I’ve noticed the “daily routine” of Hunter Thompson make the rounds over the years. Joe Rogan even read it on his podcast.
Around 2006, I read the biography that routine was lifted from. I have read a handful of Thompson’s books, the earliest of which are good but don’t warrant the outsize place he holds in popular imagination.
Watch Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, starring Johnny Depp as Thompson. It is a good film, the rare one you could say is as good as the book. The visual format and star-studded cast glorify drugs better than the written story.
The brand of Hunter Thompson, maybe more than any other artist, has perpetuated the stereotype that substance abuse creates great art. For all the people who dig him, I’d bet nine of 10 haven’t read his books. The brand persists because people want to believe genius creating art when drunk and/or high, if not because of it. They want to believe that getting drunk and high is good for you.
I believe the cult of Hunter Thompson lives on because he publicly embraced drugs when they were taboo. To have read a biography of him, maybe I was a little into the cult. But I was blessed early on – I remember the very moment in my first Bogota apartment, circa 2009 – to have read a little book which would disabuse me of glorifying substances for the sake of art. From Hugh MacLeod’s Ignore Everybody and 39 Other Keys to Creativity:
I’ve seen so many young people take the “gotta do the drugs and booze thing to make me a better artist” route over the years … It’s a familiar story: a kid reads about Charlie Parker or Jimi Hendrix or Charles Bukowski and somehow decides that their poetic but flawed example somehow gives him permission and/or absolution to spend the next decade or two drowning in his own metaphorical vomit.
Of course, the older you get, the more casualties of this foolishness you meet. The more time they have had to ravage their lives, the more pathetic they seem. And the less remarkable work they seem to have to show for it, for all their “amazing experiences” and “special insights.” …
Sure, like Bukowski et al., there are exceptions. But that is why we like their stories when we’re young. Because they are exceptional stories. And every kid with a guitar or a pen or a paintbrush or an idea for a new business wants to be exceptional. Every kid underestimates his competition and overestimates his chances. Every kid is a sucker for the idea that there’s a way to make it without having to do the actual hard work.
So the bars of West Hollywood, London and New York are awash with people throwing their lives away in the desperate hope of finding a shortcut, any shortcut. And a lot of them aren’t even young anymore, their B-plans having been washed away by beer and vodka years ago.
Meanwhile the competition is at home, working their asses off.
I once heard Hunter Thompson say that there were three things he had never done with drugs: never sold them, never thrown them away and never smuggled them across borders. I’ve done all three, before and after reading the above passage. So I didn’t sober up, but I never bought into the idea that drugs and alcohol bring “special insights” or do anything else other than get you high.
Thompson’s best book was Hell’s Angels (I should have done something similar with the deported community in Colombia). Within 10 years, he was publishing compilations of articles he wrote for Playboy and Rolling Stone. By the time of the film starring Johnny Depp, he was writing about sports more than politics, none of it worthy of mention. He committed suicide because he was irrelevant.
Today I believe that artists known for debauchery create great work in spite of their substances, not because of them. They would be great artists even as teetotalers. People hear about hard-partying artists because they want to. There are high-achieving drunks in every field. The artists garner more fame.
Alcoholics and addicts are often intelligent people. Part of the reason they use is to get out of their heads to find peace. They would often be notable drunk or sober.
You don’t hear about teetotalers because people don’t want to. You don’t hear Steven King sobered up in the 1980s. You don’t hear Ryan Holiday doesn’t like the taste of alcohol. Those facts are boring.
Sidenote: the author of the biography has been in the news recently as the plaintiff in high-profile defamation lawsuits.
Expat Chronicles 
Imagine telling the Layne Staley that you are going to do hard drugs to be a good artist lol
In all seriousness though, I do think the drugs and booze do help some artists become better but only in that it gives them a greater struggle to write or sing about
Almost like being lab rats who ruin their lives and now get to sing about it for either the entertainment of others or for those who want something relatable
Like Layne Staley
Would Alice in Chains be as good if their band wasnt cursed by the drugs? Probably not
What would they sing about? Sure, maybe not literally every song they got is about drugs. I haven’t listened to every single one so maybe. But people don´t think of Alice in Chains for their normie songs about going fishing or whatever
Granted, Layne had an AMAZING voice and he´d still be successful without question. He had plenty of great vocal talent, drugs not needed
But perhaps you get what I mean — the struggle from the drugs only added more to their pain which I do think added to their success and how great and relatable the songs were.
