Tom Petty Running Down a Rock and Roll Dream

Into The Great Wide Open
October 2, 2017
By Brian Bentley

Tom Petty was all about heart, until his own gave out.

Nobody said getting old would be fun, but the death of Tom Petty from a heart attack at 66, just makes our collective aging process seem lonelier and more desperate. (At press time, he had been taken off life support but was technically still alive)

Tom Petty was a selfless artist who continually stood up to record companies at his own expense. He was generous and supportive of countless other musicians, and maybe harnessed the best rock band for pure chops, ever. Ask Bob Dylan who handpicked The Heartbreakers to replace The Band on several worldwide tours.

Hailing from Gainesville, Florida, Tom Petty moved to L.A. in 1975 with his band, Mudcrutch, and was signed to Shelter Records. A year later, he released the single “American Girl,” and from that point forward, his career never looked back. Over the next 42 years, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers were an encyclopedia of rock and roll. Being from the South, they easily mixed Southern Rock with Cali studio finesse (Skynyrd meets The Byrds).

They also married sixties Garage Rock, like The Standells, with Americana folk and country. Tom Petty was Neil Young without all the personal drama. His style forged Del Shannon guitar licks with British Invasion R&B. The Heartbreakers’ cover of The Animals, “Don’t Bring Me Down,” was fierce and unrelenting, soulful and defiant. In some ways, you could compare Petty to Paul Shaffer’s house band on David Letterman. Not only could The Heartbreakers master any rock and roll style, they were frequently better at it than the originals.

Tom Petty was a music historian and facilitator. In Jimmy Carter-type fashion, he managed to corral the egos of Bob Dylan and George Harrison and form the supergroup Traveling Wilburys, which also gave us an 11th hour taste of the brilliance of Roy Orbison, weeks before Orbison passed. Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers toured with Bob Dylan in the 80’s, which was a treat, not only for fans, but for Bob, who was awed by their cooperative, laid-back musical taste and once declared Mike Campbell, “the greatest guitarist I ever worked with.” (Hopefully Robbie Robertson wasn’t listening).

If rock and roll is not truly dead, as Gene Simmons recently said, most of its original practitioners are. Some deaths are expected (like Weiland and Lemmy), others, such as Chris Cornell and Tom Petty, hit us out of left field, like a flat tire on your way out of town for a long vacation. Rock, like other obsolete forms of art, must be cherished, preserved and handed down to generations unlucky enough to have missed it. To rail against its loss by blaming the disappearance on American mall-kids who took up rap instead, may have some validity, but it serves no purpose. One of the first Twitter responders to offer sympathy to Petty’s family was Chuck D.

Tom Petty once said, “Fuck politics, Rock and Roll is about heart.” Petty always had plenty of it until his own gave out on him. Life is short my friends. Celebrate every moment of it and never lose the feeling of liberation that the music gave you the first time you heard it. I have included a link here to some of the best Petty interviews that capture the brilliance, bluntness and balls that made him our national rock n’ roll curator and keeper of the flame.

5 best interview moments of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers

Was Chris Cornell a Martyr for Our Depression?

Jesus Christ Pose
May 22, 2017
By Brian Bentley

Chris Cornell’s suicide is a shock to the system

It took a very long weekend for me to process the tragic suicide of Soundgarden singer and front man, Chris Cornell. This was not a slow fade to black like Scott Weiland. The news came out of left field and the shock has yet to wear off. There has been no shortage of analysis, but little real insight into what was certainly an unexpected and devastating act of resignation.

I’ve always believed that intelligence, insight and a sense of humor are the keys to survival, even when depression is so overwhelming that a human being is obsessed with morbid thoughts night and day. Chris Cornell was the smartest, most articulate and seemingly well-balanced musician the “Grunge” movement ever produced. Cornell had it all.

Soundgarden was one of the first groups to join Seattle’s groundbreaking Sub Pop label and the first to break nationally by signing to a major label (A&M Records in 1988). They provided a template of how to balance commercial instincts with artistic integrity for countless Northwest bands (like Nirvana). When Soundgarden disbanded in 97, Cornell made a seamless transition to a solo career and later was the engine driver behind Audioslave, one of the most successful rock bands of the 00’s.

Chris was a stable family man, physically blessed beyond belief and the owner of a spectacular, five-octave vocal range. Because he so effortlessly blended punk and metal, Cornell was loved by the world, respected by everyone – a senior spokesman for all of rock and roll. Only Eddie Vedder and Dave Grohl have higher “Q scores.”

But success forces you to continually meet or exceed both financial and artistic expectations because your legacy and your bankroll depends on it. That's a lot of pressure. Cornell was notoriously moody and temperamental. He had struggled with drugs and done his share of rehab. There were times onstage when his band mates were hapless bystanders if Chris was feeling ornery and difficult. His often gentle and easygoing nature served as a neat front for a brooding intensity and struggle for perfection that was rarely satisfied.

At the core of Cornell’s personality was a frightening level of passivity and nihilism. He often accessed the identical “Fuck you and all of this” worldview that made Kurt Cobain throw in the towel. Because of the tremendous strain to hit those notes that few rock singers could reach, Chris' voice had been partially blown out years ago. His stage manner increasingly gave the impression of a person who'd rather be doing something else.

There have been many observations regarding Cornell’s lyrics. The subject matter was darker than Edgar Allen Poe at the bottom of a well. Songs like “Fell on Black Days,” “Let Me Drown,” “The Day I Tried to Live” and “Like Suicide,” left little to the imagination. But this was prose inherent to the musical genre that Soundgarden was in. Mick Jagger wrote some pretty dark lyrics and it never mattered. It always seemed that Soundgarden was mostly bleak in a theatrical sense. These were smart guys who understood the dumbness of living out your song’s themes to your own detriment.

Is there any way to find some closure to what led Chris Cornell to hang himself in a Detroit hotel room, two hours after a show and in the middle of a sold-out tour? Can we process this in the slightest? As someone who has sunk to levels of depression that only ex-girlfriends appreciate, I can attest that the outer trappings of life will not save you.

Even self-insight is not enough. If the brain is chemically wired wrong, it has a fascinating way of processing and rationalizing data to make you believe that no matter what you accomplish, you are still a failure. It leads to all-or-nothing, black and white thinking that only recognizes when you fuck something up, and rarely celebrates what you have to be grateful for. Ironically, this can also be the mental make-up of very successful and creative people.


In Detroit, at Soundgarden's last show, May 17, 2017

Let’s add another scenario. You are Chris Cornell, arguably one of the three or four best rock singers in history. You’ve accomplished everything possible and are at the summit of your profession. Yet, you still feel like shit. Now what? The depression is woven into your soul and there’s nowhere to go but down.

Maybe you’ve had a bad week/month/year. A lot of your contemporaries have died. You’re feeling the downward spiral that soldiers who are lone survivors in battle go through. You ask yourself. Who were my brothers in arms? Andrew Wood of Mother Love Bone. Kurt Cobain in Nirvana. Layne Staley in Alice in Chains. Even Scott Weiland of Stone Temple Pilots. THEY ARE ALL GONE. Why am I still here? I have done it all before and better.

Now you finish a discombobulated live show in a classic music city, Detroit, not far from Illinois, where your musical journey began. Your mind and body are tired. You’ve contemplated ending this for years. An impulsive sense of anguish hovers over every thought. How can you finish this tour? Are you headed for a career disaster, like when Nirvana bailed on headlining Lollapalooza ‘94? Why tell the band and your agent and your family and put them through all that again? It’s your problem and you know what to do. Just take care of biz, man. Fucking finish it.

I present these thoughts only as possible theories for a tortured mental state, a catalyst for Chris Cornell to blow up his outside world. What's clear is that we’ve lost another chapter of our youth, in an age where everything good seems to be going and everything bad seems to be staying. When a man with so much to live for chucks it all, what are we as lowlier worker ants supposed to think? It certainly seems to lower the standard for the phrase, "Nothing to live for." Cornell’s passing could even be interpreted as a challenge, a suicide gauntlet thrown at the feet of anyone with worse circumstances to get a clue.

As of this writing, the Detroit press is reporting that Cornell called his wife, Vicky, from the dressing room after the show to say, “I am just tired.” This is what alarmed her enough to call for help. His depressed state of mind was not about an extra Ativan pill or two, despite what celebrity ambulance chaser and rehab gasbag, Dr. Drew Pinsky, proclaimed to any media outlet who would listen.

Many years ago, my cousin dropped by my parents’ house for the holidays. He brought along his best friend, Mark Silver. Mark’s sister is Susan Silver, formerly the biggest manager in the Seattle music scene and Chris Cornell’s ex wife. The couple had just gone through a divorce. But Susan said that Chris had taken his acoustic guitar to a holiday party and sang Christmas songs for all the children. They sat around him in a circle, mesmerized and thrilled.

This is how I choose to remember a man who was not only an incredible singer, lyricist and guitar player -- he was a trailblazer who made it a little easier for every artist who followed him to be heard. Chris Cornell is gone but his work lives on, any time music is close by. Rock is about aggression and rage, but Cornell demonstrated how it can also include grace, humility and a vast, sensitive intelligence that cuts deep.

Eagles’ Glenn Frey 1948-2016

California Dreamin'
January 22, 2016
By Brian Bentley

Glenn Frey turned rock fans onto country music

I stopped writing about music a few years ago because all I was doing was writing obits. So here I go again. Music appreciation is a subjective experience. You either like an artist or you don’t. Logic seldom applies to taste. I loved Weiland and Bowie and Lemmy, but I lived through the Eagles and Glenn Frey. I grew up in L.A. and for my pre-punk generation, after The Buffalo Springfield and The Byrds and The Beach Boys faded, the Eagles became our So Cal house band. It was an amazing time. Jackson Browne, Linda Ronstadt, JD Souther, Dan Fogelberg and the beloved Joe Walsh, were mostly immigrants to L.A. who created an extended family of musicians with gorgeous and emotionally-resonant songs.

