Ignored             Obscured              Restored

We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the Stones kicked in – “Monkey Man” roared through the speakers like a freight train full of mescaline and bad decisions.  Nicky Hopkins, God bless his ghostly British soul, hammered that piano line like a madman trying to summon Satan with eighty-eight keys and a jug of bourbon.  Suddenly, the whole trip made sense.  This wasn’t just music – it was gospel, prophecy, a searing manifesto of the damned.

Rock music wasn’t background noise for Hunter S. Thompson. It was blood in the ink, the sonic chaos that drove the typewriter at 3 a.m. while the walls breathed and the lizards danced.  He didn’t just listen to it — he inhaled it, snorted it, blasted it through his skull like auditory ether.  The man once called Herbie Mann’s Memphis Underground “the best album ever cut by anybody,” and who the hell are we to argue with that?

Far Out magazine, in a rare moment of journalistic clarity, unearthed the gospel according to Thompson: ten albums that lit his brain on fire during the so-called “rock age” – a time of beautiful noise and narcotic truth.  It wasn’t just a playlist. It was a manifesto.

Behold the holy relics:

Herbie Mann – Memphis Underground (absolutely filthy jazz-funk, pure American madness)

Bob Dylan – Bringing It All Back Home (a lyrical fever dream with a harmonica snarl)

Bob Dylan – Highway 61 Revisited (America on the verge, painted in amphetamine blues)

The Grateful Dead – Workingman’s Dead (acid-sweat Americana for the true believers)

The Rolling Stones – Let It Bleed (dirty, dangerous, and soaked in gin and blood)

Buffalo Springfield – Buffalo Springfield (flower-power on the edge of a nervous breakdown)

Jefferson Airplane – Surrealistic Pillow (psychedelic lullabies for the chemically unhinged)

Roland Kirk – Various Albums (the sound of a man strangling the cosmos with three horns at once)

Miles Davis – Sketches of Spain (matador jazz played in slow motion by a stone-cold killer)

Sandy Bull – Inventions (instrumental mysticism for interstellar cowboys)

These weren’t just albums.  They were tools – instruments of psychic warfare, necessary for surviving Nixon’s America and the corporate stranglehold of post-‘60s dream rot.  You had to have the soundtrack right, or the whole illusion fell apart.

And then – “Monkey Man.”  That’s not just a song. That’s the anthem for the freaks, the outcasts, the wide-eyed maniacs who chose not to play the game.  “I’m a monkey!” Jagger shrieks.  Yes.  Yes, we are.  All of us.  Scrambling through the ruins of the American Dream, chasing shadows, chewing through vinyl and broken glass just to feel something.  But it’s Nicky Hopkins’ piano that makes it immortal.  That intro doesn’t just open the song – it launches it, like a bullet from a gold-plated revolver fired in a jungle nightclub.

God bless the Stones.  God bless the chaos.  And God help anyone who tries to understand it without a damn good stereo and a suitcase full of dubious substances.

Enjoy… until next week.