A six-hour playlist of Hunter S. Thompson’s favourite songs
Despite never producing a single note beyond a cocaine-flecked burp, Hunter S. Thompson remains a pivotal figure in the rock scene. Not only are his books devoured by the music world with the same vigour with which he quickly backed Chivas Regal and Colombian marching powder, but his game-changing Gonzo approach to journalism has inspired countless generations of writers around the world.
He placed himself at the centre of all his stories, drenched in the filthy nature of the news he was reporting on. Thompson’s unique ability to immerse himself – often finding himself dirty, drunk and completely lost – within a culture and then reflect on it with the sneering reverence of a masterful scribe has been routinely regurgitated throughout the decades that followed his heyday.
Thompson is likely most known for his novels in today’s cultural sphere. His most revered work, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, is rightly regarded as a seminal moment for the counterculture, and, even when thrust into the mainstream via the epic Johnny Depp-led movie, it still commands a sense of outside art that has rarely been matched. But while Thompson has enjoyed his life on the peripheries of society, his love for music has placed him firmly in the centre of the world’s most widely consumed art form.
The Godfather of Gonzo journalism always considered musicians to be in the same sphere as writers and painters. Whether it was Mick Jagger or Michelangelo, Thompson regarded both as pivotal members of the same cultural circle. And, over the years, Thompson would, on occasion, share some of his favourite moments of rock and roll’s fast and furious catalogue.
When speaking with Rolling Stone editor John Lomabardi, Thompson would share his ten favourite albums of the 1960s and firmly assert his love of the art: “I resent your assumption that Music is Not My Bag because I’ve been arguing for the past few years that music is the New Literature, that Dylan is the 1960s’ answer to Hemingway, and that the main voice of the ’70s will be on records & videotape instead of books.”
EMI also once reached out to Thompson to share a list of his favourite songs, which included numbers from Lou Reed, Bob Dylan, Jefferson Airplane and many more of the counterculture’s finest captains. However, both of these lists were pulled together when Thompson was already regarded as an icon. His mystique had already been firmly established, and one might argue that the world of artists and musicians around him had already cultured his taste.
To find out the real sonic soul of Hunter S. Thompson, one must look to this writing. There are a few notable moments of the novelist penning pop music references in his books, notably in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas when ‘Three Dog Night’ interrupts a bath in Japanese bath salts, “First Lennon, now this, I thought. Next we’ll have Glenn Campbell screaming ‘Where Have All the Flowers Gone?’” he continues before demanding the “rising sound” of a Jefferson Airplane. However, Thompson’s reach extends far beyond these moments.
Thankfully, NTS London captured a collection of Thompson’s favourite songs in 2019 as part of a deep dive into the mythical figure. Composed by Edu Villarroel, the mixes provided a searing look into Thompson’s work through the many musicians he has named throughout his articles, prose and interviews as his favourites. It makes for a six-hour dream flecked with drunken nights, acid days and the kind of weekends that last for weeks.