In the 70’s, New York and London wielded considerable cultural power. But I have always regarded with suspicion anyone who evaluates art through the perspective of the tagline “avant garde.” It can be a meaningless fashion statement that worships style over substance. There were plenty of bad musicians that critics worshipped who could not write a decent song. The Eagles were always hampered and suspicious of that East Coast snobbery. By the mid-70’s, sentiment seemed corny and no longer cool. Punk was a lather, rinse, repeat of the English Invasion ten years earlier that killed The Beach Boys and sent Brian Wilson into psychotic exile. As Jimi Hendrix mumbled in “Third Stone From the Sun,” “You’ll never hear surf music… again.”

I have always thought you really aren't a songwriter until you can write a sad love song. Love songs are our oldest and most dependable inspiration. There is nothing wrong about listening to music with a tear in your eye. Even John Lennon, the cynic of cynics, was capable of a stunning tune like “Julia” (about his departed Mom). Love songs are important because they demonstrate strength by exposing the author’s vulnerability and celebrate the positive aspects of humanity by paying respect to our collective heart and soul. Old-school country love songs were often pained romanticism with a profound sense of loss. They could be weepy, but they were always real.

The Eagles have been accused of homogenizing country music and bastardizing it into calculated Top 40 hits. In reality, they turned a nation of kids onto country music and made it possible for artists like Gram Parsons to get the attention they deserved. “Desperado” (1973) was a monumental concept album that equated rock musicians to outlaws in a narrative with serious literary cred. Without the Eagles, the best country rock songwriters of the 90’s, The Gin Blossoms, would have been just another Tempe bar band.

Glenn Frey formed the Eagles and they were no doubt, his band. Like Stewart Copeland in the Police who deferred to Sting, Frey gave Don Henley free rein to be the spokesman. But without Frey’s muscular, Detroit rock-purist’s enthusiasm and business sense, the Eagles would have been The Don Henley Experience. Frey’s jockish cool was the perfect counterpoint to Henley’s sometimes pretentious wordsmith abilities and massive ego. Frey was the average-guy dude who put the rock in the Eagles’ rock and roll.

The Eagles were the most commercially successful rock band in history. They sold more records than the Beatles or the Stones. But they never sold out to be commercial. They were popular because they were stupendous songwriters and those songs have not aged in the slightest. The next time you are home alone for an evening and taking a break from social media, listen to Eagles catalog nuggets like “Hollywood Waltz,” “Ol’ ’55,” “Doolin Dalton,” “Outlaw Man,” “Good Day in Hell” and “The Last Resort.” No band could vocalize their storytelling better and their unequaled Americana harmonies sounded like The Blue Ridge Mountains meeting the Malibu shoreline.

I’ve heard a lot of lazy critics throwing together insta-obits like, “The Eagles gave us plenty of peaceful easy feelings and tequila sunrises and made America feel good.” Yeah they did all that, cause Lord knows, the 60’s were not a downer in any way. But they weren’t an invention of Hollywood or a simplistic Top 40 band. Glenn Frey was the face of the Eagles and a confidant, handsome guy he was. He might have had the best hair of any rocker in history and anyone can relate to that.

2015 Rose Bowl: The Oregon Trail to a Championship and Respect

Florida State Blown Out by Oregon in a Duckwalk
January 9, 2015
By Brian Bentley



Comedian Rodney Dangerfield used to say, “Respect? I don’t get no respect!”

In the 2015 Rose Bowl, the first College Football Semifinal playoff game ever, the Oregon Ducks proved that if nobody gives you respect, you can take it like someone’s wallet. On a sunny, chilly winter day in Pasadena, they stole the game from the dazed and confused Florida State Seminoles. The second half of the contest was such a blowout that many fans pulled over their hoodies and exited by the beginning of the fourth quarter.

The final score was 59-20, but the Ducks beat-down of the Seminoles resonated far beyond the lopsided 39 point victory. The 2015 Rose Bowl was the highest rated program in the history of cable television. It was a passing of the torch from one national power center to another. College football has been dominated for eons by teams from the South.

These yahoos have hyped their hubris and carved their contempt for the Pac-12 Conference with the kind of blatant disregard that made institutionalized racism a Southern institution. This Rose Bowl was about emotional and physical payback – revenge for the disrespected West Coast and an Oregon team fed up with the label “soft.” It could have been a Dirty Harry sequel. Call it Sudden Impact: Pasadena.

Under the creaky BCS Championship format, which was finally euthanized this year in favor of the more logical four-team playoff, two Southern schools, Alabama and Florida State – both losers in Semifinal Bowl games on New Year’s Day – would have been playing in the newly-minted College Football Playoff title game. Seven of the past eight winners of the BCS National Championship game hailed from the Southeast Conference. Not this year, Gomer, as Oregon and Big Ten powerhouse Ohio State will battle for the prize in Arlington, Texas on Jan 12th.

If true respect must be earned the hard way, the Oregon Ducks have done so, whether the South is on board with the concept or not. Oregon has been arguably the best team in the 2010’s, the first to win 50 games and the team with the scariest and most productive offense in college football history. Their up-tempo offense, brilliantly designed by former head coach Chip Kelly and handed down like a prized family rifle, initiated a play every 16 seconds in the Rose Bowl. Time waits for no one, especially opposing defenses.

It’s tough to stop an offense that sets up that fast, and the Seminoles scrambled to get players to the line of scrimmage in time for the snaps. Heisman Trophy winner, Marcus Mariota, the most gifted college quarterback of the decade, orchestrated a spread offense that moved with inhuman precision and accuracy. Oregon chews up defenses like a pit bull shredding up your favorite shoe. Nine times this year, they have produced touchdown drives in 36 seconds or less. The Ducks often start games slowly, but only four teams since 2011 have been able to contain and beat them for four quarters.

In boxing, you can often predict a winner just by how the fighters chose their entrances. Football is likewise and it’s possible to hedge your bets by how loose and confident the players look in the tunnel heading to the field. While Florida State appeared hesitant and a bit overwhelmed pre-game, Oregon players were bouncing around like dozens of mischievous Muhammad Ali’s, poised and bratty at the same time, straining at the bit to wreak havoc.

To understand how the cocky 2015 Oregon Ducks are not the same nervous bunch that choked under expectation and lost the 2011 BCS title game against Auburn, one needs to appreciate safety Erick Dargan. The team leader in tackles with 70, he also leads the Pac-12 in interceptions with five. A smart and fearless competitor, he played a backup role until finally getting his starring shot as a senior this year. Dargan’s fierce play, along with his cold, pitiless stare embody the best qualities of “thug” street toughness without the unnecessary byproducts.


If you have questions about Oregon’s toughness, come see safety Erick Dargan.

Championships are forged from balanced teams and predatory gladiators like Dargan. This latest version of the Ducks is an opportunistic, attacking group of battle-tested veteran seniors and sensational freshmen like “can’t be knocked off his feet” running back, Royce Freeman. These are supremely talented guys who understand it is their time and are too young, and full of life to be scared of anything like losing. Oregon’s reputation as an entitled team that gambles is more about calculated risk-taking to frustrate and cripple the opponents’ will to fight. Part of the mystique is the snappy and garish, sometimes goofy, Nike uniforms that change color schemes every week. If you can pimp the other team, they are left with the intimidating impression that you don’t give a fuck. To walk onto a field dressed like that you have to be good.

Jameis Winston, Florida State’s quarterback and the Heisman Trophy winner last year, also came to play at the Rose Bowl. With his unsavory legal past and murky reputation, Winston is the polar opposite of Oregon’s humble, lovable QB, Marcus Mariota. But he is no less a competitor, and coming into the game, his team was enjoying a 29-game win streak. Winston had not lost since he was a senior in high school. While he often appears exasperated with an air of emotional wreckage, he’s led his team from behind to victory nine times this season. Winston’s grown-man energy was the driving force that kept the game close in the first half. When the halftime show began, the teams were locked in a near statistical dead heat with Oregon ahead by the indifferent score of 18-13.

Analysts say that winning football games is not just about stats, but about certain key moments that swing the momentum from one side to the other. To beat the Oregon Ducks, you don’t have to play a perfect game, although near-perfect would be desirable. But your team cannot turn the ball over, cannot come out of the Red Zone with only field goals. You can’t come from behind to win, because nobody can play catch-up with Mariota when he is ahead and his offense is firing on all cylinders. Trading scores does not work if you trail Oregon by two or more touchdowns and you can’t stop them from scoring.

Imagine the night sweats that defensive coordinators must suffer before they play Oregon. If your defense can actually cut off the corners so the Ducks spread-formation plays don’t get many yards after catch, then you’re set up to be attacked down the middle, with Mariota firing strikes through vertical passing lanes. The quarterback who seldom throws from the pocket, threw 56 touchdowns this season. You heard right, 56. Nobody can freeze a defense with a look-off or a play action fake like Oregon’s main man. If your linebackers and D backs hesitate for a moment or commit the wrong way, Mariota, the fastest quarterback to ever play the game, is off and running free. It’s like trying to catch dust in the wind.

Opportunity lost against the Ducks is opportunity rarely seen again. In the fiercely contested second quarter, Florida State had eight snaps inside the Ducks’ 15 yard-line and came away with only three points. On fourth and goal at the one yard-line, Oregon’s Tony Washington ankle-tackled Winston to save a touchdown. The officials removed another potential FSU touchdown opportunity with a blown non-call of interference on tight end Nick O’Leary in the end zone.

With two minutes left in the first half, the ACC champs were trailing 18-6. Gaining some footing in their familiar come-from-behind mode, FSU mounted an impressive six-play, 71 yard drive, producing a touchdown to make it a five-point game at halftime. Despite Oregon appearing to have the edge throughout the first two quarters in speed, swagger and stops, the game was knotted up. Neither quarterback had thrown a touchdown. But Mariota did throw only his third interception in 397 attempts, a rare miscue that Florida State failed to convert to points. As fans rushed to be first to the bathrooms, they left a game with little rhythm that felt clumsy and in need of definition.

From the perspective of the Florida State Seminoles, the third quarter of the Rose Bowl was a dose of the mortality they had rallied against and lucked away from for 29 games. It was a reality check delivered in a brutal series of body blows by an unbeatable opponent who sucked the wind and then the heart from them.

