What caused the feud between Lou Reed and Hunter S Thompson?
Johnny Depp was perched in a bar one sullen evening in Woody Creek, Colorado. The locals chattered away blissfully unaware or otherwise completely indifferent to the fact that a Hollywood star was uneasily quaffing whisky in their midst. He had a scheduled business meeting planned with the esteemed writer Hunter S Thompson at midnight and was quietly demurring over what sort of hours these freaks keep to.
Then, with the clatter, bang and instant unrest of a tornado breezing through town, the sleepy bar was flung into a frantic ruckus. Depp looked over his shoulder to see sparks flying everywhere, like a Catherine Wheel that had inexplicably become animate and developed a thirst.
Then this sparking mass began yelling, ‘Get out of the way, you bastards!’ And a drunken sea of Woody Creek’s many societal pariahs parted as the burly mad Moses figure of Hunter S Thompson strode forward, trailing nothing but his own wayward muse towards Depp. In the writer’s right arm was a three-foot cattle prod, and in his left was a taser gun.
This might not tell us much about the forthcoming feud between Thompson and the right honourable Lou Reed on the surface as Deep went on to be friends with the Fear and Loathing writer forevermore, so the old adage of ‘don’t meet your heroes doesn’t really apply. But perhaps the differing tale of Lou Reed’s encounter proves the point: Only meet the heroes who you know you’re unlikely to clash with (if such a thing can be deciphered in advance, which in this case it seems like it certainly could’ve) …
So, how did the feud begin?
Lou Reed might not have been a man who carried a cattle prod, but he may as well have been. A lot of people in rock music purport to be iconoclasts, but very few live up to the sound and fury of the man who dubbed The Beatles “a load of shit!”. With The Velvet Underground, he relished in the life of a subterranean denizen of the degenerate demimonde, and seemingly when fame tried to drag him from the figurative dive bar of culthood, he had no intention to leave.
He went through life in the cultural mainstream, like a drunk being dragged away from a half-finished drink by a bouncer. Thus, his kicking and screaming artistic brilliance was never likely to meet with Thompson like strawberries and cream, more so a bonfire and a shell suit. Both men were too mutually incendiary for it to ever work out. Yet comically, their clash was anything but fiery.
For a while, however, even a shell suit withstands the flames and Thompson and Reed enjoyed a friendly honeymoon period after they first met. Thompson was a huge fan of Reed’s anthem for the disenfranchised, ‘Walk On the Wild Side’, and he had previously licensed the song from Reed for use on a project. Reed was more than happy to oblige, and with mutual admiration in the air, like Romulus and Remus of the counterculture movement, a union of artistic outsiders was formed.
Thus, when the filmmaker Wayne Ewing contacted Reed about using the sultry ode to outsiders on his latest movie about the Gonzo progenitor, Breakfast with Hunter, he was expecting a quick ‘Sure, no problem’. Instead, his secretary was told, “Never call about Hunter Thompson ever again.” So, what exactly had caused the odd couple to veer towards their predestined collision?
As the story goes, in 2000, Thompson published Fear and Loathing in America, and he embarked on a book tour despite his ill health. His back was ailing, and he developed an intense aversion to stairs. In fact, anywhere with an incline was met with Thompson’s wrath. Many of his cohorts suspected that this was a cunning ploy cooked up by the cranky writer to simply remain at home, seeing as though stairs have been fairly ubiquitous the world over since the turn of the 13th century.
The feeling was that Thompson had blown out of proportion the back injury and exacerbated the impact of inclines. But his publisher didn’t cancel the tour and simply said that they would do what they could to ensure that he stayed, quite literally, on the straight and narrow. Seemingly, word of this obstacle failed to reach Reed.
After a book signing in Manhattan, Thompson was due to meet the Transformer star in a Manhattan restaurant. Much to the writer’s fearsome chagrin, it was one of these new-fangled swanky joints with dastardly stairs! Thompson’s assistant emerged to find the daunting trip up to the first floor, and Reed was already angered at the top of it, wondering where his guest was.
Word got back to Thompson that Reed was not at ground level, and for him, this was an insurmountable impasse. It is worth reiterating at this point that although Thompson had a bad back, he was still more than capable of physically tackling a set of stairs. After all, he hadn’t thought twice about the matter when he accepted the rock star’s invitation.
But presently unable to see any way that he could defy gravity to meet Reed, the Rum Diary writer decided to stand him up and go for a ground-level feast with Johnny Depp and Demi Moore instead. As it happens, this turned out to be somewhat of a major victory for him.
Depp managed to convince Moore to lend Thompson the private jet that she and Bruce Willis had recently bought in order to get to Washington DC after he had voiced concerns that he would never survive that perilous voyage on America’s paved roads in a premium vehicle. All the while, as Thompson was lucking out in a ground-floor windfall, Reed was raging in his lonely, lofty hell.
As it happens, Thompson would indeed charter the jet to DC, never pay his fuel bill to Moore, and never speak to Reed again. The beast was known to later make one single remark about the fallout: “Something happened in New York on the last trip… He felt insulted, I guess he’s easily offended.”
