Fear and Loathing at Rolling Stone

October 1, 1970

Two hours before the polls closed we realized that we had no headquarters—no hole or Great Hall where the faithful could gather for the awful election-night deathwatch. Or to celebrate the Great Victory that suddenly seemed very possible.

We had run the whole campaign from a long oaken table in the Jerome Tavern on Main Street, working flat out in public so anyone could see or even join if they felt ready ... but now, in these final hours, we wanted a bit of privacy; some clean, well-lighted place, as it were, to hunker down and wait . . .

We also needed vast quantities of ice and rum—and a satchel of brain-rattling drugs for those who wanted to finish the campaign on the highest possible note, regardless of the outcome. But the main thing we needed, with dusk coming down and the polls due to close at seven o’clock, was an office with several phone lines, for a blizzard of last-minute calls to those who hadn’t yet voted. We’d collected the voting lists just before five—from our poll-watcher teams who’d been checking them off since dawn—and it was obvious, from a very quick count, that the critical Freak Power vote had turned out in force.

Joe Edwards, a twenty-nine-year-old head, lawyer, and bike-racer from Texas, looked like he might, in the waning hours of Election Day in November 1969, be the next mayor of Aspen, Colorado.

The retiring mayor, Dr. Robert “Buggsy” Barnard, had been broadcasting vicious radio warnings for the previous forty-eight hours, raving about long prison terms for vote-fraud and threatening violent harassment by “phalanxes of poll watchers” for any strange or freaky-looking scum who might dare to show up at the polls. We checked the laws and found that Barnard’s radio warnings were a violation of the “voter intimidation” statutes, so I called the district attorney and tried to have the mayor arrested at once ... but the DA said “Leave me out of it: police your own elections.”

Which we did, with finely organized teams of poll watchers: two inside each polling place at all times, with six more just outside in vans or trucks full of beef, coffee, propaganda, checklists and bound xerox copies of all Colorado voting laws.

The idea was to keep massive assistance available, at all times, to our point men inside the official voting places. And the reasoning behind this rather heavy public act—which jolted a lot of people who wouldn’t have voted for Edwards anyway—was our concern that the mayor and his cops would create some kind of ugly scene, early on, and rattle the underground grapevine with fear-rumors that would scare off a lot of our voters. Most of our people were fearful of any kind of legal hassle at the polls, regardless of their rights. So it seemed important that we should make it very clear, from the start, that we knew the laws and we weren’t going to tolerate any harassment of our people. None.

Each poll watcher on the dawn shift was given a portable tape recorder with a microphone that he was instructed to stick in the face of any opposition poll watcher who asked anything beyond the legally allowable questions regarding Name, Age, and Residence. Nothing else could be asked, under penalty of an obscure election law relating to “frivolous challenge,” a little brother to the far more serious charge of “voter intimidation.”

And since the only person who had actually threatened to intimidate voters was the mayor, we decided to force the confrontation as soon as possible in Ward 1, where Buggsy had announced that he would personally stand the first poll-watching shift for the opposition. If the buggers wanted a confrontation, we decided to give it to them.

The polling place in Ward 1 was a lodge called the Cresthaus, owned by an old and infamous Swiss/Nazi who calls himself Guido Meyer. Martin Bormann went to Brazil, but Guido came to Aspen—arriving here several years after the Great War ... and ever since then he has spent most of his energy (including two complete terms as city magistrate) getting even with this country by milking the tourists and having young (or poor) people arrested.

So Guido was watching eagerly when the mayor arrived in his parking lot at ten minutes to seven, creeping his Porsche through a gauntlet of silent Edwards people. We had mustered a half dozen of the scurviest looking legal voters we could find—and when the mayor arrived at the polls, these freaks were waiting to vote. Behind them, lounging around a coffee dispenser in an old VW van, were at least a dozen others, most of them large and bearded, and several so eager for violence that they had spent the whole night making chain-whips and loading up on speed to stay crazy.

Buggsy looked horrified. It was the first time in his long drug experience that he had ever laid eyes on a group of non-passive, super-aggressive Heads. What had got into them? Why were their eyes so wild? And why were they yelling: “You’re fucked, Buggsy ... We’re going to croak you ... Your whole act is doomed ... We’re going to beat your ass like a gong.”