Oregon’s success lies in the tempo of their offensive attack and a newly gelled defense. Nose guard Alex Balducci and defensive ends Arik Armstead and DeForest Buckner were a three-man front that routinely head slapped, sucker punched and muscled their way through five offensive lineman and made the FSU backfield their home. Three players beating five off the ball left Winston on his own and chased from the pocket like a man with a twisted ankle fleeing attack dogs.

The third quarter began quietly but suddenly turned otherworldly at about the eight minute mark. That’s when Nike CEO and Duck benefactor/mojo man Phil Knight appeared on the sidelines, gestured to the heavens and the sky fell in on Florida State. With the score 25-20, the Ducks shifted into overdrive. Mariota hit receiver Darren Carrington with a sideline bullet that turned into a 56 yard touchdown scamper. FSU running back Dalvin Cook fumbled and Mariota quickly connected again with Carrington for a 30 yard touchdown.

Florida State is known for having no quit, and mounted a drive to the Oregon 30. Trailing 39-20 on fourth down, this was their opportunity to make it a two-score game. But Jameis Winston’s number was finally up and he stuck the dagger into his own team’s heart. Flushed from the pocket, he tried to make a play and slipped like a throw rug had been pulled from under him. Flopping to the ground, he fumbled the ball backwards. Tony Washington, the Defensive Player of the Game, scooped it up and rumbled 58 yards for another touchdown. Game, set, match.

The game was a beat-the-traffic score of 52-20 at the start of the fourth quarter. FSU had committed five turnovers in six possessions in the third quarter, leading to four unanswered Ducks touchdowns. In retrospect, it wasn’t that hard to see coming. Oregon is ranked second in the nation in turnover margin (good). The Seminoles are ranked 101st with 12 fumbles and 20 interceptions. Expecting to win a close game against Oregon with those numbers is like leaving a can of lighter fluid inside the fireplace at Thanksgiving dinner and hoping for a quiet meal.

Oregon head coach, Mark Helfrich’s enjoyed his 29th 50-point game since taking over as the master of the offense. The Ducks racked up 639 yards in total offense. Running back Thomas Tyner was running downhill contributing 124 yards and two touchdowns. Darren Carrington, not exactly a household name, had a career performance with seven catches for 165 yards and two TD’s. Meanwhile, the Oregon defense was performing a Vulcan mind meld with FSU receivers all day – in synch with their every move, cutting off and anticipating routes and harassing Winston to no end.

As the game’s outcome became inevitable, Florida State had the body language of a man being led to the gallows. Their corner threw in the towel when Mariota took off on his own touchdown run and the defense hardly bothered to line up. Oregon’s bloodthirsty avalanche of tempo, speed and execution sent a message to the world, addressed to the SEC. There’s a new sheriff in town.


The view from Section 28 got better as the game went on

For Oregon alumni like myself who saw this final L.A. game of the Mariota era in person, it was hard not to leave the Rose Bowl misty-eyed. It felt like the end of a movie that took five long years to make. The credits haven’t rolled as the College Football Playoff championship game is Monday. The Ducks are six point favorites and Oregon’s first national championship is still 60 minutes away. But what a ride through the 2010’s it has already been. Nothing can replace the excitement and buzz of seeing your old school, with years of unremarkable football distinction, become the rock stars of our time and the media darlings of everyone west of the Cuyahoga River.

This Rose Bowl win is dedicated to the ghosts. The ghosts of former Ducks: Dan Fouts, Bobby Moore, Joey Harrington, LaMichael James and coach Chip Kelly – the man with the incredible vision who made it possible. This was for all the Oregon fields of dreams that were cut short. For favorite son and track superstar Steve Prefontaine, who died in a single-car accident at 24, before he could bring the Olympic Gold Medal back to Eugene. It was a fist pump for the countless warriors with losing seasons who shed green blood to represent a town best known for rain and a smelly sawmill. But mostly, it was about respect. Whether the Oregon Ducks ever climb this high up the mountain again, respect is something you carry to a place that no one can take away.

Go Ducks.

Freelance Copywriter Survival Strategies

Surviving as a Freelance Copywriter is Up to You
December 15, 2014
By Brian Bentley



Today’s topic covers some of the strategies for survival as a freelance entertainment copywriter. What exactly is this? Think of Don Draper from Mad Men, only you’re writing ad copy for something far more cool than ketchup or cold cream. You’re in the movie business. Sure, you won’t get passes to the Academy Awards, but many of the people you work for will. I have been an entertainment freelancer for years, contributing copy for over 300 films and TV shows. My work has gone to finish on posters and video boxes for Dances With Wolves, Blade and Buffalo 66.

This is a tough business and nobody makes much money because writers don’t get paid a whole lot anymore. But the rewards are plenty. Imagine you are walking down the street with a friend and you both notice a 20-foot high billboard for the HBO series Girls. The image is four young women gazing upward into white space. The tagline is “Nowhere to Grow but Up.” And you wrote that. Whip out the iPhone and immediately post the photo. You can’t buy how good that feels.

If you are starting from scratch, the first thing you will need is a copywriting portfolio.

A good creative director can spot a talented writer in two seconds, even from a spec ad. Find some taglines and movie synopses you admire and break down their components to replicate them. It’s fairly easy in many software programs to insert your own copy into existing key art and create a finished ad. Work on taglines, synopses, actor bios and sell sheets. Press kits to emulate can be found online. Once you have built a decent portfolio, the next step is to target potential clients.

LinkedIn is a nice resource. So are the Golden Trailer Awards. Any database that lists agencies to approach is good. TrailerPark.com is one of the industry leaders.

Most people will be happy to tell you the things that are so great about the biz and how you can still make it, even though the entire industry has been hammered and shrunken by technology. In the late '90s, it was mostly print and broadcast. Now it’s mainly online. But the principles of keeping your sanity have not changed. I am going to tell you things that you won’t find in typical places, but maybe they will help you keep focused and determined.

• When I was doing this full-time, I made an average of 50 to 100 cold calls for work every week. I kept detailed logs of each prospect, when to call back and what my follow-up strategy would be in each case. If you are afraid of rejection, realize that this is a numbers game. The more people you call/contact, the easier it will get and the better the chance you are going to hook up with someone (kind of like dating). You are not selling Internet bundling packages. You are selling a service that is going to be profitable for both you and your client because you know you can deliver the goods.
• The gatekeepers at studios and agencies are hired to keep people like us away and out of the boss’s hair. Make these gatekeepers your friends. Don’t let them intimidate you. If they are complete a-holes, then move on, you don’t want to work there. But often you can get them to see you as a determined and sincere person and they will do all they can to help you.
• Draw up profiles of all your targeted execs. Find out what they have worked on and any awards. Do your research homework. This will impress and flatter them if you are lucky enough to engage them in a conversation.
• Avoid passive communication like sending out resumes without phone calls or repeated email/text/online follow up. Cold resumes are often tossed in the trash. Rarely does anyone call back from a resume unless you went to the same college as the boss or are friends with one of their best friends.
• Try hard to make them empathize with your career goals. When someone is impressed by any candidate they will go out of their way to help them succeed.
• If you are a beginner, you can work for spec (paid only if copy used) exactly ONCE for the same client. After that, ask them if they could “pay their bills working for free?” and tell them diplomatically that anyone who works for free is getting paid what they are worth. If they get snippy or claim that other writers work for free, move on. There are more clients out there than you think and the harder you look, the more you will find.
• Once you get a client or two, then your job is to not lose them.
• Be aware of idiots in the front office who will absolutely destroy your chances of success at the company. If you find yourself taking copy direction from someone you sense is incompetent, diplomatically confirm with higher-ups that the direction you are being given is what the brass really wants.
• This can be done delicately, but sometimes you just have to be forceful. Better to say, “I’m sorry, but I’m getting mixed messages here and I want to make sure you guys are happy with my work.”
• One reason you are doing this is because your time is valuable. More importantly, if you are sent in the wrong writing direction by a well-meaning but clueless lower level employee, the boss you are working for will usually blame you, the writer.
• Deadlines are the most important facet of this. Whenever possible, get them verified in writing. Even if you agree by phone to deliver them by 5 pm on a Tuesday, send a follow up text or email that confirms that in a casual way. This gives you a back-up note to send to the boss that proves the deal was made for a certain deadline.
• Use a Purchase Order (P.O) whenever you do a job for anyone, and have the fee plainly stated. E-mail is OK to confirm your fee, but some people can claim to lose an e-mail, so I try to make it an official P.O. with my company and address at the top.
• Sometimes no news is good news. Just because you turned in an assignment and didn’t hear back, it doesn’t mean they are unhappy. If you are satisfied with your work and convinced you put in 100% effort, it just stresses you out to project anything negative. Creative Directors are swamped with things to do.
• There is one constant in this. If they like you and you gave them their money’s worth, they will use you again. But often they won’t compliment you in the slightest because they are worried this will cause you to want more money, or, even worse (if they really like you), disappear and start working for their competition.
• The flip side is if they didn’t like the work they will never tell you why. They just won’t use you again.
• When it comes to assignments, always promise less than you can deliver and then deliver more than you promised. Ask for more time than you really need and then give them more copy directions than they asked for. If they ask for 25 taglines, give them 50.
• Rewrites are free. If the first pass isn't exactly on target, let them know that you will write one revision and maybe a little more. But if there are major changes in direction on their end after you submit copy, then the fee needs to be renegotiated. Money really is about time spent. Your time.
• When negotiating fees, be honest but clever. Most budgets are loosely set by companies before they contact freelancers. But there can be considerable wiggle room. If they think you will take bottom dollar, they will presume that you suck. You want to be near the top end of their affordable range. Ask other writers what they charge. Try to find one exec who is sympathetic and ask them straight out what they usually pay. I was once called for a fees quote to write radio spots for the movie Shrek. The woman on the phone asked me what I charged and when I gave them a figure, she told me that my quote was half of what the other writers asked for so I “must not be any good.” I replied, that I would be happy to charge her more if it would make her feel better.
• Friends are good. Industry friends are even better. My best and longest contacts were people with whom I enjoyed a certain camaraderie. There was one guy who was a musician and we were on a great social wavelength. He’d call to give me the background info on an assignment and we would spend most of the conversation talking about bands and gigs and then he would finally say, “Oh yeah, the tagline concepts are blah, blah, blah, same old shit,” and then send me all his coverage to work from. If you can find a relationship with a freelance employer this natural and real, you have struck career gold.

