Spike Magazine

Spike | 15 YEARS OF BOOKS, MUSIC, ART, IDEAS | www.spikemagazine.com
it but I wished he’d just shot his dick off. Something
that would give him pain but have him talk about it,
because instead of shooting away the one exceptionally
wonderful piece of machinery in his body: his brain!
The centre of all his being. The centre of his genius
really. And he is a genius, no doubt about it as for going
down as a great, great journalist writer. He didn’t write
novels, he took William Faulkner’s advice about fact
being far more stranger than fiction.
I mean I just wonder why he did it? You know if only
I could have talked to him. Once! Just to say ‘What the
fuck! Don’t be daft, Hunter, for fuck’s sake!’ That’s why
I thought if he’d shot himself in the foot or something
… But, you see, if you can imagine: in a wheelchair, a
man of action, a man who always done exactly what
he wanted to do, suddenly realising he has no control
anymore and he’s gonna end up in a home with a lot of
old people scared him. It’s that thing: ‘In the end it was
no use, he died on his knees in a barnyard with all the
others watching.’ It’s that indignity he couldn’t stand
the idea of.
What was he like as a character?
He could be mean. He didn’t like sloppy drunks,
even though he imbibed so much stuff he was just on
another sort of level I suppose. I don’t know how he
carried on like he did. Like he said: ‘I hate to advocate
drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but
they’ve always worked for me.’ That’s the well known
BUY Ralph Steadman books online from and
phrase. He wasn’t no pusher. But he couldn’t stand
sloppy drunks and he wasn’t a sloppy drunk cos he
never seemed drunk.
Did he ever frighten you?
Yes, many times in the car. I wrote a song with him
once called ‘Weird And Twisted Nights.’ One of the
lines is “Drive your stake through a darkened heart /
In a red Mercedes Benz / The blackness hides a speeding
trap / The savage beast pretends.” We’d driven …
And this was another one of his tricks, he used to like
to drive at night with his lights out because the police
wouldn’t see him, a starlit night – “The scar heals
black…” There’s a record of it you can get from EMI,
it’s called I Like It (1999).
What is Gonzo, Ralph?
Gonzo is a strange manifestation of one’s intentions
to go somewhere to cover it (the story) euphemistically
as a journalist and yet end up being part of the story,
not part of the story but become the story. You make
one, you have to generate some sort of tension, some
oddness, some unexpected freaky thing that makes it
go, ‘Yes that’s it!’
The other thing is there is no accreditation for gonzo
journalists, so you go there as an outsider. Like we
went to the Miami Convention in the 70s and we had
to get inside without accreditation, that was part of
the target. It’s to be a rock’n’roll journalist. What’s a
gonzotic frenzy? Well it’s me in the throes of an ink
491
More
Spike
email
RSS
Facebook
Twitter
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
J
K
L
M
N
O
P
Q
R
S
T
U
V
W
X
Y
Z