Dr. Hunter S. Thompson's Private Stash
Lineage: HST Master Cassettes> Soundstudio to aiff> Itunes 7 to wav> Flac 8> You
Track List:
DISC ONE (TT 60.24): Today Show (Raw) 06-21-88: 1. The Gideon Bible; I Have A General Distaste For Activists; 1968 Democratic Convention 2. We Were Mean; Ed Meese; A Victim of Some Kind of Horrible Mental Illness 3. Are You Michael Jackson?; I Should Live Like I Want To; Be Careful, That’s a Hair Trigger! 4. The Examiner Column; We’re In The Business Of Controlling Our Environment 5. Is There Anyone That Inspires You Today?; The Ethic of Enlightened Self-Interest; If You Don’t Do It, Somebody Else Will 6. How Do You Translate To The Europeans?; Are You Disappointed in the American Public? 7. Watergate; A Lesson Of Some Sort; Journalism 8. Television Versus Print; Libel; Writing 9. I’d Rather Write Poems; You Know That Meese Is A Swine; Nixon 10. Have You Ever Made Too Harsh A Judgment? Regrets; I Have Lawyers DISC TWO (TT 73.27): 11. Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas; It Worked Fine And It Didn’t Hurt; It All Gets Back To Being Lazy 12. I Love Writing; I Steal From The Right People; One Long Sentence 13. I Never Thought Of Myself As A Journalist; I’ve Been Expecting To Die For So Long; It’s Fun To Take The Chances 14. Mortality; A Magnificent Luxury; Bad Whiskey Is Like Tea 15. Doing Cutaways
USA Today Part 1 07-08-88: 1. This Is For My Own Reference; George McGovern; Why Get Into Politics? 2. We Had Good People on Our Side; The Kennedys; All the Good Things Have Happened 3. It’s Hard To Avoid Reality; Jesse Jackson; Why Did This Thing Ring? 4. This Dumb Bastard; Billionaires; Where Is the Progress? 5. The War On Drugs; Guns
6. I Beat the Hell Out of Journalism; Did Terry Take the Motherfucking Tape Out of There?; Tracking the Video 7. This, That, Beta, VHS; Journalism; I Know I Can Change One More Vote
DISC THREE (TT 45.58): USA Today Part 2 07-08-88: 1. A Dangerous Thing; Dukakis; Ted Kennedy 2. Ted Kennedy and Chappaquiddick 3. Let the Record Show; Pat Buchanan; A Fellow Thug and Brawler 4. Jim Brady; A Cheap Thief; Nixon’s House in China 5. Are There Any Politicians You Do Respect?; Harvard Law School 6. Political Talent; Freak Power; They Haven’t Got Me Yet 7. That’s All We Eat Out Here; AIDS 8. I Would Kill Most Of The People Here; White Trash Behavior; I Insist That This Business Be Fun 9. The Conventions; Look What Happened To Julian Bond; I Told A Guy From NBC… 10. Generation of Swine; Tattoos; I’ll Take Any Excuse Not To Work
Artwork is included, designed for a 3-cd jewel case.
It’s a pdf. Print it out at 100 percent and not “scale to fit.”
The story of “Dr. Hunter S. Thompson’s Private Stash”
A few weeks after Dr. Thompson’s suicide, an auction titled “HST unpublished works and tapes” appeared on ebay; we won it for a few hundred dollars. Put up by a person we believe to be one of Thompson’s former assistants, it included a Xeroxed collection titled “Drafts, Notes & Work Papers of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson 1988 – 1990”— correspondence, columns, and unpublished pieces complete with his editing marks. (That collection is NOT included here. Sorry.)
There were also three 90 minute audio tapes. We’d heard that HST taped his conversations and interviews, which isn’t surprising considering that he kept carbons of every letter he ever wrote. At the very least, the USA Today tapes begin with him saying, “This is for my own reference.” (One article in the collection, “Static Detonates the Gel,” describes the episode of Nightline that he and the interviewer are watching in Part 1 of the USA Today interview.) That conversation, incidentally, was split between two tapes with no continuity, so we named them Part 1 and Part 2.
As for the sound, the amateur nature of these recordings was most obvious in the Today Show tape. It’s NOT a feed, as you’ll soon tell! In fact, we imagine it was recorded with a cheap, desktop recorder, because whenever someone hit the mic—which happened a lot!—the volume crashed dramatically and took a few seconds to return to normal. This is most obvious about 20 minutes in, when Thompson gets interviewer Stone Phillips to shoot one of his handguns into the darkness off his Woody Creek porch! We left a few of those jostlings intact, partly to preserve the conversation and partly because it added to the charm of the recording.
There are some fluctuations in volume, but “Hunter S. Thompson’s Private Stash” is surprisingly listenable, especially considering the source. We spent about 15 hours micro-editing the first and only playing of the Today Show tape alone; the USA Today tape took far less work. Frankly we think they both sound pretty good—and we hope you agree. They’re great for their political insight, interesting opinions, classic wit, and the cries of Thompson’s peacocks wandering the grounds (the background sound in the Today Show tape is rain). At one point in the USA Today interview, you hear a strange snorting sound, too…
How they came into the possession of the auctioner, we honestly don’t know. We believe they’re Hunter’s own copies—hence the title—and thus the only ones in existence. We certainly can’t imagine Hunter’s assistants keeping backup copies of every tape he made. We do, however feel safe in saying that these tapes have never circulated.
Until now. After debating for years whether to liberate these recordings or return them to Thompson’s estate, we decided on the latter and offered to give them to Anita, free of charge, through an email to her wonderful website, www.gonzostore.com. She never replied, so light one up, crack one open, and start tapping the glass—then dip into “Hunter S. Thompson’s Private Stash.”