I hope I’ve given you a few freelance entertainment copywriting strategies that I spent years figuring out the hard way. Now, as Don Draper would say, “What are you waiting for, a pat on the back?”



4

Charles M. Young: Remembering a Pioneer of Punk Rock Journalism

Rock and Roll
Should be Frightening
(Not Unlike God)
August 24, 2014
By Brian Bentley



On Tuesday, August 19th, my friend, Carlos “Cake” Nunez, called to tell me the sad news that legendary music writer, Charles M. Young had died from a stage four brain tumor. A dozen years ago, Carlos introduced me to Chuck by forwarding him a story I wrote. So it was only fitting that he be the person to inform me that the great CMY had left this earth at 63.

I had the unique privilege of a 10-year correspondence with Chuck Young that was an irreplaceable source of inspiration and creative ideas. Over the years, we exchanged more than 100 emails and IM’s with dizzying regularity. He tutored me on writing and the writing markets, gave me legal advice, discussed Oregon college football, our mutual love of comedian Bill Hicks and delved into touchy topics like how to connect with women who were emotionally available.

In short, Chuck became a friend I would chat with at all hours of the night about any subject, professional or deeply personal. He was holed up in New York and could never quite make it out to L.A. to visit, except the time he dropped by Carlos’ apartment in the late 1990’s for research on a book he was writing about The Butthole Surfers. Carlos knew plenty about the band as a longtime writer for the legendary punk fanzine, Flipside. (The book about the BH Surfers never came out, but that’s another story.)

Charles M. Young was a student at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism when he won a national writing competition sponsored by Rolling Stone. In no time, he was a major contributor at the magazine, specializing in witty, humorous and deeply researched profiles of punk, country, blues and rock artists – often captured at the peak of their careers. In 1977, he was the first rock journalist at a mainstream publication to write an in-depth cover feature on the Sex Pistols, “Rock is Sick and Living in London.” Chuck introduced the Ramones to mall-rat America with his breakthrough portrait, “The Ramones are Punks and Will Beat You Up.”

In 1985, Chuck was instrumental in producing the TV show, Punks and Poseurs, the first authentic program dedicated to punk rock ever featured on MTV (and maybe the last). In the debut episode (check the You Tube clip), a scholarly Charles M. Young, decked out in wire framed glasses and a motorcycle jacket, patiently explains the bizarre ritual of slam dancing and how punk fashions influenced everything from studded wristbands on Ozzy Osbourne to Madonna’s punkette stage look.

Chuck was attracted to difficult, contradictory subjects of all musical genres. His knack as a fearless Method style interviewer who physically integrated himself with interviewees, often found him locked in psychic combat and at the mercy of unstable, egomaniacal musicians like Jerry Lee Lewis and Don Henley of the Eagles.

There weren’t a lot of punk rock critics who were passionate about the Eagles, but Chuck regarded them as uniquely human, dug their songs and wasn’t afraid to say so. He found Don Henley’s hypocrisy, blatant sexism and hatred of the East Coast music establishment annoying, but respected his ambition, intelligence and dedication to songwriting craft. Young hammered Henley to expand his thinking and open up to different kinds of music. They became lifelong friends the day the Eagles took on the Rolling Stone team for a spirited softball game at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, home of the USC Trojans. The Eagles took their softball so seriously they rented the pricey facility and invited their friend, California Governor Jerry Brown and an abundance of national media.

The Eagles won the game but offered to let Chuck Young follow them around for the better part of a year. In 1979, he was along for the ride as a first-person witness to every fist fight and line of coke while the band struggled to complete their swan song album, “The Long Run.” It was a mammoth and draining marathon which yielded a so-so album but a masterpiece story about the band, and a flaming coda for the 70s, “Hell is for Heroes, the Eagles Slow Burn in the Rock and Roll Inferno.” Young’s piece was funny, playful and revealing. Preconceived notions that the Eagles were simply pompous careerists were proven wrong, reminding us that it’s rebellious kids who form rock bands. Who knew a dour, S.O.B. like Henley had a silly delinquent side and was capable of blowing up a laundry cauldron with a cherry bomb?

Southern rock overtones could be heard in the Eagles’ tunes and Chuck was fond of Southern music in general. Maybe it was spiritually linked to his great-grandfather, who had fought for the Confederacy and once owned slaves (the latter being something Chuck was not thrilled about, but in his typical wisdom, understood). Chuck was born in Wisconsin, the son of a minister, which is a long way from the Mason/Dixon line. But he admired how many of the Southern bands didn’t conform to conventional or hip thinking. Young was attracted to contrarians and libertine outsiders and anyone who challenged rigid or conventional thinking. Southern rockers seriously embraced the manifesto of sex, drugs and rock n’ roll and implicitly understood the commitment involved in partying to the bitter end.

In the fall of 1976, Charles M. Young was the editor of Random Notes at Rolling Stone. Probably the most consistently-illuminating music column in history, Random Notes was a behind-the-scenes glimpse of rock stars at their most enlightened, dangerous or ridiculous. One day in ‘76, it was suggested that Chuck go downstairs to a hot dog joint inside the mammoth building that served as Rolling Stone’s New York offices, to interview the South’s most notorious rock band, the original Lynyrd Skynyrd.

The hot dog stand story symbolized the circus-like excesses of the era. I have a fairly deep knowledge of Southern Rock and the original Skynyrd, so when Chuck told me what happened that afternoon, it was a wholly-formed, first-person confirmation of everything I had heard about only in fragments. We sent pages of emails back and forth about the chimp that MCA Records brought to the event that was guzzling a bottle of Jack Daniels with the band. This unusual pairing resulted in one of the most bizarre and iconic rock photos ever. Away from the cameras, Chuck and the chimp hit it off immediately. Young was a master at getting drunk with musicians to loosen things up and make the interviews jump.


“The Monkey and Me” Lynryd Skynyrd drink Jack Daniels
with a Chimp at NYC press party, 1976
This was a dangerous proposition with a band like Lynyrd Skynyrd. Their lead singer, Ronnie Van Zant was a lyrical genius, but also a ruthless, violence-prone thug who would have fit in nicely with the guys in Compton on Death Row Records. Van Zant was arrested 11 times for fighting and public drunkenness. Given that the rate of arrests compared to incidents without an arrest, is probably weighted 40-1, you get an idea of the unsavory risks involved. But for an adventurous journalist like Chuck, the interview was a priceless opportunity to mix it up with fellow pros at anarchy.

Taken from our IM’s and e-mails, here’s what Charles M. Young had to say about drinking with a chimp, getting kicked in the balls by Hunter S. Thompson, allowing The Ramones to steal a song title from him and how hard it is to make it as a writer. I can say without hesitation that you won’t find these quotes in the other stories out there about CMY.

BB: So what are your memories of the Lynyrd Skynyrd day? Was it like a meet and greet with the band?

CMY: Lynyrd Skynyrd rented a hot dog restaurant called Nathan’s that happened to be 23 floors below Rolling Stone. It was chosen because of its proximity, on the theory it would be easier to coax us writers to go if we didn't have to travel far. And it was chosen because the record company figured that if the band busted it up, how much damage could you do in a hot dog restaurant?

As the writer of Random Notes in the fall of '76, I arrived at the restaurant and got drunk with (band members) Allen Collins and Artimus Pyle. For some reason, they had a chimp there, who shared our Jack Daniels. We all got drunk, me, the guys in the band and the chimp. Both Collins and Pyle warned me to stay away from Ronnie Van Zant, who was extremely drunk and very mean. I observed him closely, but didn't ask him anything, because he was so obviously volatile.

BB: I heard Van Zant's violent instability was really unsettling to be around.

CMY: Yes! The rest of the guys were decent fellows but Van Zant appeared dangerously out of control. Later, he indeed beat the crap out of somebody on the sidewalk, and Pyle had an LSD freakout. I wrote a Random Note about it, and Russell Baker, the humor columnist of the New York Times, plagiarized the whole thing. Just took my Random Note and changed the name of the band. Fucker.

BB: I once heard a quote from Billy Powell (Skynyrd keyboardist). "When Ronnie was drunk and picked on you, you didn't fight back. Because if you fought back, you'd get really hurt."

CMY: Before I was at Rolling Stone, I remember an editor at Crawdaddy (magazine) telling me that Van Zant had told him that he liked fucking groupies in the ass, because he had a small pecker, and that way it would seem bigger and they'd remember him. So he definitely wanted to be bigger than life.

BB: Al Kooper found them in some beat-to-shit Florida club and immediately signed them to his “Sounds of the South” label. Right after, he booked studio time for their first album and brought them up to New York. Talk about fish out of water.

CMY: I didn't know what to think of Lynyrd Skynyrd in their prime. I admired their let-it-all-hang-out ethos, but I was terrified that they'd let it all hang out on me. While most of the great bands were simultaneously inspiring and frightening (not unlike God), Skynyrd was really frightening up close.

BB: More scary than G.G. Allin?

CMY: Never saw G.G. I remember George Tabb used to say, "Chuck, you gotta see G. G. Allin."

"Why?" I would say.

"Because he shits onstage and throws it at the audience."

"I don't want to be in the same room with that act."

"Yeah, but the last time I saw him, he stuck his finger up his ass and chased people out of the club."

"You go see him and tell me about it later."

BB: Obviously one of the most crazy and charismatic guys you ever met was Hunter S. Thompson.

CMY: I tried to strangle him at the Rolling Stone office Christmas party in 1980.

BB: You wanted to kill him? What happened?

