Hell's Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga

by Hunter S. Thompson

  I expected a denial of the strange intelligence attributed to him by The New York Times … but no, he was proud of his insights and eager to be quoted further. I had no sooner mentioned the Hell’s Angels than he began to ramble about “ringleaders, Communists and narcotics.” He was privy to information that four Hell’s Angels had been arrested in Connecticut, en route to Laconia with a “carload of drugs, hand weapons and a sawed-off shotgun.” He was not sure whether these four had trained south of the border. “I’d rather not say where we got the information that they trained in Mexico,” he said. “It was confidential. It came in the mail. But I turned it over to the FBI right away. They’re following up on the Communist angle. We got some pictures of them wearing swastikas.‡

  When I asked him how many Hell’s Angels had been arrested he said none, or none that admitted it anyway. Not even those four bums in Connecticut would admit to being Angels. At one point somebody in Laconia had seen a car with California plates, but it too had disappeared.

  About halfway through our talk I got a strong whiff of the transmogrification factor, but I was hardly prepared for the mayor’s special fillip on it. There were plenty of Hell’s Angels at the riot, “but they escaped,” he explained, “behind a wall of fire.” While he elaborated on this I checked my calender to make sure I hadn’t lost track of the days. If it was Sunday, perhaps he had just come back from church in a high, biblical state of mind. At any moment I expected to hear that the Angels had driven their motorcycles straight into the sea, which had rolled back to let them pass. But no, it wasn’t like that. The mayor was not loath to give details of the escape; he wanted law enforcement agencies everywhere to be warned of the Angels’ methods. Knowledge is power, he opined.

  So Mayor Lessard described for me, in what sounded like sober tones, how the Hell’s Angels—prior to the riot—had soaked a major egress road with gasoline. And then, at the height of the violence, just as they were about to be arrested, they roared out of town at great speed … and the last one to cross the gasoline soak dropped a match on it. A sheet of flame exploded in the night, making pursuit impossible. Yes, it was the old firewall technique, a legacy of the Boer War. It was highly successful in Laconia. The lawmen were stopped in their tracks by heat so intense that it presumably scrambled the crystals in their shortwave-radio transmitters. Had the Hell’s Angels been any less clever, they might have been intercepted, by means of a general alert, somewhere between New Hampshire and California.

  As it was, they made it back safely, and with plenty of time to shake the cross-country dust out of their clothes for the Bass Lake Run just two weeks later. There was no denying the wizardry of it, and when the clan came together it was a prime topic of conversation. Everybody wanted to congratulate the hardies who’d pulled it off … but for some reason nobody spoke up. The only Angel who knew anything more about Laconia than what the others had read in the newspapers was Tiny, whose ex-wife had called him from a Laconia telephone booth at the height of the action. One of the low points of the Bass Lake Run was Tiny’s rueful declaration that no Angels had made it to Laconia.

  “My old lady was right there,” he told the disappointed outlaws, “and if any of our people were there she’d have told me. Those guys from Quebec were the ones—them and a bunch called Banditos, from the East. They showed real class. We should get together with those guys.”

  This news caused the others to stare balefully at the fire. Finally somebody grunted, “Shit, that was a bunch of amateurs—if we’d been there they wouldn’t of busted it up so easy. Man, fifteen thousand bikes in one town—I tell you it hurts my mind.”

  After the first wild stories were scaled down, nobody, even in respectable motorcycle circles, thought the Hell’s Angels had anything to do with the Laconia trouble. Cycle World, which calls itself “America’s leading motorcycle-enthusiasts’ publication,” blamed French-Canadian outlaws, refugees from “the scabby side of motorcycling in the Eastern United States,” and “radical crackpots, some of whom are in public offices in towns around Laconia …”

  ‡ Tiny was arrested for assaulting the officer whose leg got broken. A cop at the scene said he saw Tiny do it with a Coke bottle. Nine months later, after lengthy proceedings, the charge was reduced to “disorderly conduct” and Tiny paid a $150 fine. The felony charge was dropped because films showed Tiny falling on the officer’s leg after being clubbed on the head by another cop.

