The only British song that Hunter S Thompson truly adored
In an age when Gonzo has become something of a buzzword, we mustn’t forget all the reasons immersive mastermind Hunter S Thompson dirtied the hands of modern pop culture.
The surface-level observer will likely know little about Thompson other than the countless times they’ve come across Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas in a book shop. But what they also don’t realise is how much they also inadvertently live and breathe everything he ever did. Much like how he once described music, Thompson’s impact is everywhere, an “energy”, a “question of fuel”.
His self-insertion into whatever it was he was interested in made him more qualified than most to comment on different forms of art, which is incidentally why music, whether subtly or not at all, found its way into most of the worlds he created. If it truly became a force of “fuel” to him, it charged his stories and experiences forward like the literal act of stepping on the gas pedal—something needed to feel things even harder.
“I am a serious consumer,” he once said, “On some nights, I still believe that a car with the gas needle on empty can run about fifty more miles if you have the right music very loud on the radio”.
It probably doesn’t take an expert to hazard a guess at what some of Thompson’s favourites might be. A rabid, self-proclaimed architect of blending personal narratives with what people know to be fact, the writer’s favourites in the music world are songs that centre similar sentiments, or at the very least come from a culture or community with lifestyles defined by the drugs they took; the realities they forged.
Revealing some of these during an episode of Desert Island Disks, Thompson praised some of jazz and blues’ finest contributors, like Herbie Mann and Howlin’ Wolf. He also captured his connection to counterculture’s off-kilter psychedelia by picking out Jefferson Airplane’s ‘White Rabbit’. Most of his entries unsurprisingly came from American geniuses, including Lou Reed, Bob Dylan, and Warren Zevon.
In fact, the only British entry came in the shape of Rod Stewart’s ‘Maggie May’, the folk-inspired rock smash based on his first ever sexual encounter. As someone with a keen eye for accidental revolutionaries, it’s no wonder Thompson became endeared to the track. Sonic factors aside, it was also the first rock hit to feature a mandolin, something that was only really used in folk music at the time.
Beyond that, though, there’s a lot to be said about his gravitation towards musicians like Stewart. The first of which was his unbothered charm in the face of whatever’s mainstream at any given moment. A true consumer, Thompson didn’t care for pretence, which is funny considering that’s a word many would use to describe his approach.
But he went on feeling, on whatever gave him the biggest sense of “fuel”; if it happened to be what was popular at the time didn’t even matter, and for whatever reason, ‘Maggie May’ earned a spot among his American musical heroes.