CMY: I was actually (in drunken jest) trying to kill (publisher) Jann Wenner, and someone pulled me off him. Hunter was next to him, so I decided to kill him instead. He kicked me in the nuts and I went down like a sack of potatoes. It was one of the low points of my drinking years, but it's kind of a fun story. (Chuck’s drinking led to a departure from Rolling Stone that lasted ten years, but he emerged sober for life.)

BB: Does anyone really know exactly what happened on the Vegas trip that led to his book, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas?

CMY: I'm sure he did that stuff and the Hells Angels book is true. He had the artificial hip and bad vertebrae to prove it. But after Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail, he was making a lot up. I thought he was at his best when he did the reporting, and then hallucinated. Hunter was true to himself, to his own style in the first three books. After that, it was somewhat hit and miss.

BB: Given Hunter’s love of guns, his depression and his flair for the dramatic, was it a shock to you that he committed suicide?

CMY: He was very depressed from all the physical pain he was in. It's one thing to decide rationally that you don't want to live with the infirmities that Hunter had, which were many. It's another thing to off yourself in front of your family. I'm not sure what that statement is. Hunter had just told his son Juan where all the important documents were, then he went in the next room, called his wife on the phone, and shot himself. To me, it was a bad scene, an act of anger.

BB: I think if he had died right after he wrote the 1977 piece, The Banshee Screams for Buffalo Meat, about his late friend, Oscar Acosta, the writing establishment would have put him on Mount Rushmore.

CMY: Well, he still deserves to be on Mount Rushmore.

BB: I saw Thompson give a lecture at UC Santa Barbara. He showed up several hours late after getting drunk in a bar in Goleta and when he finally arrived, people were so pissed and freaked out, it caused a riot.

CMY: His lectures were usually riots. That was part of the show and why you were there.

BB: That classic 70’s piece you wrote on The Ramones was flawless.

CMY: Oh thanks. I was upset by some of the editing, but I'm the only one who knows what could have been. Here’s some trivia for ya. The subhead on that article was “Teenage Lobotomy.” The Ramones stole it for their song. I saw Tommy Ramone recently, and he reminded me. I'd forgotten.

BB: Were there any successful punk bands you didn’t like?

CMY: I confess I didn't like The Clash much. I wanted to like them and felt I should like them, because of their politics. But once I'd seen the Sex Pistols, nobody else quite measured up. Even if it weren’t for the Sex Pistols, I’d have found the Clash boring, although Mick Jones had something. My favorite Clash song was, "I'm so Bored With the USA." Me too. I also hated Motley Crue and some of those other terrible hair bands from the 80s.

BB: I was reading an article recently about the 50 worst bands of all time. The Doors easily made the list, but I always thought Morrison’s stage attitude influenced punk rock.

CMY: I'd put The Doors on my best AND worst lists. When they were good, they cut through everything else on the radio. When they were bad, they sucked the entire mop. The later singles, "Touch Me," and "Riders on the Storm" were dreadful.

BB: What did you think of the Oliver Stone movie on The Doors?

CMY: Ray Manzarek hated the way he was portrayed in that, because it made him look like a disconnected, hippie intellectual doofus, but that's exactly how the guy talks, on and off camera. My favorite Door is John Densmore, because he refused to let the songs be used for commercial jingles when Manzarek and Kreiger insisted they sell them to Madison Avenue. Densmore argued that Jim Morrison would have viewed it as selling out. I agree. I also loathed hearing "Rock & Roll" by Led Zeppelin on Cadillac commercials. To this day, whenever I hear "I Heard it Through the Grapevine," I think of that fucking dancing raisins commercial.

BB: At the height of punk, you were writing for a national magazine. How much flack did you take from underground bands when you would go to see them?

CMY: For a national magazine, RS was always trying and I give Jann the credit. We were out there and willing to write up bands that had something to say. There has been a continuum. Now Matt Taibbi gets to say what he wants, and he's said some things about Wall Street and the economic system that needed saying. And yeah, I do wish RS would give me the freedom they give to Taibbi. But that's not going to happen in this incarnation. I try not to think about it a lot.

BB: I know that you were writing music reviews for Playboy and more recently, a blues column for The Atlantic. Is that your favorite music right now?

CMY: Yeah, I listen mostly to old blues these days. Hardly an original taste in someone of my age, but that's what I like, and that's what I play. I feel fucking sorry for kids coming up on Justin Bieber. Bubble gum has always been out there, but us baby boomers were extraordinarily lucky with the music we came of age to. Now, Corporatism is killing everything, including the arts.

BB: What do you have going on in the story pipeline?

CMY: I'm doing a story about Skunk Baxter right now. Then I’m going to go hang out with Jerry Lee Lewis and see what happens. Everyone's waiting for a band to come along and change things again. Nirvana was the last band that really resonated in the culture. It's been a long time.

BB: Is it possible to actually survive as a freelance magazine writer? I took a break from advertising copywriting in the 90's and gave it a go and found it a dead end.

CMY: Ya know, it's pretty much impossible to make a living doing what I'm doing. I don't recommend it to anyone. I make it worse for myself with fear and perfectionism and shit, but it's mostly unattainable. I remember, when I was in journalism school, some guy came to my reporting class and outlined the finances of free lancing. He said it was impossible to make a living, and I didn't believe him, but he was right. I got published in Crawdaddy before I was ever in Rolling Stone. The Crawdaddy clips gave me something to show other magazines, even though Crawdaddy paid for shit.

The state of magazines is very discouraging. Most magazines sell a lifestyle – and now nobody can afford the magazine, let alone the lifestyle. They all seem stunningly irrelevant. These days, you have to be a machine or a hack to make it work. Or strike it rich somehow as a celebrity, like Hunter. I'm always scrambling, and it's unpleasant. But it's better than having a corporate job. You should go for it, if that's what you want to do. But don't have any illusions about how tough it is.

BB: I have a question for you. Why do you think the life expectancy, even for writers, in rock is so short? Robert Palmer just passed away. It seems like musicians, writers, anybody in rock goes out before their time.

CMY: Well, hard living is a tradition in rock writing, and there's not a chance of getting rich. A sociologist in England figured out that people at the top of any social hierarchy live longer than the people at the bottom. Rock writing is pretty fuckin' low in prestige. Lotta stress. Timothy White (Chuck’s close friend and fellow writer, who died at 49 in 2002) had his father killed by a heart attack at a young age. But mostly in Tim's case it was stress. Billboard was hard on him. Billboard is an awful, stupid, corrupt magazine. I'm talking about the management at that place. They're all dirtbags.

---

My last question to Charles M. Young, regarding the short life spans of rockers, is one that hangs heavy with irony in the air tonight. I never thought I would be writing this story. I figured Chuck would be around for another 10 to 15 years to bounce ideas off of. The only real friend I ever had in the publishing business was always reachable and inexhaustible in his support.

Chuck cared greatly, which was his blessing and his burden. He was a mentor and a confidant. Whenever I wrote something important, he was one of the first people I sent it to. He was a “made man” in journalism, and his informed opinion was the most valuable. Sometimes I would phrase a piece a certain way just to impress him. He mattered like the teacher in high school who drove you to your best work. In his indomitable spirit of encouragement, he was “Mr. Miyagi” in the Karate Kid. He gave me the greatest compliment ever when he said we were “peers.”

In the mid 2000’s, restless to find a freelance market that magazines like Rolling Stone could never offer, Chuck dived into writing incendiary articles for thicantbehappening.net. The website is a blog collective Young co-founded, along with an impressive stable of other writers, that begs to be censored or investigated by all branches of the government that suppress independent thinking. Thiscantbehappening.net skewers both the Right and the Left, but more often, addresses how corporations and their massive influence on politics and world economies continue to pollute the planet. Chuck’s tribute to comedian Bill Hicks is a reminder that a true satirist attacks everything.

Always fond of politics and searching for a cause with impact, Chuck immersed himself in the Occupy Wall Street movement, chronicling it in his blog and sometimes marching in street protests. His outlook was energized in a way he hadn’t felt in years. But with the highs came an increasing number of lows. After his parents died in 2008, Young withdrew and indicated that he was in the throes of a great depression. His despondency reached alarming proportions. Chuck’s usual cheerfulness had always been tinged with a certain fatalistic, funny cynicism as in, “we’re all fucked, Brian,” but lately, his heart seemed defeated and veering toward capitulation. Friends say he was a virtual recluse and had mostly stopped writing or returning calls. His last Rolling Stone piece was a Solomon Burke profile in 2010. Technology and the decline of magazines painted his career into a corner. Chuck never humped his accomplishments via social media, a numbingly redundant practice these days for anyone “artistic.” At the time of his death, he had no personal Wikipedia page and only three photos of him appeared in Google Image Search.

In late 2012, a few months before he was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer and while he was reportedly dropping out of contact with many of those who knew him closely, Chuck’s rate of emails to me doubled. Often he was effortlessly brilliant and could sum up or dismiss a lifetime of expectation in a single sentence. When I rambled on about how I had found the game of No Limit Texas Hold ‘Em poker to be almost a religion, based on the mastering of psychology and the optimization of personal performance, Chuck replied curtly, “I’ve never had any luck at cards.” But more and more, he would repeat details of the same stories over and over, like a child might or an old man. In retrospect, the Glioblastoma that had invaded his brain may have been affecting his mind and behavior.

Chuck Young was not necessarily alone. Hundreds of veteran journalists like him have become fossils of a bygone age, dinosaurs with no museum to house or honor them. Long, expansive music articles that delve deeply into philosophy and complicated truths have been extinct for years. Few people possess attention spans and freely admit to avoiding any block of copy that takes up more space than a mobile device screen. Writers such as Chuck, who used to fight like frightened monkeys to preserve their original editorial edits, now settle for bylines on 100 word sidebars, right next to the Katy Perry bendover photo. At any dollar rate, the money is laughable. I still remember the perception that writers who got paid “$2 a word” had it made.

Many writers in Charles M. Young’s “New Journalism” generation addressed their subjects from the top down, straining to be intellectual, aiming for high-brow epic-ness at the cost of clarity. Chuck wrote from the bottom up, for the average guy, for the guy who waited in line 8 hours for a ticket to a rock show that meant everything. Chuck was a music academic, but also a man of the people and never forgot that many people think academics and musicians are full of shit.

