Looking for Freak Power in the Rockies
The evidence of Thompson’s close run for sheriff of Pitkin County Colorado in 1970 is still in evidence in Aspen. The bar at the Hotel Jerome and The Woody Creek Tavern still hang the poster Tom Benton* designed for Thompson’s run for sheriff; but that, in its way, is just capitalizing on Thompson’s name to sell a few more cocktails.
I was at a party a few miles up in Lenado, just past where Thompson used to live.
It was a reunion for a group who lived and worked up at a logging camp in the seventies. They would have been part of that Aspen freak contingent. Everyone remembered Thompson, but memories of that election were vague at best.
It’s pretty clear that the greedheads and limousine-liberals depicted in Thompson’s essay have pretty much won the day. The developers have been good at keeping all the development from looking too ugly. On the one hand, that four lane highway Thompson mentions never did barrel straight through the center of Aspen. In the right season when the weather is fine, you will still be treated to the most terrifyingly beautiful scenery imaginable as you creep over Independence Pass. (A long time Aspen/Lenado resident gave me the sage advice, "always steer into the mountain, not the cliff”).
It’s not clear how local the local freaks ever really were. Thompson offers a concise description of a scene that has occurred again and again in various geographic locales:
The pattern never varies; a low-rent area suddenly blooms new and loose and human—and then fashionable, which attracts the press and the cops at about the same time. Cop problems attract more publicity, which then attracts fad-salesman and hustlers—which means money, and that attracts junkies and jack-rollers. Their bad action causes publicity and—for some perverse reason—an influx of bored, upward mobile types who dig the menace of “white ghetto” life and whose expense-account tastes drive local rents and street prices out of reach of the original settlers … who are forced, once again, to move on.1
During happy hour at the Jerome Tavern (sorry, that’s now called the J-Bar), Jim’s friend Kyu said that Aspen was a pretty hip place to be back in the day, but it has grown pretentious and insufferable. I’m inclined to agree. But both Jim and Kyu had lived up at Lenado even then because Aspen was already well out of reach of the average freak doing menial labor.
And what about the police Thompson wanted to rein in? My first exposure to the police in Aspen was when we turned around in a side street off main. There were three Toyota Highlander SUVs with local law enforcement markings. The vehicles were hybrids, of course. “Ecology” is an important niche market. Then later at the Woody Creek Tavern, a young woman balked at being asked to show ID: “I’ve been drinking here since I was sixteen!” Well, the ownership had apparently changed, according to the bartender, and besides, “the cops …” he left an ominous silence. The cops, indeed. To give them their due, it might just be that they enjoy roughly searching a couple of drunken teen sluts on a slow Saturday night. But who doesn’t. No, they don’t seem to have remained the overtly menacing force they once were. One can even imagine them maintaining a fleet of bicycles as HST’s platform originally suggested they do. The current Pitkin County Sheriff is named DiSalvo. A DiSalvo for Sheriff sticker on the Woody Creek Tavern back bar says he wants to legalize pot. Now that most of the freaks have gone straight, that too would be a valuable commodity to bring into the legal market. Many an ex-freak still likes to smoke a big reefer after a hard day of working for the man.
Well, most of the ex-heads I met seemed to have survived with a good deal of idealism intact. But overall, the freaks got subsumed into the larger market. Everything can and will be commodified, so now, that small and promising pocket of resistance is just one very small component of the GDP. And the former site of the Elks Club where Thompson and his followers called last minute freak voters and awaited the election results is now … wait for it … a Prada store!
Let’s hear it for the one percent … Aspen über alles.
