corcoran’s matter of fact, serious even. “It’s not what it was in my day, but you should still go.”

She smiles.

“I can’t finish this,” he says, nodding toward his plate. “Could you bring me something to pack it up in?”

“Yes, sir.”

Back at his house, he’s getting out of his car when he hears a hello as a bicycle speeds past in the dark. It’s Sebastian, home from an evening with friends. Corcoran walks over to his other front yard.

Tom Corcoran as I knew him

“Hello, Son,” he says. “I couldn’t eat all my dinner. Would you like it?”

“That’d be great,” Sebastian says. “I haven’t gotten around to eating yet.”

“It’s Italian. It’s good. I just wasn’t that hungry.”

“Thanks, Dad.”

Corcoran turns back toward his other house. “Goodnight, Son.”

“Good night, Dad.”

But Corcoran isn’t ready for bed just yet. If he didn’t have a visitor, he might be at work on his next Alex Rutledge novel. Instead, he looks through his files of photographs of Key West. He’s published one book, a limited-edition art book, of black and whites. Now he’s contemplating a companion book in color.

The photographs are sharp and vivid, not faded and blurred with time. Corcoran examines each one carefully, seeing occasional flaws, remembering the instant each photograph was taken.

Here’s McGuane, serenely high from the look in his eyes, with Richard Brautigan and Guy de la Valdene. That was on Duval, he thinks. Here’s Hunter S. Thompson, probably in 1978 or so, looking over a manuscript page in Buffett’s apartment, sitting in that chair that’s in the next room. And speak of the devil, here’s a young and hairy Jimmy Buffett, wearing the smallest of cut-off shorts, hanging off the side of his sloop.

Must’ve been 1974 or thereabouts. He wasn’t the multi-millionaire entrepreneur then, but aside from the hairline and the income, Corcoran isn’t sure all that much has changed.

He treats everything with surgical care: photographic prints are in plastic slipcases; valuable books have mylar covers. He has a whole bookcase devoted to his Key West collection, many of them rare, precious and beautiful.

You should turn this into a museum, the guest says.

He nods. “Perhaps I will.”

It’s well after midnight when he finally puts away the pictures and announces he’s ready for bed.

He locks the front door, turns out the lights, crosses the hall to his bedroom, and gets between the covers. 

Thinking about Key West again invigorates him, but he’s tired, so he falls asleep quickly, slipping into a dream before very long. Soon, he could see the blue water.

Google Translates a Review of the French Edition of My Book About Hunter S. Thompson

My book was called Outlaw Journalist in the English-speaking world. The title was a little more cumbersome in French. I saw that a review of the book appeared in a French publication, so I copied and pasted it into Google Translate and this is what I got. I particularly like the phrase “monkey emeritus.”

Hunter S. Thompson was the inventor of gonzo style: journalism written by a living pharmacy, a way to crack the American dream without skimping on LSD, peyote, Tequila, Chivas Regal and other amphetamines, a columnist who is featured as the character Principal’s reports.

The excellent biography by William McKeen does justice to this monkey emeritus.

The cover of the French paperback features this Al Satterwhite photograph, taken in Cozumel in 1974.

The monster was born in 1937 in Louisville, Kentucky, a city providing half the world’s bourbon. Adept of creative vandalism, the juvenile seeks to silence his demons by engaging in the Air Force. Editor of a cabbage leaf for sport pilots, it is already the bombing and the chameleon. He was fired in 1957 for “rebel and superior attitude.”

Here grouillot to Time columnist bowling Puerto Rico goalkeeper villa in Big Sur, freelance for The Observer in Latin America. Adept of hitchhiking in bermuda, the character loves shooting rats with a 357 Magnum. Reader Hemingway at the time of Bob Dylan, this atypical madmen consonant with a new generation of columnists. They call Tom Wolfe, Joan Didion, Terry Southern. Their way? Integrating the psyche of a journalist in the article itself, deal with the real weapons of fiction. In this new journalism, Thompson adds a kind of intimate caving with whims and exciting. Set in 1964 in San Francisco, he lives between the world of psychedelic hippies and the leather community while the Hells Angels, which he dedicated in 1967 an essay memorable him to be beaten by those crazy bikers. “Journalism, he said, pays for our continued education.

Now camped in his hut in Aspen, Thompson throne with his eternal cigarette holder and his Hawaiian shirt in the woods elk stolen Hemingway. Looks like a kind of Walt Whitman redesigned by Robert Crumb. The brilliant crazy wrote to President Johnson asking him to be appointed Governor of Samoa before embarking on one of his terrible raids journalism. Will pay for the presidential candidates of 1968: Richard Nixon, his staff Antichrist, “a nightmare of intrigue, bullshit and suspicion”, and his rival Humphrey, “an ignoble body electrified.

