The two Rolling Stones albums praised by Hunter S. Thompson
High on the heady fumes of Beat Generation literature, Hunter S. Thompson carved a unique trail through 20th-century pop culture as an unconventional journalist. As the archetypal gun-toting American, Thompson was something of a hellraiser, open to experimentation and danger, the only proviso being that the experience births a good story. “I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they’ve always worked for me,” he would famously say.
Thompson is best known for his 1972 semi-autobiographical novel Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, which was initially serialised in Rolling Stone. However, he rose to prominence five years prior with the arrival of Hell’s Angels, a non-fictional account of life with the titular motorcycle gang, for which he spent a year socialising with the notorious organisation led by Sonny Barger. The book popularised Thompson’s associative enclave of New Journalism, coined as “Gonzo” writing in 1970.
Thompson’s disregard for convention can be compared to that of his contemporary Beat Generation writers, some of whom he befriended. Throughout the 1960s, these progressive authors and poets had a monumental impact on popular music. Most famously, Bob Dylan’s embrace of abstract lyricism in the mid-decade can be attributed to a newfound friendship with Allen Ginsberg. Elsewhere, The Rolling Stones and The Beatles were among the notable acts to find inspiration in Beat literature.
Progressive writing – whether Gonzo or Beat – and popular music were tightly bound pillars of mid-century pop culture, each profoundly affecting the other. For instance, Thompson was a musically inclined individual and a fervent admirer of Dylan. In 1972, he dedicated Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas to one of the Nobel laureate’s classic songs: “To Bob Dylan for ‘Mr Tambourine Man’.”
Thompson’s admiration for Dylan and belief in contemporary music was further evidenced in a letter he sent to Rolling Stone editor John Lombardi in 1970. Thompson rebuked his former boss, stating: “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 and videotape instead of books.”
“But by music, I don’t mean the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band,” he affirmed. “If the Grateful Dead came to town, I’d beat my way in with a fucking tyre iron, if necessary. I think Workingmen’s Dead is the heaviest thing since ‘Highway 61’ and ‘Mr Tambourine Man’ (with the possible exception of The Stones’ least [sic] two albums… and the definite exception of Herbie Mann’s Memphis Underground, which may be the best album cut by anybody).”
Thompson’s assertion that Dylan’s mid-1960s work and The Rolling Stones’ late 1960s albums, Beggars Banquet and Let It Bleed, would prove pivotal on the scale of early-20th century literature seems right on the money: The Rolling Stones went on to release several more immortally revered projects in the early 1970s, confirming their status as one of rock history’s greatest forces. Meanwhile, Dylan’s enduring knack for poetic songcraft earned him the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2016.
Listen to ‘Sympathy for the Devil’, the opening track of The Rolling Stones’ 1968 album, Beggars Banquet, below.
