Ralph Steadman himself...
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Books/news/articles/0,6109,1419636,00.html

Depraved and decadent: adventures with Thompson

Thompson's co-conspirator, the artist Ralph Steadman, recalls the barmiest
of their barmy exploits

Tuesday February 22, 2005
The Guardian

I knew all along he was pretty damned important. I was naive, an innocent
abroad. He corrupted me in a very special way. I took his gleeful, demonic
spirit on board and took out of it what I needed for my own work. But he was
the original.

I first met him in 1970, at the Kentucky Derby. The editor of Scanlan
magazine, which was named after a little-known Nottingham pig farmer, had
seen my first book, Still Life With Raspberry, and concluded I was the guy
to do this story with Hunter S Thompson, an ex-Hell's Angel who'd just
shaved his head. On the way to the airport I lost my pens, pencils and inks.
Luckily the editor's wife was a Revlon representative and she gave me a pack
of lipsticks and rouges and whatnot. And that's what I used for the story,
The Kentucky Derby is Depraved and Decadent.

When I finally found Hunter, he said: "Holy shit! I was told to look for a
matted-haired geek with stringwarts!" I had a goatee beard. I still don't
know what stringwarts are, but anyway, I had them too. "Uh, well, let's take
a beer," he said, "Do you gamble?" I told him I didn't. He'd never seen a
character like me before, who said "terrible, this is terrible" (which he
pronounced "tirrible") all the time. He realised that I was looking through
a glass darkly, seeing things I'd never seen before, like southern people
enjoying themselves in a weird and wonderful way. It was fresh and alien to
me, so I became a conduit for him. That's how Gonzo started.

In 1974 we went to Zaire to cover the "Rumble in the Jungle" between George
Foreman and Muhammad Ali for Rolling Stone magazine. Rolling Stone publisher
Jan Wenner called it "the biggest, fucked-up journalistic adventure in the
history of journalism". Hunter never delivered the story and the art
director didn't like my drawings. Hunter sold our fight tickets to buy drugs
or something, and told me: "If you think I've come all this way to watch two
niggers beat the shit out of each other, you've got another think coming."
This wasn't a racist remark. It was gonzo. He said it to be provocative.
Then he snuck off to the pool with the whisky and a big bag of grass.

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When we got back to New York, Hunter was determined to get his elephant
tusks back from customs where they were impounded. He had paid $300 for them
in non-negotiable American Express travellers' checks. "Just stay at this
bar, and have a drink," he told me, "I've gotta get my tusks back." Then, in
one beautiful action (he would have been a wonderful footballer if he hadn't
screwed his knee up), he leapt over the customs desk, picked the tusks up,
hid them under my bag in the bar and ran into a telephone booth. The customs
officers never found him, but the tusks were impounded again at Colorado,
where he lived. I later heard that all they'd wanted from him, if he'd only
bloody well listened (he never did), was $28 duty. But that was him. He
always said he raged against the coming of the light, rather than the dying
of the light.

We got drunk a lot together but the only drug I ever took with him was
psyclobin, a hallucinogenic, in Rhode Island, when we went to screw up the
Americas Cup. It scoured my innards, in a way that I cannot deal with.

When I woke up the next day, the first thing I wanted to do was spray "Fuck
the Pope" on a boat, because when Hunter had asked, "What are you gonna
write, Ralph, with your spraycans?", it was the first thing that came to
mind. But we got caught shaking the spraycans noisily. Someone asked what we
were up to. "Oh, just looking at the boats," said Hunter. Then he whispered:
"We've got to get out of here Ralph, we must flee. We've failed. We've
failed, Ralph." He set off two distress flares in the harbour and set fire
to some boats to cause a distraction so we could get away, which meant going
to a coffee bar and pretending we were ordinary people.

When we made a BBC Arena film called Fear and Loathing on the Road to
Hollywood in 1977, Hunter said: "Ralph, we've got to go to a funeral
director's. We've got to plan the monument for the event of my death." I
said: "How about some 100ft upright stainless steel tubes gathered into one
bunch, and on top there'll be the fist of gonzo?" "Two thumbs!" said Hunter,
"always remember, two thumbs!" God knows why. It was just gonzo. You can't
explain it any more than you can explain why certain phenomena happen in the
world.

The funeral director was taking it all seriously. The plan was that after
he'd been cremated, some sort of cannon or explosive device would fire his
ashes from within the fist, across the valley that he could see from his
house in Colorado. It was all romantic and lovely.

At this moment Johnny Depp is trying to figure out how we can do it.

·Ralph Steadman was talking to Amy Fleming





Alison Croggon

Blog: http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com
Editor, Masthead: http://masthead.net.au
Home page: http://alisoncroggon.com