Video: Hunter S. Thompson interviews Keith Richards
- Text by Alex King
“I have a sense of history that you don’t,” explains the godfather of gonzo, Hunter S. Thompson. “And so does Keith.”
With his notorious drug-fuelled daily writing routine and well-documented psychedelic antics, there are few people on the planet more qualified than Thompson to interview Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards – a man with a strong claim to having ingested more narcotics than anyone else on the planet during the latter half of the Twentieth Century.
Spotting the chance to unite two towering philosophers of altered states and chroniclers of the psychedelic experience, the pair were brought together in an Aspen, Colorado hotel by ABC in 1993.
Thompson and Richards get straight to the big questions: “Talking about the next world, you know what I mean?” Richards drools. “It’s like, what are we looking for? Promotion, demotion and why do we, you know… We’re here living this life. What’s all the speculation about the next one? It will either be there or it won’t.”
To which Thompson responds: “There a lot of people out there who’ve seen you play for them, who would consider you were already in the next world.”
In the ten-minute clip, the surprisingly-lucid-yet-barely-comprehensible pair go on to discuss the reincarnation of J. Edgar Hoover (he would return as “a fart,” Keith says), The Beatles, the Hell’s Angels, drugs (of course), the Stones’ troubling Altamont incident and blood transfusions.
So, go ahead and give it a watch. You might just learn something – if you can decipher the mumbling…
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