Hunter S. Thompson, who died this week, spawned generations of imitators. But the gonzo master was a one-off, writes Shane Hegarty.
Hunter S. Thompson is dead, but take a look around and you can see him almost as clearly as he saw those bats at the start of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. On TV, in newspapers and magazines, in ad campaigns and on cinema screens. He may have struggled with, and perhaps contributed to, the exaggerated persona he built around himself, but so many people have been imitating him for so long now that he will not fade away with the echo of that final gunshot.
Things got quite ridiculous a couple of years back when the marketing people finally got involved. A book, Gonzo Marketing: Winning Through Worst Practices, explained what the works of Thompson could teach advertising people about how to sell trendy beers and natty trainers. It even featured passages of excruciating Thompson-esque prose in which the author met his hero: "He rams the barrel into my sternum, pinning me against the window. 'Yeah sure, so it's a business book.' " It was inevitable. Everyone else had done it.
What Thompson introduced is now in the DNA of journalism. Today, you don't have to spend long reading a newspaper or magazine before stumbling across yet another interview or story in which you learn as much about the journalist as you do about the subject. His legacy is in countless memoirs during which the authors engage in some adventure that necessitates constantly telling you how anarchic everything is. It is all over rock journalism, with music magazines too often featuring articles by writers who desperately want to place themselves at the centre of every scene. It is visible every time a sportswriter goes to an event and hardly mentions the action, as Thompson did when he created gonzo by reporting on the 1970 Kentucky Derby and all but ignoring the race.
You could argue that when documentary-makers such as Nick Broomfield and Louis Theroux insert themselves in a story to give it a narrative jolt, it is thanks to Thompson. And when you watch Jackass or any of its impersonators featuring young men doing dangerously stupid stunts, the attitude is that of Hunter S. Thompson, only stripped of insight or intellectual intent and replaced with testosterone.
Tom Wolfe may be considered the prime instigator of New Journalism's more novelistic approach to reporting, but he believed that the best stories involved an invisible narrator. With gonzo, though, Thompson put the writer's personality at its centre - only Hunter's personality was fuelled by hedonism and an apparent disregard for personal safety. The problem is, of course, that Thompson made it look easier than it is, which is why most of what has followed has been pallid homage. When he was truly great, he tricked his admirers into believing that all that was needed to get to the centre of a story was a head full of stimulants and a taste for danger. The writing and cultural intuition would no doubt follow. You can see why that's an attractive package, especially to young male reporters needing a boost to both ego and reputation.
Without him, so, there would be no lad mags as we know them. When Loaded first published a decade ago - selling 500,000 copies a month and creating a publishing phenomenon - its features were unapologetically gonzo. If there was no story, the journalist became the story.
"The idea was to push boundaries," says Tim Southwell, co-founder of Loaded and now editor of Golf Punk magazine. "We used to say that it was about making the writer 'get on the elephant'. If we sent someone to an elephant polo match, where GQ or Arena magazines would have reported on it from the sidelines, our guy got on the elephant. It was about taking risks. Don't just accept the situation. If it's not happening, make it happen."
The stories were often as much about the amount of drugs ingested by the reporter as they were about what was going on around him. Eventually, Loaded even managed to lasso its hero, when one writer dropped his original assignment in Aspen and went in search of Thompson instead. The result was an adventure involving an international drug-dealer, a peacock and a gun-waving Thompson.
"If you are exceptionally privileged," insisted the writer, "an evening in his company could result in being wanted by the authorities or having your head kicked in."
Even these pilgrimages to Thompson, then, resulted inevitably in laboured gonzo tales of booze and brushes with the law, although there was often the suspicion that these said as much about what the journalist wanted from the experience as they did about the reality of it.
There was the Guardian interview in which the reporter, on being introduced to Thompson, heard "a massive explosion about five feet behind my head. When I reach the ground again, I see Thompson himself, with a big kid's grin on his face and a rifle in his hand, ducking back into his house. The interview, it would appear, has begun."
Or there was the Atlantic Monthly interviewer who began: "What would you do? You're sitting in Hunter S. Thompson's kitchen conducting an interview and he wants you to drink. So you drink."
Tim Southwell's successful Golf Punk magazine, which brings gonzo to the manicured fairways, is continuing proof that the Thompson attitude still has cache.
"The company's built on gonzo," he says. "Although maybe it's not as extreme, given that golf is its central theme."
He complains, though, that much gonzo writing cannot hope to match Thompson; that it may have the hedonism, but not the sense of adventure.
"Most writers don't have the honesty, the charm or the mental edge that you need to write decent gonzo," he says. "What you've got now is Jeremy Clarkson writing about himself, saying 'look what I'm doing, aren't I great?'. Hunter was never like that. It was about the great American dream and road trips and seeing what happens. You've got to be a genuine character for that to work. In the wrong hands, gonzo can be a disaster."