At the heart of Chuck’s writing was the concept of absurdism. From Wikipedia: “In philosophy, ‘the Absurd’ refers to the conflict between (1) the human tendency to seek inherent value and meaning in life and (2) the human inability to find any. Absurdism is very closely related to existentialism and nihilism and has its origins in the 19th century Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, who developed existentialist philosophy.”

There were many tired sacraments in rock journalism and one was that the artist was to be deified and placed on a pedestal (see Bob Dylan). Chuck’s Midwestern school of thought (see Creem Magazine out of Detroit) embraced absurdity and argued that legends could be the biggest clowns, and to worship them simply for being legends was kind of funny. From his 2006 Rolling Stone Jerry Lee Lewis story “The Killer Reloaded.”

“The last of the original Sun Records pioneers of rock & roll, and by far the least likely to be walking around in the twenty-first century, the only guy in all of music who makes Keith Richards look about as dangerous as Jessica Simpson, the Killer continues to rage into the night. Outside in his front yard. he is wearing only his underpants — bikini briefs, not boxers — and it appears that the most rock & roll of all rock & rollers might be having a senior moment.

He marches to the middle of the driveway, which goes up a short rise from Malone Road. Over the white fence that surrounds his forty acres and pond, the headlights of the passing cars seem to be gaping at the Killer, who is illuminated by the garage lights as if onstage. Hunched but unbowed, after six decades over the piano, he flaps his arms, he jumps up and down, he screams vowel sounds at the cars, daring them to gaze upon his nakedness in the humid night air.”

Chuck Young was a man of wit and grace, a writer who readers trusted because there wasn’t an insincere, dishonest bone in his body. Somehow, he managed to be intellectual without being snotty, tough but also sentimental, supportive but sometimes discouraging. “Real” is the term that would best describe him. Because he was a fan first and a prominent writer second, musicians believed him and he became their best friend. He once hung with The Butthole Surfers and drove them all over town (reportedly after the band had given him some acid).

From guitarist Paul Leary’s website:

“He was a champion for the band, writing reviews for us in big magazines. He let us sleep on the floor of his small mid-town NYC apartment for more nights than I can count. We almost got him kicked out of there a couple of times. I still remember the times he bought us all BBQ sandwiches for lunch. We were hungry. When we were living in Winterville, GA, he flew down to hang with us, showing up in a rental car that had an unlimited mileage agreement. This was at a time when we had absolutely no vehicle of any kind to get around, and were living in the middle of nowhere. We started calling him "Charles 'Unlimited Miles' Young".

Paul Leary was like many musicians and writers who Chuck sponsored. The closest I ever got to him was when he came to my emotional rescue – before, during and after my one foray into magazine writing. For years, I had been an advertising copywriter specializing in music and movies. I had written for most of the record labels and film studios in town. My taglines had appeared on one-sheet posters for Dances with Wolves and Blade. I had worked with a difficult Vincent Gallo to write the video box synopsis for Buffalo 66.

But nothing compared in stress, effort and emotional turmoil to the experience of trying to place a story I had written about a Silver Lake, CA woman I knew who died in a house fire under suspicious circumstances. No charges were filed but the arson investigator went to his grave believing the woman’s boyfriend was involved. I approached a local L.A. magazine of national prominence and they paid me upfront to deliver the story. After a year of negotiations and tense rewrites, the article was killed. My theory was that the piece was a little too edgy and weird for both the magazine’s readers and its advertisers. But what I mostly remember was how Charles M. Young was the best friend a writer could ask for – supportive in good times and bad.

Chuck, I will never forget you buddy and I thank you for everything. I hope that somewhere out there you are reading my tribute and that I got it right. This email you sent me about the story that was killed is something I will treasure for the rest of my days.
Later dood. Yerz, Brian.

CMY: Ohhhhhhhhhhhh Brian. I'm so sorry to hear this.

You cannot win a battle of wills with these shitheads. If you make a frontal assault, they have all the weapons, and you'll lose. Do NOT insult them, even though they deserve it. If you do, the mag will feel justified in screwing you over even more. Do everything you can to suck up, make ‘em feel like they owe you (which they do).

The problem is, they've paid you money. You've cashed the check. You can't take it elsewhere until it’s officially killed. If you publish it elsewhere to the vast acclaim you deserve for your excellent reporting and writing, the editor will look bad. Being an autocratic jerk, he lives in constant fear of looking bad. He doesn't want to publish it because it's different and good, and he doesn't want to kill it, because then you have a chance to thrive somewhere else at his expense. So he's going to sit on it until it's too old to publish elsewhere.

You're totally fucked.

The times in my life when I got into a direct fight with an editor, I lost even when I won, because they find a way to stick the knife in your back in some way you're not even expecting, like putting a stupid headline on your story, or shrinking your byline to microscopic size. So I would try sucking up to the sonofabitch. If he still doesn't slot it, ask in the nicest possible way for him to kill it so you can sell it elsewhere.

Chances are, nothing will work, and you'll still be totally fucked. That's how freelance writing works. Keep in mind that your task is to get the article into print. Insulting him is fine for your imagination, but in practice, he's impenetrable. Don't give him any reason to want to fuck you over. You are at his mercy, and that's just the fact of it.

Shit like this is why I've been fighting depression for decades.
Keep at it. Don’t give up. You have talent. You rule.

lemme know what happens
chuck

Robin Williams: A Funnyman Comes to a Sad End
August 11, 2014
By Brian Bentley




Robin Williams, who was found dead at his home in Tiburon, CA at noon today, was a giant of film and comedy and his shocking celebrity suicide has rattled the nation in a manner not seen since the death of Kurt Cobain. Whatever you were doing, when you heard the news that Williams had killed himself, the sobering effect dominated your thoughts for the rest of the day.

How could it not? Robin Williams was an actor who made us feel good to be alive whenever he walked into a room. He was 63 and in the twilight of his career – but what a career it was. The traditional media can provide an exhaustive list of his credits and a complete blow by blow retrospective. But how about the movies “Good Morning Vietnam,” “Dead Poets Society” and “Good Will Hunting,” for starters?

Williams’ cinematic masterpieces came long after he had helped define the essence of drug-fueled comedy that ran manic through the streets of the 1970’s like a coke fiend on fire. Richard Pryor and George Carlin re-invented comedy and set the stage for Williams’ contemporaries like John Belushi, Andy Kaufman, Dan Aykroyd and Steve Martin. “Crazy” was the term that defined most of these acts. There was silly-crazy like Martin’s “wild and crazy guy;” smartly-cynical crazy like Aykroyd; weird, foreign-guy wacky like Kaufman and stone cold fucking nuts crazy like Belushi and Pryor – two radically creative comics who seemed intent on capping their volatile careers with early exits.

It is impossible in 2014 to appreciate how new and exciting all this was in 1978, but the country had emerged from a relentlessly repressive decade of war-mongering, assassinations and racial turmoil. People were fed-up with “the establishment” and lies and bullshit and Watergate and bummers of all kinds. Society was suffering from a sense of collective nihilism and anarchy was a popular notion. Punk rock stars were singing songs declaring there was “no future” and whether you subscribed to that bleak a philosophy or not, everyone seemed to agree it was time to let it loose and party.

Comedy and music took the lead in burning the candle at both ends. Drugs, decadence and living on the edge were badges of honor and achievement. Back then, the country was addicted to the image of hard living and getting high the way we are junkies for Facebook now. Guys like Belushi and Pryor and Keith Richards were considered marvels of modern medicine and self-determination.

Robin Williams wound up on the cover of Rolling Stone with his inventive, hit TV series, “Mork and Mindy.” He was a superstar stand-up comic known for boundless energy. It was exhausting to watch him work a stage and impossible to separate his amped-up routine from his offstage personality. To keep that rush going, he did copious amounts of cocaine, often in the company of his fast lane peers. Nobody has ever provided evidence, but it’s apparent to anyone who followed this story that Williams was shooting speedballs along with John Belushi at the Chateau Marmont Hotel the night that Belushi OD’ed – and managed to get out of town about five minutes before the cops slapped him with a trumped-up conspiracy charge that would have fallen apart in court but dealt a severe blow to his brazenly clean-cut public image.

Surviving those times, when many of his professional friends did not, was no mean feat. But Robin Williams (who was never a cast member) did something phenomenal that most of his buddies from the original Saturday Night Live could not – he became an extraordinary dramatic actor who made great movies. There was often a sly sadness and wistful melancholy ingrained in his roles and this was reflected in his private life. Williams entered rehab on numerous occasions and confessed in interviews to prolonged bouts with cocaine, alcohol and depression.

In one of his greatest roles and certainly against type, he played a lonely, creepy photo-processing clerk in “One Hour Photo.” As Seymour Parrish, Williams stalks a young suburban family, using their cheerful and “normal” photos to fill the holes in his empty life. While his character spins down a drain of psychosis and obsession, Williams enters into uncharted waters for a comic actor. The aching sadness in his eyes and longing for human contact chillingly capture the insecurities in all of us to belong.

After the events of the last 24 hours, it is difficult to know just how much Robin Williams was acting in real life. When a man who seemingly has everything – money, family, prestige, a beautiful home overlooking the San Francisco Bay, decides to take his life, it sends a message to us all that depression does not care who you are or what you have accomplished, just what you are missing and what you believe you lack and will never attain. That loss of purpose is more dangerous to one’s survival than any drug.

As the Boomer generation drifts into their final years, there has been much discussion that suicide will become a natural and increasingly popular remedy for the slow and painful disintegration of old age. When an accomplished and respected director like Tony Scott has the strength and willpower to climb a bridge scaffolding to leap to his death, one wonders if these precedents had an impression on a fitness freak like Robin Williams, whose body was fit enough for marathon bicycling but whose mind and heart had quit. Williams has several films yet to be released and these will be viewed, as will all his work, with a fresh perspective and a search for answers to the kinds of questions that can never be answered.