It reminds me of that scene from the movie Walk the Line
Johnny Cash starts singing about Jesus to the record producer. Record producer is not interested. BORING. He tells Johnny that. Now Johnny is given a second chance and sings a second song about killing a man in Reno and yes that song is more interesting.
But having said that, I wouldn´t tell some kid to go do drugs or whatever to become successful. That´s just retarded. Going back to Layne or Kurt Cobain or most of those depressing 90 singers, all of them would go back in time and stop themselves from going down that bad road if they could. And yes all of them did have the talent to become successful without drugs. It´s just their suffering was easy to turn into good music too.
They still made some cool songs about having fucked up lives anyhow.
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Layne Stanley would not be the first artist I think of, and I liked Alice in Chains.
To compare apples to apples, as you attempt with Johnny Cash, look at artists who sobered up. Maybe his magnus opus “Hurt” was done sober, a cover of another sober artist in Trent Reznor. Other artists who sobered up and continued creating include Eminem, Ray Charles, Anthony Kiedis & Flea, Eric Clapton, Pete Townshend. There are many.
When questioning whether substance abuse enhances art … and specifically heroin for music. There may be something there.
Maybe the suffering inherent in substance abuse lends to creation. In writing, like HST and the Hell’s Angels, my heavy drinking and drugging was probably required to get in with the deported community in Bogota. I heard secondhand there were some questioning behind my back that I was a fed or whatever. But then the core circle I hung around would see how I acted on weekends (and of course I never accepted offers to haul packages across borders).
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I think the song Hurt and both Trent Reznor´s and Johnny Cash´s singing go along with what I was saying.
That song Hurt is part of the Downward Spiral album. Which was at a time in his life when Trent was having a downward spiral so to speak. Addictions, depression, etc. That´s not exactly the happiest album to listen to.
Similarly, when Johnny Cash covered it and as you can see even more from the music video he put out on it, it´s clear Johnny Cash — while sober when singing it to be fair — was recounting the many mistakes in his life, the pain he has caused others and the passage of time throughout his life (he was pretty old when he put out the cover). Of course, I´m not saying either that all his mistakes had to do with addictions he had. They were part of it. Though I see both covers of the song very differently anyhow.
Either way, both songs hit hard because of how relatable they are. And, at least for Trent, I see that song primarily dealing with suicide, depression and some references to addiction-drugs.
And sometimes singing about addictions, depression and other problems can be very relatable and appeal to many. Which is why I think songs like that can become so popular.
Going back to Trent anyhow, he is a very popular musician. He has put out many other good songs and albums. Such as the Ghosts tracks though. But ultimately, outside of those who follow him and are big fans of his work, most people when they think of him I believe think of him during the 90s (including his work with Marilyn Manson and NIN). When he was doing drugs and all. Are his latest albums really as popular these days as when he was during that period? I don´t know for sure but I´d guess not. I know he is very active still to this day and has a loyal following but if you were to have me guess I´d say the music he put out then was more popular than it is now.
I guess another example I think of is Stephen King. Getting away from music, I think he serves as a good example too. By his own admission, some of the books he wrote were influenced by his troubles with dope and alcohol. The books Misery and The Shining were supposedly influenced by it. But despite whatever influences that stuff had on his literature in his earlier years, he still has put out decent books since then.
Ultimately, I´d stand by the claim that addictions have influenced definitely the creative process for a lot of artists. At times it ends up producing great stuff. Often it leads to those same artists dying. Some artists never produce content that is greatly popular after they get sober. Others do (and regardless of Trent´s current popularity, I´d say he has had more than a successful career without drugs if you look at it). Just depends on the artist really.
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“(I should have done something similar with the deported community in Colombia).”
Are you still in touch with your friends from that community? You could still do that and it would be a book I would be more than happy to have on my bookshelf. As far as my knowledge, there has yet to be a book on the subject of deportees anywhere in the Americas.
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Excellent question, and I appreciate the confidence. I am still in touch with some, we have talked about doing a podcast interview or three, but unfortunately I didn’t embed long enough to write a full book. With HST, it was his job to hang around the Hell’s Angels and do nothing else.
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