  ‡ Cycle World magazine

  ‡ The same casualty pattern prevailed in the Watts riot in August. Of the thirty-four killed, thirty-one were Negroes.

  ‡ The Laconia racing weekend was held on schedule in 1966. There was massive police pressure and no rioting, perhaps because the only Hell’s Angel on hand was pacified by LSD.

  ‡ No swastikas were visible in any of the photos he sent me, which presumably were the most convincing he could round up.

  21

  Lies! You’re lying! You’re all lying against my boys!

  —Ma Barker

  By late summer of 1965 the Angels had become a factor to be reckoned with in the social, intellectual and political life of northern California. They were quoted almost daily in the press, and no half-bohemian party made the grade unless there were strong rumors—circulated by the host—that the Hell’s Angels would also attend. I was vaguely afflicted by this syndrome, since my name was becoming associated with the Angels and there was a feeling in the air that I could produce them whenever I felt like it. This was never true, though I did what I could to put the outlaws onto as much free booze and action as seemed advisable. At the same time I was loath to be responsible for their behavior. Their pre-eminence on so many guest lists made it inevitable that a certain amount of looting, assault and rapine would occur if they took the social whirl at full gallop. I recall one party at which I was badgered by children and young mothers because the Angels didn’t show up. Most of the guests were respectable Berkeley intellectuals, whose idea of motorcycle outlaws was not consistent with reality. I told the Angels about the party and gave them the address, a quiet residential street in the East Bay, but I hoped they wouldn’t come. The setting was guaranteed trouble: heaping tubs of beer, wild music and several dozen young girls looking for excitement while their husbands and varied escorts wanted to talk about “alienation” and “a generation in revolt.” Even a half dozen Angels would have quickly reduced the scene to an intolerable common denominator: Who will get fucked?

  It was Bass Lake all over again, but with a different breed of voyeur: this time it was the Bay Area’s hip establishment, who adopted the Angels just as eagerly as any crowd of tourists at a scraggy Sierra beer market.‡ The outlaws were very much the rage. They were big, dirty and titillating … unlike the Beatles, who were small, clean and much too popular to be fashionable. As the Beatles drifted Out, they created a vacuum that sucked the Hell’s Angels In. And right behind the outlaws came Roth saying, “They’re the last American heroes we have, man.” Roth was so interested in the Angels that he began producing icons to commemorate their existence—plastic replicas of Nazi helmets with swinging slogans, “Christ was a Hype” and Iron Crosses, which he sold on the teen-age market from coast to coast.

  The only problem with the Angels’ new image was that the outlaws themselves didn’t understand it. It puzzled them to be treated as symbolic heroes by people with whom they had almost nothing in common. Yet they were gaining access to a whole reservoir of women, booze, drugs and new action—which they were eager to get their hands on, and symbolism be damned. But they could never get the hang of the role they were expected to play, and insisted on ad-libbing the lines. This fouled their channels of communication, which made them nervous … and after a brief whirl on the hipster party circuit, all but a few decided it was both cheaper and easier, in the long run, to buy their own booze and hustle a less complicated breed of pussy.

  The only really successful connection I made for the Angels was with Ken Kesey, a young novelist‡‡ livi
ng in the woods near La Honda, south of San Francisco. During 1965 and ’66 Kesey was arrested twice for possession of marijuana and finally had to flee the country to avoid a long prison term. His association with the Hell’s Angels was not calculated to calm his relationship with the forces of law and decency, but he pursued it nonetheless, and with overweening zeal.

  I met Kesey one afternoon in August at the studios of KQED, the educational TV station in San Francisco. We had a few beers at a nearby tavern, but I was forced to leave early because I had a Brazilian drum record to take out to Frenchy at the Box Shop. Kesey said he’d come along, and when we got there he made a great hit with the four or five Angels still on the job. After several hours of eating, and drinking and the symbolic sharing of herbs, Kesey invited the Frisco chapter down to La Honda for a party on the coming weekend. He and his band of Pranksters had about six acres, with a deep creek between the house and the highway, and a general, overcrowded madness in the private sector.

