It's totally gonzo
http://www.boston.com/yourtown/cambridge/articles/2010/11/21/historian_casts_doubt_on_origin_of_gonzo_label/
Did Southie slang inspire Hunter S. Thompson to label his journalism?
A historian has cast doubt on that story
By Billy Baker
November 21, 2010
In South Boston, there's a word they've long used on the street
corners to describe a particular type of madman. Not your
run-of-the-mill madman, mind you. No, this term is reserved for those
who use craziness as a form of self-expression, who push it too far
just to push it.
Those people are "gonzo.''
Forty years ago, unbeknownst to the people of Southie, "gonzo'' left
the neighborhood on the back of a soon-to-be-famous writer Hunter
S. Thompson who adopted it as the name for his signature style of journalism.
The word went global. It's in the dictionary. It's used to describe a
style of marketing and a genre of pornography. It's why that Muppet
is named Gonzo.
But now, on this unnoticed anniversary, "gonzo'' may be taken from
the people of Southie again, this time by a historian who claims the
word actually originates with a New Orleans musician.
For more than three decades, the story of "gonzo'' has always started
the same way even according to the Oxford English Dictionary with
a note sent by a former Globe editor named Bill Cardoso in 1970.
Cardoso had just read an article titled "The Kentucky Derby is
Decadent and Depraved'' by his friend Thompson, who was, by all
accounts, a first-ballot madman hall-of-famer. Thompson's idea of
properly covering the derby meant becoming a comic participant in
what he saw as the real action out-drinking the "whiskey gentry''
he'd come to vilify; spreading rumors of an impending Black Panther
riot; contemplating "macing helpless drunks in the clubhouse
restroom, for their own good'' but instead macing a restaurant.
"I don't know what the [expletive] you're doing,'' Cardoso wrote to
Thompson, "but you've changed everything. It's totally gonzo.''
Thompson ran with it. He started calling his
reporter-as-main-character style "gonzo journalism,'' and the word
took off, along with Thompson's fame. In Rolling Stone magazine, and
in such books as "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas'' and "Fear and
Loathing: On the Campaign Trail,'' Thompson's manic writings
usually fueled by heavy drugs and copious amounts of alcohol made
him a central cultural figure of the 1970s.
The word is everywhere now it brings up over 13 million hits on
Google and is used to describe the wild and crazy, as well as the
genre of subjective storytelling where the narrator is an aggressive
protagonist. (In gonzo pornography, the action is filmed by a participant.)
But as its usage grows globally, it appears to be fading locally.
At the South Boston Catholic Academy, an informal Globe poll of 102
students in grades 4 through 8 found that only a third knew the word.
Nearly all said that it wasn't a word they use, but some said they
occasionally heard it from their parents and grandparents. One
student said his aunt yelled it at people all the time when she was driving.
The students offered definitions such as "crazy,'' "out of your
mind,'' and "nuthead,'' but older generations in the neighborhood say
the students' definitions miss the nuance of gonzo motivation.
Despite Hollywood's portrayal of South Boston as the place where the
bad guys come from, its people say gonzo behavior was mostly done for laughs.
"So he comes down the street, riding a 10-speed,'' Brian Quinlan, a
36-year-old from the neighborhood, said recently as he sat on a bench
at Castle Island, offering a textbook example, "and he's wearing a
pair of Nike Leather Cortez . . . and nothing else.
"That's your classic gonzo behavior.''
Cardoso, who grew up in Cambridge, always said the term came from
Southie, and during his lifetime he offered up various definitions
for the word, including "weird and bizarre'' and "the last man
standing at the end of an all-night drinking binge.'' But he
admitted, in an unpublished account of the "gonzo'' story, that he
was "never much on either Southie or Dot, for my mother forbade me
from going there.''
Cardoso thought the expression was derived from the French-Canadian
word "gonzeaux.'' The Oxford English Dictionary, which defines
"gonzo'' as "bizarre, crazy; far-fetched,'' says "perhaps'' it has
roots in Italian or Spanish.
The people of Southie say the word's origins are actually much
simpler: it's just "gone'' with a -zo suffix added to intensify the
word, similar to the transformation of "nut'' to "nutzo.''
"As I heard it used over the many seasons of my life, it was just a
play on gone,'' said Billy Bulger, a Southie guy and former Senate
president known for his skillful use of language. "It was a word of
caution: 'He's out of his mind. He's gonzo.' ''
Now, the commonly accepted history of the word is being challenged by
Douglas Brinkley, a 49-year-old Rice University professor who said
Thompson told him the real story late in his life because he wanted
to set the record straight. Brinkley, who is the executor of
Thompson's literary estate and refers to himself as his "official
historian,'' has published two new accounts of the gonzo story in the
five years since Thompson committed suicide.
"This bit about Cardoso introducing Hunter to the word 'gonzo' is
just a false story that Hunter allowed to go on because he was
friends with Cardoso,'' Brinkley said.
Brinkley's account begins in a New Hampshire motel in 1968, when
Cardoso and Thompson were covering the Nixon campaign. Thompson was
listening to "Gonzo,'' a 1960 recording by the New Orleans pianist
James Booker, over and over again.
In one Brinkley version, Cardoso was driven crazy by the music and
started calling Thompson the "gonzo man.'' In another version,
co-written with Johnny Depp (who played Thompson in the adaptation of
"Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas'' and will reprise the character next
year when Thompson's novel "The Rum Diary'' is brought to the
screen), Cardoso appeared in Thompson's motel room, wondering what
the word in the song meant, and phoned a "smart friend'' who told him
it was Bronx slang for "last man standing.''
Another variation is offered by Lucian K. Truscott IV, a journalist
and screenwriter who was a friend of both Thompson and Cardoso. He
says that in 1969 Cardoso had assigned Thompson to cover Nixon's
inauguration for the Globe Magazine, and when he walked in to the
Globe's offices to submit his article which included watching
protestors rape the American flag, Thompson contemplating whether he
should load up on LSD to cover the inauguration (he opted instead for
a few joints), and an interview with visiting dignitary Raoul Duke
(who was actually Thompson's alter ego) Cardoso called his writing
"gonzo journalism.''
OK. So there's some confusion here with what was, for over three
decades, just one story everyone agreed on. Brinkley himself
published the Southie version in 1997.
These posthumous revisions Cardoso died in 2006 have enraged Mary
Miles Ryan, who was Cardoso's partner for 30 years and calls herself
a "gonzo widow.''
"I don't think Brinkley has any right to change what Hunter has
always said,'' Ryan said when reached by phone in California.
The etymology of gonzo is nearly impossible to pin down precisely. It
may have originated in several places independently, with independent
meanings, but what's hard to look past, even 40 years later, is how
perfectly Thompson's personality fit the Southie definition.
He was definitely gonzo.
--
Billy Baker can be reached at [email protected]
.
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
"Sixties-L" group.
To post to this group, send email to [email protected].
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to
[email protected].
For more options, visit this group at
http://groups.google.com/group/sixties-l?hl=en.
