Ralph Steadman

Well, it’s alright, but it’s slightly echoey. I was just wondering. I rather had imagined conference phones to be there whenever I talk to publishers on the phone. There’s like six other guys there and they’re all sitting on golden thrones. When in fact you’re all sitting around a desk with a phone between the lot of you. I always imagine a great hall and my voice is booming out from speakers and people are taking notes and passing judgment.

I do indeed. I think they’re so wonderful, publishing people. They’d never screw you, they really love you and they love humanity. Bless their hearts for being so wonderful.

No they don’t. They’re trying to save the world for Christ’s sake.

What is SuicideGirls?

Is there anybody committing suicide within this organization?

With a name like that, they should commit suicide, so they do and that’s that. Rather than the ending, it’s the beginning.

Ok I’m at the site. Is this a woman wrapped in plastic? Oooh. Is that a whole issue?

A set. It’s an amazing set of sheer erotic joy.

I don’t write books about sex, but perhaps I should. I’ve been missing out. Hunter missed out there. He really fucked up there. He should have been writing sex books. He’d have been good at it.

Oh I think so. He used to think I was a suckfish.

You don’t know what a suckfish is? Holy God man? Where have you been living man?

I looked up suckfish to learn exactly what he meant because he called a lot of people suckfish. A suckfish attaches itself to the lean underbelly of a shark looking for a meal. It won’t attach itself to a fat shark who’s just eaten but it will attach itself to a lean shark because it’s about to eat, then the suckfish gets its free meal. Because when the shark eats, it throws meat all over the place, so the suckfish is able to grab and eat. That’s something you could apply to many politicians of all sorts, which is what Hunter used it for.

He used to say, “You’re feeding off me Ralph.” But I think he fed off me too.

The thing about the drawings we did together, especially in the early days and in some of the later days, with Lono and things like that. The drawings seemed to encapsulate what it was he wanted to be. He wanted to not just be a recorder, recording things as they happened, but he wanted to be an artist as well, like a photographer. He wanted to capture that moment so the writing would be real. It would just come out of him like stream of consciousness. That’s was really what gonzo was. That is the essential essence of gonzo. If they set up a Hunter S. Thompson foundation it would be for such writers. The young kids that want to write as they feel.

Don’t talk about Untrodden Grapes! You weren’t going to talk about grapes!

It looks good and it’s funny. It does say something about wine but it doesn’t drone on like so many wine books do. It’s a putrefaction of juices that go bad. But it goes bad in the nicest possible way. So that’s really what my book is about but it is fun as well because of the various interesting types in it and I tried to capture them. Such as the elegant people like the Basque women with moustaches and people like that. I don’t think it’s a wine book. I’m no Tom Stevenson so I don’t know wine like that. He is a serious wine master who understands every nuance of fermentation and what happens at every stage but I’m not that interested. I make wine myself.

Yes, I’ve had a vineyard for 15 years with a 100 vines and I could make a decent sort of interesting Pinot Noir. I also made some German varieties of wine. Everybody’s doing it, it’s crazy, it’s lovely, it’s better than gardening cabbages.

I like cabbages, but I don’t want to talk about them. I wasn’t going to do a book about them next. I was thinking of not doing them and then deliberately going for something like parsnips. You can make a nice wine from parsnips.

My father used to do all that stuff. He tried making wine out of mushrooms but it defeated him because you simply cannot make wine out of fungus.

Magic ones of course.

No, he didn’t. We’re talking about someone who lived in North Wales in the 1940’s.

They were unknown. I’ll be there were some Welsh farmers there who knew about magic mushrooms there and would find them too.

It’s that the whole business of magic mushrooms being like peyote. It’s hallucinogenic, it’s perfect and it’s natural.

The wine company, Oddbins, had a catalog every year and in 1987 they got in touch with me and asked me if I knew anything about wine. I said, “Not much except it’s nice to drink. But I don’t drink German wines.” They said “Why not?” I said, “Well, they’re too masterful.” I like French wines for their eloquence. That’s the one thing they have not learned in the new world, that wines have an eloquence to them in France. They still have that peculiar ability to grasp the very essence, the character, what the grape is trying to say. A grape is like a barometer, it picks up every single nuance of what is in the weather and what is in the soil. Whether it’s a good summer, a bad summer, this is why they get good and bad vintage. Those things fascinate me.