“Hunter did not commit suicide, Hunter followed the Way of the Samurai” (Iggy Pop)

Freak. Described by one witness as “a cross between half-mad hermit and a Tasmanian devil”, this psychotic Celinian is recruited by the fledgling Rolling Stone magazine, which he made the beautiful days. There he publishes Loathing in Las Vegas, the story of a drift distorted through the game city, wrote to the Dexedrine and bourbon during the summer of 1971. Journalism vision, stretched, torn by lightning psychotropic, as if the Stones put music in the Apocalypse of St. John. The legend of gonzo Thompson begins to take shape. The man, safari hat covers the presidential campaign of 1972 or the fall of Saigon, and sometimes signed “Martin Bormann” on hotel registers, becomes a character in the comic strip Doonesbury Uncle Duke, a reporter with the glasses of ‘Aviator seeing bats everywhere.

After 1976, Thompson patina. Cocaine him gnawing nostrils. His wife Sandy left him. He was fishing for tarpon in Key West, is the portrait of Muhammad Ali, hangs out with Jim Harrison or John Belushi, then resumed a weekly column in the Examiner. Working in his kitchen in the middle of televisions turned on, the super-freak of the Reagan gently invite to vote for Bill Clinton, whom he lent “the loyalty of a lizard who lost his tail.” The man who loved to “dedicate” his books with a bullet becomes the totem of young Hollywood, revered by Sean Penn or Johnny Depp, who will play in the film Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. But, less a prisoner of his mythology, the old hunter scalps in 2005 will choose the end of Hemingway’s heroes: a .45 caliber gun in his mouth. “Hunter did not commit suicide, Hunter followed the Way of the Samurai,” says Iggy Pop. Consistent with this life pyrotechnic is the gun that his ashes were eventually scattered.

Hunter S. Thompson: journalist and off-the-law, William McKeen (Tristram, translated from English by Jean-Paul Mourlon, 496 p., 24 euros).

Hunter S. Thompson

Sweet Mysteries of Life

My father died when I was young, and there are a few million things I wish I could talk about with him. He was 53 and I was 20. I’ve significantly outlived him.

I inherited most of his books — and it’s daunting. He had everything. Go into my living room, where I keep this prized library, and you’ll find an impressive collection  of world literature. Run your fingers over the spines: Thuycides, Plato, Aristotle, through all of Jane Austen and Henry James, and that fun couple, Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne

This photograph of Raymond Chandler kind of looks like my father.

I have a beautiful edition of Leaves of Grass, printed (appropriately) with a grass leaf cover. I have his copy of The Bible as Living Literature

He loved Vladimir Nabokov, and could recite parts of Finnegans Wake from memory. He was a huge fan of James Joyce and so the portrait of Joyce next to the living-room bookshelves — which I purchased from a Dublin street artist — is there in tribute to him. I’ve appreciated Joyce’s short stories but never made it through Ulysses or Finnegans Wake.

I have such strong memories of my father performing passages basso profundo.

But his tastes were so catholic. Note lower case. 

My father was one of those guys with a book in every room — living room, family room, bedroom, bathroom. Different books for different moods.

I share one of his addictions, though mine did not appear until many years after his death. We both love(d) detective fiction.

I remember when we were stationed in England in the 1950s. Dad had a lot of paperback mysteries strewn around the house. My brother got custody of those books when Dad died, so I’ve been playing catch-up.

Erle Stanley Gardner, creator of Perry Mason

The recent HBO series devoted to the Perry Mason origin story got me reading the Erle Stanley Gardner omnibus my son Jack bought for me last year at a garage sale. Mom and Dad used to devour those books.

I bought a few Raymond Chandler collections from eBay. Dad, in particular, loved Chandler.

And there was a less-well-known writer, named John Dickson Carr. I remember so clearly my father reading his book, The Problem of the Wire Cage. I await the arrival of a battered 60-year-old paperback from eBay.

I wish I could talk over these books with my Dad. I was so unformed when he died. In the last year of his life, he bought me two books that meant so much to me — The Boys on the Bus by Timothy Crouse and In Cold Blood by Truman Capote. I was the only member of the family who showed no interest in following him into a medical career, so he wanted to support me in the work I chose.

Somewhere along the way, I became a fan of mystery novels. Maybe it started with Carl Hiaasen’s books, back in the 1980s. I’m not sure those are traditional mysteries — they’re more like farces with undertones of ecological skullduggery.

His latest book, Squeeze Me, spoofs the crimes against humanity at the Palm Beach White House, where the president is known only by his secret service code name: Mastodon.

Hiassen’s novels have only a couple of continuing characters. Alternating novels feature Skink, the renegade former governor of Florida. War hero and patriot Clinton Tyree returned from Vietnam filled with idealism and entered public life. He was elected governor, but then became frustrated by the rampant corruption in the state, and so disappeared.