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Hunter S. Thompson Goodbye to the Last American Hero

The Headless Thompson Gunner
February 25, 2005
By Brian Bentley



Sunday afternoon, on the 20th of February, on the cusp of Pisces, Hunter S. Thompson, the most brilliant satirical writer of the 20th Century, was no match for the business end of a .45 handgun he used to scatter his brains like snowflakes across the Colorado winter.

Suicide seemed a fitting end for a writer who was the closest thing the Boomer generation had to Ernest Hemingway. Thompson was not going to shrink from the responsibility of determining his own destiny. You weren't going to find him tied to a hospital bed on the end of a tube, ready to meet his maker. There is only one way an old soldier goes out and that’s with his boots on. Don’t leave it to the pill pushers and bean counters and the do-gooders to decide what's best for you.

Hunter S. Thompson, the founder and Godfather of Gonzo Journalism, was 67 years old and had lived a half dozen different lifetimes when he died last week. Clearly his best work was behind him, even though he was still writing regularly and cashing paychecks from ESPN.com. There was nothing amiss with his mechanics; it was more like he had run out of subject matter, while the values he idealized in his writing, the ones that seemed precious enough to die for in the 1960’s, were compromised away by a world that had become too jaded to care anymore.

Despite the setbacks, Hunter always enjoyed himself. His last column for ESPN was about a sport he had just invented called, “Shotgun Golf,” in which the object of the game is to blow the opponents ball out of the air in mid-flight. It was the perfect metaphor for the Thompson literary ethos: to be high, to be moving at great velocity, to be blown to pieces like some doomed speed freak outlaw.

The amazing aspect of Thompson’s story is how he managed to live as long as he did. He had the kind of lifestyle habits that kill bulls. His daily drug regimen would have brought most men to their knees; with the exception of cats like Keith Richards, he had few peers still standing. But in the end, I suspect, it wasn’t the drugs or the physical ailments that did him in. It was the isolation. The world had forgotten about Thompson. He was suffering from irrelevancy. And to a man who had made such on impact on so many, to be ignored was a fate worse than death.

----------------------------------
Hunter Thompson didn't start out to become an icon, which can be rare in the icon business. Born in Louisville, Kentucky in 1937, he served two tumultuous years in the Air Force and by the early 60’s, was a struggling sportswriter. In 1965, Thompson unwittingly launched a revolutionary participatory literary style when he persuaded the Hells Angels to let him ride with their thug gang and write about the experience. Two years later, his diaries were optioned into the book, Hells Angels: a Strange and Terrible Saga and Thompson became a cultural star overnight.




Suddenly, the icons of New Journalism like Norman Mailer, Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese and George Plimpton were lining up to sing his praises. With the 60’s providing the perfect canvas for Thompson's foot-to-the-floor, drug-laced narratives, he blazed with moral outrage and a manic, first person, subjective style of reporting that incinerated the lines between fact and fiction.

But fiction and embellishment were not to be confused with Thompson’s eternal quest for the TRUTH. There was often more truth in his eccentric ramblings, simply because he didn't conform to the conventional school of reporting. In his day, writers veered toward safety and mediocrity. Hunter never sold out. He challenged the process and the editors he worked with to keep up with him. There was no compromise, no quarter. Thompson's press credentials from Rolling Stone gave him the same priceless access as the guys from Newsweek and The Washington Post, yet he was covering stories with an underground zeal that lampooned the dreary realities of standard news coverage.

“One of the constant nightmares of traveling with politicians is the need to keep them in sight at all times. Every Presidential campaign has its horror stories about reporters who thought they had plenty of time to “run across the street for a quick beer” instead of hanging around in the rear of some grim auditorium, only to come back in 20 minutes to find no sign of the press bus, the candidate or anybody who can tell them where they went. The temperature is always below zero, there is usually a major blizzard to keep cabs off the street, and just as the victim remembers that he left his wallet on the press bus, his stomach erupts with a sudden attack of Ptomaine poisoning. And then, while crawling around on his knees in some ice-covered alley and racked with fits of projectile vomiting, he is grabbed by vicious cops and whipped on the shins with a night stick, then locked in the drunk tank of the local jail and buggered all night by winos.”
("Jimmy Carter and the Great Leap of Faith” from The Great Shark Hunt)

By the turn of the decade, Thompson was no longer content to just reference the other side. He was becoming the other side – a volatile, loose cannon who injected himself into his stories and made his very survival dependent on their outcomes. Part of it was obviously an act, a manipulation of reality, a form of the Living Theater that artists like Jim Morrison and Andy Kaufman made their own.





The breakthrough for Thompson came in 1971 when he took his act to Las Vegas. Sent by Rolling Stone uber-editor, Jann Wenner, to ostensibly cover the Mint 400 desert motorcycle race and a convention of drug enforcement officials, Thompson turned the fractured, psychedelic weekend into a tour de force account of drugs, destruction, imminent nervous breakdown and excessive room service bills. The book which rose from the ashes, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, was a masterpiece of literature – part fact, part fiction and completely insane. Colonel Kurtz had taken a trip upriver, landed on The Strip and turned it into a towering inferno.

“Circus Circus (casino) is what the whole hep world would be doing on Saturday night if the Nazi’s had won the war. The place is about four stories high, in the style of a circus tent with all manners of strange county fair/Polish carnival madness going on in mid-air over the gambling tables. And for 99 cents, your likeness can appear, two hundred feet tall on a screen above downtown Las Vegas. We will close the hotel room drapes tonight. A thing like that could send a drug person careening around the room like a ping pong ball. Nobody can handle the possibility that any freak with a $1.98 can appear in the sky twelve times the size of God, howling at anything that comes into his head. No, this is not a good town for psychedelic drugs. Reality itself is too twisted.”
(Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas)

To writers and erstwhile social critics, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas was our generation’s equivalent of Kerouac’s On the Road, or Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye. It was a shotgun blast to the face of the establishment and changed pop literature the way Sergeant Pepper’s changed pop music. Part of the beauty was its inclusive counterculture charm and how effortlessly it brought the reader into Hunter’s road trip from hell, diving headlong from the sheer boredom of everyday life into a darkly hilarious world where you can get away with anything you’re crazy enough to try.

Thompson’s partner in crime on the Vegas trip was his real life buddy, L.A. renegade attorney, Oscar Zeta Acosta. True life could be stranger than fiction and Acosta was certainly up for the task. He was Hunter’s greatest character and the complete embodiment of all things Gonzo – a borderline psychopath who was smart enough to be thoroughly dangerous.

“Oscar was not into serious street fighting, but he was hell on wheels in a bar brawl. Any combination of a 250-pound Mexican and LSD-25 is a potentially terminal menace for anything it can reach – but when the alleged Mexican is in fact a profoundly angry Chicano lawyer with no fear at all of anything that walks on less than three legs and a defacto suicidal conviction that he WILL die at the age of thirty-three – just like Jesus Christ – you have a serious piece of work on your hands. Specially if the bastard is ALREADY thirty-three and a half years old with a head full of Sandoz acid and a loaded .357 Magnum in his belt.”
(“The Banshee Screams for Buffalo Meat” from the Rolling Stone Tenth Anniversary issue)

Thompson and his attorney, Oscar Acosta (circa 1971)

On a major creative roll, Thompson was back on the road again, this time as the National Affairs editor for Rolling Stone. With the release of Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72, a collection of stories he’d filed on the looming re-election of Richard Nixon, Thompson took the hallucinatory stylings of FLLV and directed them downward, on a journey to the center of madness, the campaign to elect a President.

The book made him a superstar. A masterfully detailed primer on the grim realities, manipulations and sheer insanity of the political landscape, Campaign Trail '72 chronicles the further co-opting of the American dream as great careers are born and dissolved under the new-found power of media examination. By the book’s end, Thompson was flat on his back in a hotel room, suffering from an exhaustion-based nervous breakdown. Candidate Ed Muskie, once a front-runner, saw his candidacy go down in flames, assisted no doubt by Thompson’s published assertions that Big Ed’s slurred speeches were the result of a hopeless addiction to Ibogaine, a mind-altering drug that supposedly rendered its users tired, feeble and confused.

Hunter S. Thompson was at his best and brightest when he tackled his arch nemesis, Richard Nixon, a man he seemed to fear, loathe, respect and desperately need for satirical inspiration. In 1968, when Nixon was running for President, Thompson finagled a limousine interview, but with strict Nixon ground rules: only football would be discussed. While the average reporter would have declined, Thompson considered Nixon’s request to be a sporting proposal and an eminently reasonable, if not brilliant, idea.

Every great story has a frightening villain and Nixon was to Thompson what horror is to Stephen King. Hunter chronicled every chapter of Nixon’s scary rise and fall from power with profound observations that captured the heart of the man’s darkness.

“Innocence? It is even hard to type that word on the same page with Nixon’s name. Nixon's entire political career – and in fact his whole life – is a gloomy monument to the notion that not even pure schizophrenia or malignant psychosis can prevent a determined loser from rising to the top of the heap in this strange society we have built for ourselves in the name of “democracy and “free enterprise.” For most of his life, the mainspring of Richard Nixon’s energy and ambition seems to have been a deep and unrecognized need to overcome, at all costs, that sense of having been Born Guilty – not for crimes or transgressions Already committed, but for those he somehow sensed he was fated to commit as he grappled his way to the summit.”
(“Fear and Loathing in Limbo: The Scum Also Rises”)

Things were never quite the same after Nixon's premature exit from the White House. Thompson had sped to the summit in the fast lane and after ten crazy years, his career was running on empty. He continued to write magazine articles for Rolling Stone and released a steady stream of books that grew more strident and less impactful as the years wore on. Thompson’s legacy for excess, however, remained fully lit. When he wasn't holding court at the Woody Creek Tavern near his home, a few miles from Aspen, he could be often found firing tracer bullets over the local highway or hunting rogue bears on his property with tasers and shotguns.

When one stops to consider the best performance comics of modern times – the ones who flipped reality on its rear end – when you consider the Andy Kaufman's and the Dick Shawn's and the Ali G.'s – Hunter S. Thompson might well be considered the Cro-Magnon who started the entire evolution with one big bang.