I think what happens is that some of the pictures just fall away. They simply have no attraction for me whatsoever. I’ve got loads of drawings and suddenly there’s nothing about particular drawings. They simply don’t have anything. It’s like doing an audition with a lot of actors, some you don’t choose and some you do. With pictures, certain ones have something and are saying something. That’s what happened with the Hunter thing, going back to gonzo. The importance of what I did with Hunter and how it worked was that I could almost hear his mind working. I felt it enough to make it in my own version of what he wanted to do himself. He wished he’d been the artist and the writer. He didn’t want a photographer; he wanted someone who would become part of the story and I was dumb enough, innocent enough and crazy enough at the time to fall in with it. That’s how it took off because he couldn’t believe that he found someone that did this.

Not in spirit. I don’t go out of the house and go to parties and shit now. That’s a sign of getting old. I’m just looking at this crazy site. It’s a naughty site and it’s intriguing so I look at it. SuicideGirls is quite interesting, but how suicidal are they. They’re full of shit; they’re not suicidal at all.

He’s a nice guy. When I met him I was charmed by him.

Absolutely, so in one way you feel bad but in another way you feel glad. Can you imagine Hunter in an old people’s home in a wheelchair looking at someone else in the same room, sitting there all day long and always saying “Weather’s not so good today” or “That nurse is rude?” or something like that.

He’d say, “Where could we get a drink?” “What the hell are we doing here?” “What am I doing in this fucking place?”

The day before was Sunday the 19th. I had just finished signing all The Curse of Lono book sets for Taschen books. I was very surprised and curious as to why Hunter had signed all 1200 of them mechanically and obediently because it was absolutely against his character. He would have fucked about for months saying “I was going to do it, I’ll do it tomorrow” or something. Every one was fully signed because sometimes he would just write HST, but this time he’d signed every one Hunter S. Thompson.

He was that uncompromising in most things in his life. But he also was, in a strange way, a polite southern gentleman who’d try to be as nice as he could to people. When he came to stay here in 1980 I told him my mother-in-law lives in the big house next door. But she decided that because he was coming she would go stay in London with her other daughter. Hunter said to me, “You mean you put an old lady out of her house just because of me? I always knew you were a mean bastard.”

Yes, I was a suckfish.

I met with him in person the October beforehand and Joe Petro, who did the fist print, was with me. When we left Joe said to me, “I don’t know why I’ve got this feeling, but I think this is the last time we’ll ever see him.”

Hunter did tell me 25 years ago, “I’d feel real trapped in this life right now if I didn’t know that I could commit suicide at any time.”

So he told me that then and he showed me all of his guns. He had a myna bird called Edward. He used to put his hand in the cage and grasp Edward and say, “Edward, as far as I know there is no bird god who is going to save you now, Edward. You are doomed Edward.” This bird would be screaming, trying to get into the safety of the cage or whatever. It was amusing to torment him.

I never met anyone like him and no one else will take his place.

It was Hollywood-ized in a way. It was not quite as I imagined it because there were half a dozen different fireworks which went boom, boom, boom and all of them had some of the ashes in it. The best way would have been to blow it out across the valley and have it explode in midair. That would have been my idea.

The interesting thing about that was that he thought of the whole episode in 1977 but he always wanted it to go off once a year to remind people that he was still around.

Yes, I can’t stand the idea of me drawing the same picture over and over again until we get the thing moving. If somebody else wants to do it that’s a different thing. When I asked Terry Gilliam if he would make a film of Fear and Loathing. He said, “Well ok Ralph but I don’t want any of your fucking drawings in my film.”

I’ve got a thing on the wall of my studio that’s by Terry and it says on it, “For Ralph who has influenced me far more than he would ever want to know.” Meaning that he’s ripped me off many times. But it doesn’t matter, he’s a good filmmaker.

I think he said it would influence the thing. In a way it would take it away from him. If he’s making the film, he doesn’t want my drawings competing with the thing and it’s a plain pity. But if you look at the road at the end of the film my drawings come up as the road surface and he drives over them. It’s kind of fuck you Ralph, I made the film.

