Dr. Hunter S. Thompson's Private Stash, Misc, Misc

Set 1
Today Show (Raw) 06-21-88

The Gideon Bible
I Have A General Distaste For Activists
1968 Democratic Convention
We Were Mean
Ed Meese
A Victim of Some Kind of Horrible Mental Illness
Are You Michael Jackson?
I Should Live Like I Want To
Be Careful, That’s a Hair Trigger!
The Examiner Column
We’re In The Business Of Controlling Our Environment
Is There Anyone That Inspires You Today?
The Ethic of Enlightened Self-Interest
If You Don’t Do It, Somebody Else Will
How Do You Translate To The Europeans
Are You Disappointed in the American Public?
Watergate
A Lesson Of Some Sort
Journalism
Television Versus Print
Libel
Writing
I’d Rather Write Poems
You Know That Meese Is A Swine
Nixon
Have You Ever Made Too Harsh A Judgment? Regrets
I Have Lawyers
Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas
It Worked Fine And It Didn’t Hurt
It All Gets Back To Being Lazy
I Love Writing
I Steal From The Right People
One Long Sentence
I Never Thought Of Myself As A Journalist
I’ve Been Expecting To Die For So Long
It’s Fun To Take The Chances
Mortality
A Magnificent Luxury
Bad Whiskey Is Like Tea
Doing Cutaways

Set 2
USA Today Part 1 07-08-88

This Is For My Own Reference
George McGovern
Why Get Into Politics?
We Had Good People on Our Side
The Kennedys
All the Good Things Have Happened
It’s Hard To Avoid Reality
Jesse Jackson
Why Did This Thing Ring?
This Dumb Bastard
Billionaires
Where Is the Progress?
The War On Drugs
Guns
I Beat the Hell Out of Journalism
Did Terry Take the Motherfucking Tape Out of There?
Tracking the Video
This, That, Beta, VHS
Journalism
I Know I Can Change One More Vote

Set 3
USA Today Part 2 07-08-88

A Dangerous Thing
Dukakis
Ted Kennedy
Ted Kennedy and Chappaquiddick
Let the Record Show
Pat Buchanan
A Fellow Thug and Brawler
Jim Brady
A Cheap Thief
Nixon’s House in China
Are There Any Politicians You Do Respect?
Harvard Law School
Political Talent
Freak Power
They Haven’t Got Me Yet
That’s All We Eat Out Here
AIDS
I Would Kill Most Of The People Here
White Trash Behavior
I Insist That This Business Be Fun
The Conventions
Look What Happened To Julian Bond
I Told A Guy From NBC…
Generation of Swine
Tattoos
I’ll Take Any Excuse Not To Work

Comment
The story of “Dr. Hunter S. Thompson’s Private Stash”
A few weeks after Dr. Thompson’s suicide, an auction titled “HST unpublished works and tapes” appeared on ebay; we won it for a few hundred dollars. Put up by a person we believe to be one of Thompson’s former assistants, it included a Xeroxed collection titled “Drafts, Notes & Work Papers of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson 1988 – 1990”— correspondence, columns, and unpublished pieces complete with his editing marks. (That collection is NOT included here. Sorry.)

There were also three 90 minute audio tapes. We’d heard that HST taped his conversations and interviews, which isn’t surprising considering that he kept carbons of every letter he ever wrote. At the very least, the USA Today tapes begin with him saying, “This is for my own reference.” (One article in the collection, “Static Detonates the Gel,” describes the episode of Nightline that he and the interviewer are watching in Part 1 of the USA Today interview.) That conversation, incidentally, was split between two tapes with no continuity, so we named them Part 1 and Part 2.

As for the sound, the amateur nature of these recordings was most obvious in the Today Show tape. It’s NOT a feed, as you’ll soon tell! In fact, we imagine it was recorded with a cheap, desktop recorder, because whenever someone hit the mic—which happened a lot!—the volume crashed dramatically and took a few seconds to return to normal. This is most obvious about 20 minutes in, when Thompson gets interviewer Stone Phillips to shoot one of his handguns into the darkness off his Woody Creek porch! We left a few of those jostlings intact, partly to preserve the conversation and partly because it added to the charm of the recording.

There are some fluctuations in volume, but “Hunter S. Thompson’s Private Stash” is surprisingly listenable, especially considering the source. We spent about 15 hours micro-editing the first and only playing of the Today Show tape alone; the USA Today tape took far less work. Frankly we think they both sound pretty good—and we hope you agree. They’re great for their political insight, interesting opinions, classic wit, and the cries of Thompson’s peacocks wandering the grounds (the background sound in the Today Show tape is rain). At one point in the USA Today interview, you hear a strange snorting sound, too…

How they came into the possession of the auctioner, we honestly don’t know. We believe they’re Hunter’s own copies—hence the title—and thus the only ones in existence. We certainly can’t imagine Hunter’s assistants keeping backup copies of every tape he made. We do, however feel safe in saying that these tapes have never circulated.

Until now. After debating for years whether to liberate these recordings or return them to Thompson’s estate, we decided on the latter and offered to give them to Anita, free of charge, through an email to her wonderful website, www.gonzostore.com. She never replied, so light one up, crack one open, and start tapping the glass—then dip into “Hunter S. Thompson’s Private Stash.”

Sources
SHNIDDateVenueCityStateArchive Identifier
Created At
Wed Aug 27 2008 15:59:00 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time)
Updated At
Wed Aug 27 2008 15:59:00 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time)

Users with this performance
Name#Active (0-5)Top CollectionsLast Update
Chris Masciangelo607642024-7-31
Corey290632023-6-13
Alex Bushe306432023-10-15
Sean Moran203942023-4-23
Resin421346832023-4-23
cotaper430652023-4-23