As Tom Wolfe wrote last week, “You didn't have lunch or dinner with Hunter Thompson. You attended an event at mealtime.” Such was the case with his infamous college lecture tours, like the strange night I witnessed “An Evening with Hunter S. Thompson” on the UC Santa Barbara campus.

Over a thousand rabid fans of Doonesbury's, “Raoul Duke,” filed into the school gym, unaware of what lay in store for them. The mood was festive, like some kind of hippie rock concert lecture by the nuttiest professor of all. The opening act, a magician, was quickly booed off the stage beneath a shower of spent beer cups. The crowd was impatiently waiting for the man.

At one hour past the scheduled show time, a student body affairs geek announced that Thompson had been “unavoidably delayed,” and was in a bar “somewhere in Goleta.” The audience groaned. As the clock ticked, the stage announcements grew stranger. “Thompson has left the bar and just called from his mobile phone. He's lost. Wait, he's on the phone and just got directions, he's on his way.”

Random booing and the predictable early exits of the uninitiated continued for another half hour. Somewhere, stage right, a vicious fist fight broke out. The mood was sullen as so many of the faithful had mistimed their drugs and were coming down. Things were getting fairly ugly.

Suddenly, almost two hours beyond reason, Thompson's jug-eared, skinned-rabbit silhouette appeared in a dimly lit doorway to the left of the stage. The crowd erupted in a long, low volcanic howl, screaming insults, half in jest, half in real anger. Some in the audience were literally berserk with rage. I never saw a performer get that kind of reaction in my life.

Thompson promptly ran into the bowels of the building like a frightened rat. After some backstage huddling, the student speaker issued an apology. “Dr. Thompson says he's very sorry for being two hours late and would like to tell you from the bottom of his heart … that you can all kindly kiss his Ass.”

After several in the crowd rushed the stage and were ejected, Thompson finally sat down at the lectern with a bottle of booze and a large glass. But I never saw him drink from it. He began to field questions from the audience and because of the kind of technical problems one finds in school gymnasiums, barely any of these exchanges were audible. I do remember him plainly calling Hubert Humphrey a white slave trader who was running a concentration camp in the wilds of Minnesota. His mumbled monologue lasted about forty minutes and by the last question, there were only about 40 people still there.

Those who had come expecting Thompson to let them in on the joke didn't understand that the joke was on them. It was a dose of his pure anarchy, which is funny to read about, but not so funny to experience firsthand. Pay the admission and enjoy the show. Hunter was one of those prophets who considered expectation to be only premeditated disappointment. Besides the books were better anyway…

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And now, he’s gone. I still don’t believe he’s dead and that a man like Thompson could be killed with a single gunshot. He was Superman. Bullets were supposed to just bounce off his animal-skin hide. In a world where cynicism and political apathy are the foregone conclusions of rigged Presidential elections, Thompson was the ultimate idealist and it cost him. No one will ever know how much John Kerry’s defeat, three months before Thompson's suicide, affected his will to go on. His final column in Rolling Stone in which he postulated that Kerry might win handily, seemed hopelessly naïve and wishful for better days. Too bad the country was no longer on the same page with him.

“All energy flows according to the Great Magnet. What a fool I was to defy him. He knew. He knew all along. I had run far enough, so He nailed me … closing off my escape routes … plunging me into fear and confusion. Never cross the Great Magnet. I understand this now … and with understanding came a sense of almost terminal relief.”
(Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas)

“A generation of swine” is what Thompson called the shallow, me-first yuppies of the 80’s who now seem to own the world with their conspicuous consumption and self-important, yak-on-cell-phones-in-the-movie-theater mentality. In the irony of ironies, the social oppression of the 60’s – that twisted totalitarian way of thinking that seeks to control the free will of others was finally defeated – only to reappear in the late 80’s in the form of Political Correctness. But this time, the forces of oppression were no longer the other guys – the enemy we could plainly see. This time, the enemy was US, the progressive people who were supposed to have fought so hard for personal freedoms.

Thompson was sacrificed by the PC forces. They labeled him a misogynist, a minority hater, a drug-addled bad influence, a gun nut and then they turned their back on him like he was Jesus and nailed him to that old-hippie cross – too out of touch, an embarrassment to us all. His legacy was forever tarnished because a bunch of dummies took a lot of drugs to attempt piss poor imitations of him and then he got blamed for it, as if it was his obligation to be a role model instead of an artist. In the end, those he had fought for, judged him for everything and understood nothing.

So now, in the dead of winter, with the dark heavens above L.A. twisting ominously and the rain clouds spewing their venomous piss onto homes sliding into the Great Beyond beneath the local hills, the gods upstairs must have realized by now that a newly-minted, crazed soul just broke into St. Peter’s liquor cabinet and is creating an unholy shitstorm in the sky.

Hunter S. Thompson loved guns, drugs and the Gonzo Life

Down here, things just don't seem the same. Filmmakers like Michael Moore still stir things up, but they are too self-serving and well-balanced to see the demons at night. They are not one of us. Who is out there to inspire the rest to show courage in the face of political and cultural defeat? Thompson stood toe-to-toe against the forces of darkness – .44 Magnum in one hand and a bottle of Wild Turkey in the other and inspired everybody to drive stakes through the hearts of the liars and bloodsuckers. Hunter was the point man for all the loonies in the hall.

Bob Dylan wrote, “To live outside the law, you must be honest.” Hunter S. Thompson was an outlaw and a brute, an anarchist and a royal pain in the ass. As one of his Colorado drinking buddies put it, “He will be hard to replace and I'm not sure you'd want to.”

“Hunter Thompson's art is purer than that of Norman Mailer or Tom Wolfe. Thompson never preaches. He amuses; he frightens; he flirts with doom. His achievement is substantial.”
--Washington Post

Thompson was really from the old school. His peers were newspapermen, and because he was so well grounded in his craft and because he was a consummate reporter with an infinite eye for detail, his flights of narrative fantasy carried true weight behind them. He combined his background in traditional journalism with the street aesthetics of a 60’s revolutionary. It was a lethal mix. Once he’d been initiated into The Hells Angels, Thompson had an epiphany, one of those crossroads moments so many people arrived at in the 60’s. It was almost as if someone had dosed anchorman Tom Brokaw with twenty sheets of blotter acid and he woke up the next day as Frank Zappa. The world had a smart, dangerous and dedicated threat to all that was sacred.

“Thompson elicits the same kind of admiration one would feel for a streaker at Queen Victoria's funeral.”
--William F. Buckley, Jr.

As an Agent Provocateur, Hunter S. Thompson established Gonzo Journalism as the literary equivalent of rock n’ roll revolution music – like The Who’s “My Generation” and the Beatles’ “Helter Skelter” (as interpreted by Charles Manson). Gonzo was at first purely observational, but it quickly evolved into sheer disruption. Hunter was at his best when operating as a button-pusher, square in the center of the action, becoming the action, risking his life and limb to up the ante. He kept his wicked humor and his fearless style amidst the kind of desperate compulsive gambling only a high roller at the crap table understands.

“Few people understand the psychology of dealing with a highway traffic cop. Your normal speeder will panic and immediately pull over to the side when he sees the big red light behind him. This is wrong. It arouses contempt in the cop heart. The thing to do – when you're running along about a hundred or so and you suddenly find a red-flashing CHP-tracker on your trail – what you want to do then is ACCELERATE. Never pull over at the first siren howl. Mash it down and make the bastard chase you at speeds up to 120 m.p.h…”
(Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas)

But as the world kept moving and the 80’s became the 90’s, Thompson pretty much stayed at home, freeze dried in the past, kind of like Cheech and Chong. He had begun his writing career as a distanced observer with an abundance of insight – rocketing skyward with warp-speed chronicles of American institutions like the Kentucky Derby and the Super Bowl – and by the early 90's, he'd de-evolved into an extremely biased professional who kept repeating himself over and over. Now, the “story” was only about what was going on inside his head.

Hunter might have been at the happiest point in his life in 1998, when the filmed adaptation of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, starring a perfectly cast Johnny Depp and directed by Terry Gilliam, hit the big screen. While the movie worked in plenty of ways and had a spectacular soundtrack, the net result of its cartoonish depictions was to pretty much cement Thompson's legacy as “that Nutty Guy on Drugs.” If you have a reputation for being crazy, staying at the top of your game requires a certain dedication to preserving that reputation. Loyalty’s a killer. The more Thompson partied and fed the myth, the hungrier his soul became. The cycle just got worse as time wore on. With his health failing and his body joints and spirit worn to a nub, he obviously preferred to be master of his own destiny. I don’t fault him at all. I’ll just miss him.

They say the souls of suicides wander the earth, haunting the night with their restless yearning. Not yet in Heaven and just removed from Hell, they exist in that In-Between where sinners and would-be saviors dwell in uneasy company. Here's to you, Hunter – Ruler of the Roost of the Damned – you were the Greatest.

And to anyone who has to ask what all the Thompson tribute and fuss is about, just read the Work – in fact, the Work speaks so much more eloquently as to why his viewpoint mattered. The thinking behind that inflamed logic simply doesn’t age. Start with the 1979 compilation of his best stories, The Great Shark Hunt, and go from there. You will find yourself less afraid as a result. Move confidently in their midst, like Thompson did, as he stripped away the bullshit of the world to move closer to simple basic truths, or what Neil Young likes to call, “The Source.”

Hunter S. Thompson started his career as a sportswriter and died working as one for ESPN.com. Sports provided everything his writing demanded: action, color, speed, violence. His favorite athlete of all time was not coincidentally, Muhammad Ali, a man who had suffered dearly at humanity’s hands for having the courage of his monstrous convictions.

“Muhammad Ali moved from the very beginning with the same instinct that drove The Great Gatsby – an endless fascination with the green light at the end of the pier. That was always the difference between Ali and the rest of us. He came, he saw and if he didn't entirely conquer – he came as close as anybody we are likely to see in the lifetime of this doomed generation.

Res Ipsa Loquitor”

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