  As it happened, nine marijuana charges against the Kesey menagerie were dropped on Friday; this was duly noted in the Saturday papers, which appeared in La Honda just about the time Kesey was posting a sign on his gate saying: THE MERRY PRANKSTERS WELCOME THE HELL’S ANGELS. The sign, in red, white and blue, was fifteen feet long and three feet high. It had a bad effect on the neighbors. When I got there, in the middle of the afternoon, five San Mateo County sheriffs’ cars were parked on the highway in front of Kesey’s property. About ten Angels had already arrived and were safely inside the gate; twenty others were said to be en route. The pot was boiling nicely.

  I had brought my wife and small son along, and we wanted to go down to the beach for a short meal before joining the festivities. Several miles down the road I stopped at the general store in San Gregorio, a crossroads community with no real population but which serves as a center for the surrounding farms. The store was quiet back around the tool, produce and harness sections, but up front at the bar, things were loud and edgy. The folks were not happy about the goings-on up the road. “That goddamn dope addict,” said a middle-aged farmer. “First it’s marywanna, now it’s Hell’s Angels. Christ alive, he’s just pushin our faces in the dirt!”

  “Beatniks!” said somebody else. “Not worth a pound of piss.”

  There was talk of divvying up the ax handles in the store and “goin up there to clean the place out.” But somebody said the cops were already on the job: “Gonna put em in jail for good this time, every damn one of em …” So the ax handles stayed in the rack.

  By nightfall Kesey’s enclave was full of people, music and multi-colored lights. The police added a nice touch by parking along the highway with their own lights flashing … red and orange blips lighting up the trees and the sheer dirt cliff across the road. Earlier that spring the Kesey estate had been raided by seventeen cops and a half dozen dogs, led by a notorious federal narcotics agents named Willie Wong. Kesey and twelve of his friends were arrested on marijuana charges, but most of these had to be dropped due to peculiarities in the search warrant. Shortly after the raid Agent Wong was transferred out of the district; and the local police made no further attempts to breach the gates. They contented themselves with lurking on the highway across the creek and checking out all those coming and going. Local sheriff’s deputies stopped and questioned a steady stream of college professors, vagrants, lawyers, students, psychologists and high-style hippies. There was not much the police could do except run radio checks for unpaid traffic citations, but they did this with unflagging determination. Now and then they would roust an obvious drunk or somebody completely stoned, but during several months of intense vigil their only actual arrests netted less than a half dozen traffic fugitives.

  Meanwhile, the parties grew wilder and louder. There was very little marijuana, but plenty of LSD, which was then legal. The cops stood out on the highway and looked across the creek at a scene that must have tortured the very roots of their understanding. Here were all these people running wild, bellowing and dancing half naked to rock-’n’-roll sounds piped out through the trees from massive amplifiers, reeling and stumbling in a maze of psychedelic lights … WILD, by God, and with no law to stop them.

  Then, with the arrival of the Hell’s Angels, the cops finally got a handle—a raison d’être, as it were—and they quickly tripled the guard. Kesey had finally gone over the line. A bunch of beatniks and college types eating some kind of invisible drug was a hard thing to deal with, but a gang of rotten thugs on motorcycles was as tangible a menace as the law could hope for.‡

  The first party, featuring only the Frisco chapter, was a roaring success. Sometime around midnight, Pete, the drag racer, grinned as he rummaged through a beer tub and said, “Man, this is nothin but a goddamn wonderful scene. We didn’t know what to expect when we came, but it turned out just fine. This time it’s all ha-ha, not thump-thump.”

  Most of the Angels were posed and defensive until they got thoroughly drunk, and a few never got over the idea that they were going to be challenged and whipped on at any moment … but as a group, they seemed to realize that if they wanted any tension they were going to have to work pretty hard to create it on their own. Kesey’s people were too busy getting out of their heads to worry about anything so raw and realistic as the Hell’s Angels. Other luminaries wandered through the party (notably, poet Allen Ginsberg and Richard Alpert, the LSD guru), and although the Angels didn’t know them, they were put a bit off balance by having to share the spotlight.