But he didn’t exactly disappear. Tyree went underground as an eco-terrorist, subsisting on roadkill.

Thankfully, Skink appears in Squeeze Me. (He has also appeared in one of Hiaasen’s entries in his best-selling series of young-adult novels. Hoot is the best-known of his YA books.)

Squeeze Me got me laughing during this pandemic, and I wrote about that book a few posts back. Find it here.

But my old man would have really loved books by two writers whose work is like crack to me: Michael Connelly and Tom Corcoran.

Both are known for their long-running series of novels with continuing protagonists. Connelly and Corcoran are so expert at their craft that it does not matter in what order you read the books. You can read the latest Connelly novel about Harry Bosch and not feel left out.

Bosch is the character to whom Connelly most often returns. He was introduced 30 years ago as a Vietnam veteran, born to a prostitute and a (then) unknown father. His mother is murdered, Bosch grows up in foster homes, serves as a tunnel rat in Vietnam before becoming a cop. With each case, he avenges his mother’s murder. “Everybody counts or nobody counts.”

Along the way, Connelly has introduced other continuing characters, including FBI profilers Rachel Walling and Terry McCaleb. He had to kill off McCaleb several years back, because Clint Eastwood bought the rights to a novel featuring McCaleb. The character was around 40, but when he was played by the Great Squinter in Blood Work, Connelly realized he had to dispose of his creation. In a meta moment, Connelly addressed the issue of Eastwood’s major plot twist that perverted the relationships in the Blood Work novel. This showed in conversation, when McCaleb notes — not long before his demise — how it sucked to be played by a geezer in the movies.

Along the way, Connelly created another character. Since he showed a great affinity with police stories, he decided to master the courtroom thriller. Thus was Mickey Haller born. Turns out he’s the half brother of Harry Bosch — we finally find out the identity of the father — and works out of the backseat of his car. Connelly inaugurated a series of Lincoln Lawyer novels, then two years ago, introduced a young detective who lives in a lean-to on the beach, Renee Ballard. 

Another continuing character, Jack McEvoy, harkens from Connelly’s days as a newspaper reporter. He appeared in The Poet, The Scarecrow (one of Connelly’s very best) and Fair Warning. Once a mad-dog journalist, these days Jack works for a non-profit reporting collective. Connelly keeps up with the times. His characters often show up in each other’s novels. Bosch might appear in a McEvoy book and Bosch makes frequent walk-ons in the Mickey Haller stories.

(FYI, Bosch is the excellent Prime Video series starring the perfectly cast Titus Welliver as the detective. If you have not seen it, six seasons await your binge. The seventh season is in production.)

A few years back, the jacket of a Tom Corcoran novel bore a quote from Connelly that said Corcoran’s book Air Dance Iguana was “the reading highlight of the year.” 

That is high praise. 

Tom Corcoran

Corcoran’s protagonist isn’t a police detective. Alex Rutledge is a Key West photographer well connected to cops and reporters and gets roped into solving mysteries in America’s southernmost city. 

Corcoran’s books have the added attraction of their setting. He gives us the underbelly of Key West, not just the tourist version. His books are fecund with sights, sounds and tastes of Key West. 

As an even further added attraction: the setting, the heat, the lack of clothing, the island breezes . . . they all combine to make these Corcoran books sexier than your average detective novel.

I’ve read all of his books and his new one, The Cayo Hueso Maze, is his best. Again, you can start with this Alex Rutledge novel, then read the rest of them — and trust me, you’ll want to — in any order.

Corcoran was an Ohio boy, but was assigned to Key West in 1968, and he’s spent most of the last 50-plus years in the islands, and he knows the town’s deep history, having palled with Tennessee Williams, Thomas McGuane and Jim Harrison. He wrote a couple of songs with new-kid-in-town Jimmy Buffett (whom he also housed when Buffett lacked a place of his own) and co-authored two unproduced screenplays with Hunter S. Thompson.

(Of course, if you’re interested in Corcoran’s life, you can always read my swell book, Mile Marker Zero.)

We are in the middle of a global pandemic, so reading a Tom Corcoran book might be the only way to take a trip to the island.

Click on these links to buy the two latest books — Connelly’s The Law of Innocence and Corcoran’s The Cayo Hueso Maze

Michael Connelly’s website: www.michaelconnelly.com
Tom Corcoran’s website: www.tomcorcoran.net

Land of the freak and home of the brave

Hunter S. Thompson lived a huge life. It’s so monumental that it’s nearly impossible to tell the whole widescreen Technicolor story. 

Hunter S. Thompson in “Freak Power”

I know, because I tried to wrestle that life between covers when I wrote Outlaw Journalist a dozen years ago.

At least I had the luxury of a book with wide-open pages.

