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Hunter S. Thompson vs. Keith Richards

This meeting of the minds will melt your face.

Back in 1993, ABC managed to get legendarily—and enthusiastically—wasted cultural juggernauts Hunter S. Thompson and Keith Richards together in a Colorado hotel, ostensibly so Thompson could interview the Rolling Stones guitarist. What followed was a rambling, mumbled, bizarre form of free associative talk that suggests the pair may have also been communicating on a psychic, or at least psychedelic, level as well.

After a negotiation process involving a fax machine and possible bags of cash, the duo engage in a cigarette-flicking, gesticulating, pause-riddled dialogue that is equal parts Marc Maron podcast and David Lynch-ian fever dream. Topics range from the afterlife to J. Edgar Hoover’s likely flatulent reincarnation to the fact that without The Beatles, there’d be no Stones. And, obviously, drugs.

As Richards says, “A painter’s got a canvas, but there’s got to be a frame around it. Somewhere.”

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James Joiner

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