Remembering Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear & Loathing at the Kentucky Derby

Steadman, who’d never been to America before, quickly fell in step with his most unusual tour guide — “I was an innocent abroad, but I was looking forward to being corrupted,” he says. The disparate pair’s booze- (and mace-)soaked Louisville misadventures form the bulk of Thompson’s Kentucky Derby essay, which ends with the brutally hung-over journalist shoving the vomit-soaked artist out of his car at the airport and berating him as a “scumsucking foreign geek,” while news of the Kent State massacre blares from the radio.

“He didn’t actually physically kick me out,” Steadman remembers. “He just kind of opened the door and mumbled, ‘Good knowing ya, off ya go, have a good flight.’ I think he didn’t want to admit that he enjoyed our time together, really. He wasn’t sure of what he was going to get from me, but I was able to give him the kind of thing that he wanted. The drawings that I did — which I colored in using Revlon makeup samples, since I’d left all my inks in the back of a cab shortly before I flew to the States — were suitable for the sort of crazy things he was after.”

“Gonzo is really an art form — it’s not, ‘Go get bombed and write some shit.’ With Hunter and Ralph’s work, the skill came first, and the insanity came second.”—Director Michael D. Ratner

“It was kind of a big brother/little brother act,” says Ratner of Thompson and Steadman, who would go on to collaborate on the books Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail and The Curse of Lono, as well as numerous legendary articles for Rolling Stone and other publications. “In Louisville, Hunter got Ralph to go along with everything like it was normal, and it led to one of the greatest creative pairings of all time. Hunter put Ralph down for his ‘filthy scribblings,’ but he needed them; they really brought his words to life. And now, whenever you read his stream-of-consciousness writing, you envision Ralph’s illustrations — that’s what you see in your mind!”

As Gonzo @ the Derby explains, “The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved” not only launched Thompson and Steadman’s fertile creative partnership, but it also signaled the arrival of “Gonzo” journalism — an energetic and over-the-top form of reportage that captured the overall experience of its subject matter while making no actual claims to objectivity. “Not everything in Hunter’s story was true, but its effect was quite correct,” explains Steadman. “The important thing about Gonzo is that you don’t cover the story, you become the story. That’s the most fundamental part of it, really, and that’s what we did.”

“What Hunter and Ralph did spawned a whole generation of imitators,” says Ratner. “But Gonzo is really an art form — it’s not, ‘Go get bombed and write some shit.’ With Hunter and Ralph’s work, the skill came first, and the insanity came second.”