  This was Ginsberg’s first encounter with the Angels, and he quickly became an aficionado. Sometime late in the evening, when it became apparent that everyone leaving the party was being grabbed by the police, Ginsberg and I drove out to see what it meant. A Volkswagen which left just ahead of us had been pulled over about a half mile down the highway, and the occupants were taken out for grilling. Our idea was to arrive on the capture scene with a tape recorder, but I barely got out of first gear before we were pulled over by another sheriff’s car. I stepped out with the microphone in my hand and asked what the trouble was. The sight of the mike caused the deputies to stand mute except for the bare essentials. One asked to see my license while the other tried to ignore Ginsberg, who inquired very pleasantly and repeatedly why everyone who left the party was being seized. The cop stood with his feet apart, hands clasped behind his back and his face frozen in a dumb stare. Ginsberg continued to question him while the other deputy ran a check on my license. I enjoy listening to that encounter on tape. It sounds as if Ginsberg and I are flapping rhetorical questions at each other, with a police radio chattering in the background. Every few moments a different voice comes in with a monosyllabic utterance, but our questions are never answered. For several moments there is no talk at all—only the sound of Ginsberg humming a Near Eastern raga, backed up now and then by the spastic crackling of the Voice from Headquarters. The scene was so ridiculous that even the cops began smiling after a while. Their refusal to speak amounted to an unlikely reversal of roles, starkly emphasized by our amusement.

  The deputy who’d been left to deal with us was staring curiously at Ginsberg. Suddenly he asked, “How long did it take you to grow that beard?”

  Ginsberg stopped humming, gave the question some thought, and replied, “About two years—no, I think it was eighteen months.”

  The cop nodded thoughtfully … as if he meant to grow one himself, but might not be able to invest all that time; twelve months okay, but eighteen—well, the chief might wonder.

  The conversation lagged again until the radio deputy came back to report that I was clean of outstanding warrants. At this point I said I’d turn off the tape recorder if they’d engage in even the most limited conversation. They agreed, and we talked for a while. It was the Hell’s Angels they were watching, they said, not Kesey. Sooner or later the hoodlums would cause bad trouble, and what the hell were they doing there anyway? They were curious about how I’d managed to find out enough to write about them. “How do you get e
m to talk?” said one. “You’ve never been beat up? They let you hang around? What’s with em anyway? Are they really as bad as we hear?”

  I said the Angels were probably worse than they’d heard, but that they’d never given me trouble. The deputies said they didn’t know anything more about the outlaws than what they’d read in the papers.

  We parted on good terms except for the citation they eventually got around to giving me—for having cracked taillight lenses. Ginsberg asked why the driver of the Volkswagen had been taken away in a police car. After several minutes the radio came back with an answer: he’d failed to pay a traffic citation several months back, and the original $20 fine had grown, as fines will in California, to a current figure of $57—which would have to be paid in cash before the fugitive could be released. Neither Ginsberg nor I had $57, so we got the victim’s name, thinking to send one of his friends after him when we got back to Kesey’s. But it turned out that nobody knew him, and for all I know he is still in the Redwood City jail.

  The party continued for two days and nights, but the only other crisis came when the worldly inspiration‡ for the protagonist of several recent novels stood naked on the private side of the creek and screamed off a long, brutal diatribe against the cops only twenty yards away. He was swaying and yelling in the bright glare of a light from the porch, holding a beer bottle in one hand and shaking his fist at the objects of his scorn: “You sneaky motherfuckers! What the fuck’s wrong with you? Come on over here and see what you get … goddamn your shit-filled souls anyway!” Then he would laugh and wave his beer around. “Don’t fuck with me, you sons of shitlovers. Come on over. You’ll get every fucking thing you deserve.”

  Luckily, somebody pulled him back to the party, still naked and yelling. His drunken challenge to the cops might have kicked off a real disaster. In California and most other states the police cannot legally invade private property without a search warrant unless (1) they are reasonably certain a crime is being committed or (2) they are “invited” by the owner or occupant of the property. His performance could have been interpreted either way if the cops had been in the mood, and at that stage in the evening a raiding party could not have made it across the bridge without violence. The Angels were in no mood to be rounded up quietly and they were too drunk to care about consequences.