Hell’s Angels. A Strange and Terrible. Saga by Hunter S. Thompson

* At one press conference in Oakland, held at the downtown office of the Angels’ bondswoman, I counted forty-two reporters on hand and thirteen microphones massed in front of Barger while he spoke — and five TV cameras.

They got a great boot out of seeing them­selves on TV, and by the time things had come to this pass, there was no question of any ideological deviation within the club. Barger and the other officers spoke for the whole organization, and anybody who didn’t agree could hang up his colors. None did, of course, even though Barger and perhaps two or three others were the only Angels with any kind of political awareness. But if Sonny had a beef with some pinko demonstrators, then by God, they all had a beef. And that was the way it went. Yet there were shreds of evidence, toward the end of 1965, that the La Honda atmosphere was having a gradual effect. One afternoon several weeks before the political crisis Terry was sitting in the El Adobe, sipping a beer and talking thoughtfully about the difference between the Angels and the hipster-radical types he’d been partying with: You know, sometimes I think we ain’t makin it, he said. These other people at least got somethin goin for em. They’re fuck-ups, too, but they’re constructive. We’re too goddamn negative. Our whole bit is destructive. I can’t see any way out for us if we can’t find some other kind of scene besides tearin things up.

Six months earlier the Angels’ only real problem had been keeping out of jail, but now they were engagé and had to sit through meetings with other people who were engagé. A few of the outlaws thrived on the new gig, but for most it was only a drag. And to those who could look back on a decade or more of hostile isolation, it seemed like the end of an era.

No more self-defeating device could be discovered than the one society has devel­oped in dealing with the criminal. It pro­claims his career in such loud and dramatic forms that both he and the community accept the judgment as a fixed description. He becomes conscious of himself as a criminal, and the community expects him to live up to his reputation, and will not credit him if he does not live up to it.

— Frank Tannenbaum, Crime and the Community

Far from being freaks, the Hell’s Angels are a logical product of the culture that now claims to be shocked at their existence. The generation represented by the editors of Time has lived so long in a world full of Celluloid outlaws hustling toothpaste and hair oil that it is no longer capable of confronting the real thing. For twenty years they have sat with their children and watched yesterday’s outlaws raise hell with yesterday’s world. . . and now they are bringing up children who think Jesse James is a televi­sion character. This is the generation that went to war for Mom, God and Apple Butter, the American Way of Life. When they came back, they crowned Eisenhower and then retired to the giddy comfort of their TV parlors, to cultivate the subtleties of American history as seen by Hollywood.

To them the appearance of the Hell’s Angels must have seemed like a wonderful publicity stunt. In a nation of frightened dullards there is a sorry shortage of outlaws, and those few who make the grade are always welcome: Frank Sinatra, Alexander King, Eliza­beth Taylor, Raoul Duke. . . they have that extra something.

Charles Starkweather had something extra too, but he couldn’t get an agent, and instead of taking his vitality to Hollywood, he freaked out in Wyoming and killed a dozen people for reasons he couldn’t explain. So the state put him to death. There were other outlaws who missed the brass ring in the fifties. Lenny Bruce was one; he was never quite right for television. Bruce had tremendous promise until about 1961, when the people who’d been getting such a kick out of him suddenly realized he was serious. Just like Stark­weather was serious. . . and like the Hell’s Angels are serious.