It’s been mentioned. There’s a guy called Alex Cox, who was the guy who was first going to make the film and Hunter went mad because he didn’t want a cartoon film. He feared my drawings in many ways. They played too big a part in the book. When it came out it was noticed in Rolling Stones because the drawings were huge. They competed with the story, but nevertheless they gave the story some visual imagery that was somehow easily recognizable. I think it upset Hunter after a while.

Yes, I have five and three grandchildren.

Everybody draws. You draw, don’t you?

Everybody draws, it’s nothing special.

Well, maybe mine. My son, Theo, plays guitar beautifully. He got married last year and has a baby. Henry wanted his brother Theo to give a speech at his wedding and be the best man but Theo couldn’t do it because he was so nervous. Instead he brought his guitar and sang. All the waitresses were just falling all over themselves because he’s a lovely singer.

Yes, I’ve seen them on somebody’s ass and somebody’s breasts. I would personally like draw one on somebody’s ass and on somebody’s breast but I’m discouraged by certain members of my family not to get involved. But it is a nice fantasy.

I have actually done it for Marsha Hunt who had had a baby with Mick Jagger. I drew grapes and two people in bed across her breasts for Telegraph Magazine way back in the 60’s. That was nice. I had drunk gin all day so it was a wonderful experience. I was able to put my head between her breasts and go bl-bl-bl just to bring myself back to my senses. There were other people in the room by the way, it was not rape, I tell you.

No, I think I’ll stick with brandy and beer. I gave up whiskey. I used to drink it with Hunter and it was just silly. I think that was part of the craziness again, getting fucking drunk and being completely muddled.

In 1990 I took Peru coca leaves because I needed them for mountain sickness. I wish I could grow them over here because they’re hallucinogenic but much more invigorating. They can make you work for five days without sleep or do whatever you want without sleep.

The Independent in London just ran a thing called Steadman’s War. It’s about the war, about torture and about all the shit that’s going on. Dick Cheney’s there talking about the dark possibilities of torture in the war, trying to justify it in the name of finding out whether someone’s going to blow up a building. That’s total bullshit. The UN charter says that in no way can you inflict pain in a premeditated way on anybody ever.

I can’t believe it. He must be so dumb. It’s so beyond belief.

I wrote for this piece about the war where I wrote, “As for Iraq, we didn’t bomb it into democracy. That’s just what the world needs, the most powerful leader in the western world who really and truly believes that God told him to do it.” He’s a bloody terrorist, that’s what he is. He represents a massive public stupidity, a human tsunami which he claims that those who believe in his enshrined gobbledy-goop go to the Promised Land with a sacred passport and the rest go to hell. It is George W. Bush who has politicized religion and created hell on earth. I want to go to hell because an awful majority have already gone there and they need me and all my kind because we appreciate all their faults.

He’s not pious; it’s sheer egotism to say that God told him. It’s sheer, dyed in the wool, depraved fundamentalism. The whole of fundamental Christian religion is a depravity. It stops people from thinking for themselves; it gives them a mantra that’s total bullshit.

No, not at all because I’ve always been individual, I’m not saying right or left, just mine. Back in 1977 I went to the Friends of Israel there and saw everything from the Golan Heights down to Gaza and the camps that they were at the time. I walked on the Sea of Galilee. The thing is, I can still be a friend of Israel, but I need to believe in the autonomous state of Palestine, its rights and its permanence. Our diplomatic intentions to smooth their turmoil are a wonderful and gracious gift of reimbursement of what is already theirs. It is not generous, it is right. George doesn’t realize that. The Americans that are blowing the ass out of Afghanistan, use the Taliban as a reason. If you need a reason, yes they did some terrible things and they probably still do. Their idea of democracy, if there is one, will never be our idea of democracy, but that doesn’t mean to say that there aren’t good people somewhere in there. I’m sorry we’re going off on politics now, but I’ve had enough of Hunter. He had enough of politics too. I’m sure part of the reason he killed himself was because when Bush got back in he couldn’t stand it. It’s another four years of gibberish. I think Bush ought to be impeached. He’s trying to turn a lie into God’s truth.

by Daniel Robert Epstein

SG Username: AndersWolleck