The guru of Gonzo, on the record

How did Hunter S. Thompson capture the manic, drug-fueled energy of his reportorial pursuits? He was a mad genius, but he had help: He carried a tape recorder. Now, the recordings he made starting in California in 1965 and ending in Saigon in 1975 have been released for the first time in “The Gonzo Tapes: The Life and Work of Hunter S. Thompson,” a five-CD set from Shout! Factory.

Thompson’s estate, including his son Juan and second wife, Anita, thought a CD release of the tapes would be a good idea after they cooperated for “Gonzo,” the recent documentary film. “The estate felt strongly about trying to preserve Hunter’s legacy,” says producer and audio archivist Don Fleming, who whittled 14 CDs’ worth of releasable material. “They also felt the power of the tapes. He’s the one pointing the mike, so it is very much his perspective. And a lot of times, it’s pointed at himself.”

In the early days, when Thompson was a focused, gutsy reporter, he brought his recorder with him to research the book “Hell’s Angels” instead of using a pen and notebook. On the first CD, you can hear him encourage his subjects and scoot off to take audio notes, as partyers whoop in the background. He’s primarily a reporter, but his anarchic hedonist is starting to show. Driving away, he wants to call his wife but thinks he’d better get out of town first because he’s been giving the police such “back talk for two days now . . . that if I do get caught here in this county or anything, they would clamp the seals down on me and that would be it.”

The balance shifts by the second CD -- it, and the third, were recorded during his notorious Las Vegas trip. “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,” his 1971 book, narrates through “the depths of an ether binge,” prodigious amounts of alcohol, pot, mescaline and anything else he and his lawyer can score. But a writer can’t write like that -- or at least, Thompson didn’t have to. These tapes document his substance-fueled conversations, ramblings, jokes and phone calls. It’s this period when he sinks deeply into his slur, when silly or paranoid fantasies spin out into story lines, when the wobbly outlines of his “gonzo” style take their splattered form.

The fourth and fifth CDs are fascinating for fans and a bit depressing for working writers, because they consist mainly of source material for pieces Thompson didn’t write. With little excitement, he chronicles days of cocaine ingestion, in Freud’s footsteps, for a Rolling Stone magazine piece. And though this is a kind of gleeful listen -- hey, Thompson was bored by cocaine! -- it’s impossible not to notice that his skepticism about the drug becomes fascination. “One of the puzzling things about coke is the desire for it, despite any ability to explain why the desire for it exists,” he says. “I have got to figure out more about this.” The piece was never written.

Rolling Stone continued to give him assignments, which Thompson repeatedly neglected to turn in. He went to Zaire in 1974 to cover the “Rumble in the Jungle” title fight between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman, recording notes even as he sold his tickets and went swimming in the hotel pool. It was brave and crazy for Thompson to travel to Vietnam in 1975, but someone else wound up filing the magazine’s piece about the last helicopter evacuating the American Embassy; he published only one piece at the time (other snippets made it into collections). So much work is documented by these tapes, but little of it got finished.

Music is a constant presence: The Carpenters are on the radio in the background in Vegas; the Hells Angels listen to Joan Baez. The tapes themselves have varied sound quality -- some people are too far away, traffic intrudes, parts are muffled when he hides the mike in his sleeve, some recordings stop midsentence.

But listening to these CDs is like sitting in a room with Thompson, with the soundtrack of popular music, the motion and the chaos. You can even hear the ice in his glass. It’s a ringside seat to witness the glory, and the destruction, of the great gonzo writer.

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