To tell Hunter’s story on film is tougher. Maximum ass-time in seats rarely exceeds two hours, so you have that limit.

So what’s happened with tellers of Thompson stories is that they have begun to break off chunks of this epic life, to focus on just a part of the narrative.

A couple of years ago, Timothy Denevi examined Thompson’s 1970 political campaign and his influential role as a journalist covering the 1972 presidential campaign. He called his excellent book Freak Kingdom.

Click above to order the film.

Daniel Joseph Watkins put together a lavishly illustrated coffee table book celebrating that 1970 campaign and now he’s co-directed a new documentary. Both the book and film are called Freak Power. 

Watkins and his co-director, Ajax Phillips, have done a masterful job filleting the contours of Thompson’s life and creating a riveting, inspiring and heartbreaking documentary of a critical time in the life of Hunter S. Thompson and his country.

As the Sixties limped to that decade’s sad conclusion, Thompson retreated to Aspen, Colorado. He evacuated the Bay Area after a few years in San Francisco, where he’d witnessed the birth of the counterculture. 

He found peace and beauty and the community he wanted in Aspen — like-minded friends he fondly called freaks. As was the case with most of the country in that foul era, there was a generational divide in the town. 

Aspen’s powers-that-be included old-guard Germans who’d come to the Colorado ski village after ending their Nazi careers. They had become the new establishment, and, joined by the conservative town folk, they went to war with the long-haired young folk who’d moved to town to ski, fuck and smoke dope.

One of the stores posted a sign: No Hippies Allowed.

Into this world came Thompson, who soon joined in with the other young folk — Thompson was 33 in 1970 — to look for a different kind of society.

“We were the aberrants,” Thompson’s friend Ed Bastian said. “We were freaks of nature. So we might as well call  ourselves freaks.”

With his friends, Thompson helped established the Freak Power movement. He was placed on the ballot as a candidate for sheriff, with a platform that called for renaming Aspen “Fat City.” It was a move to scare away developers and tourists. “Sod the streets at once,” he said elsewhere in his platform. He wanted a pedestrian town.

Click on the cover to order.

Though Thompson was funny, running for sheriff wasn’t really a joke. He believed that politics was the art of controlling your environment. And he and his friends thought they could really establish a new utopia in the mountains.

We so rarely take funny people seriously. Many assumed his campaign for sheriff was some sort of prank. Watching the film, you can see idealism in his eyes.

And what we also see in Freak Power is Thompson’s seriousness of purpose. He had a lot of good ideas, and planned to use the office of sheriff — if he’d won the election — as sort of an ombudsmen within the community. 

Again, Thompson was ahead of his time. The sort of law-enforcement model he suggested is similar to the proposals we hear in the wake of the defund-the-police movement.

So he was putting forward a lot of great and innovative ideas, but he couldn’t help himself. He had to be funny. 

For example: the incumbent sheriff, Carrol Whitmire, had a short, well-groomed head of hair. Since one of the gripes the Aspen old guard had with the hippies was with their tendency to be hirsute, Thompson shaved his head, so he could refer to Sheriff Whitmire as “my long-haired opponent.”

Freak Power shows the campaign in all of its glory. It makes no effort to tell the full-life story of Hunter S. Thompson. That might take three 10-episode seasons on Netflix.

Click on the cover to order

Instead, you see this brilliant guy, climbing to his peak. His first book, Hell’s Angels, was behind him. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and his campaign coverage for Rolling Stone were ahead. (His first article for Rolling Stone was about the campaign)

Watkins and Phillips use 1970-era films from a variety of sources. The images are crisp and the sound is excellent. There’s nothing about this film that looks dated.

As always. Thompson’s civic wisdom is timeless. His analysis of American political experience — spoken 50 years ago in an Aspen hotel — could have been spoken yesterday.

Things are pretty foul. A lot of friends shake their heads about the state of the modern world and say, “I wonder what Hunter would say about all of this.”

He’s already said it. 

Listen to him in Freak Power and re-read his political coverage. He warns us about the nation’s Trumps, no matter what their names. Denevi, in Freak Kingdom, pays tribute to Thompson’s enduring political wisdom.

Freak Power is a fantastically well-made film, laser focused on that long-ago campaign but with wisdom that resonates today. The story is told with the vintage film and with voiceovers by the surviving participants. They appear at the end, old soldiers speaking of their battle and their eventual survival. 

Throat, meet lump. 

Fantastic Monument

Hunter S. Thompson, 1937-1972

“This may be the year when we finally come face to face with ourselves; finally just lay back and say it — that we are really just a nation of 220 million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns, and no qualms at all about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable….. [W]hat a fantastic monument to all the best instincts of the human race this country might have been, if we could have kept it out of the hands of greedy little hustlers…. Jesus! Where will it end? How low do you have to stoop in this country to be president?”

Hunter S. Thompson, 1972