Derby goers and fans of the late Louisville native Hunter S. Thompson have a new reason to scan liquor store shelves around the city this week. Rolling out in honor of the Derby are roughly three hundred bottles of an eleven-year single-barrel bourbon from Gonzo Whiskey named in honor of Thompson’s seminal 1970 story “The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved.” About twenty of those bottles are hand-signed and “splattered” by illustrator Ralph Steadman, like bourbon Easter eggs.
Though Thompson and the British artist only worked together on a handful of projects—Thompson’s books Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and The Curse of Lono and the Derby story among them—their partnership proved indelible, with Steadman’s frenetic illustrations perfectly matching Thompson’s convention-skewering prose.
That association continues with Gonzo Whiskey, a brand launched by physician Matt Patel in partnership with Thompson’s estate and his widow, Anita Thompson. Its core Fear and Loathing whiskeys—Dr. Gonzo (a wheated bourbon) and Buy the Ticket, Take the Ryed (a rye)—feature Steadman’s unmistakable, scraggly lettering and debuted in Louisville during last year’s Derby week, along with the first bottling of Decadent and Depraved.
This year’s single-barrel release is drawn from the same small stock of Kentucky bourbon barrels, now aged eleven years and bottled “uncut and unfiltered.” Subsequent releases are meant to highlight how the bourbon evolves over time.
The Derby assignment was Steadman’s first introduction to Thompson, and not only did Steadman create the piece’s now-iconic artwork, he also became a central character, serving as the buttoned-up British foil to Thompson’s increasingly unhinged observations. On a Zoom call from his home in England, accompanied by his daughter Sadie Williams, Steadman, who turns ninety this May, recalled some of the details of how the piece came together.
Already known for his first book, Hell’s Angels, Thompson had agreed to cover the race for Scanlan’s Monthly, a short-lived but ambitious magazine he was helping to launch. Steadman had only just arrived in America that April and was staying with friends in the Hamptons. He explains that Scanlan’s had originally hired another illustrator, who ended up backing out of the assignment. The magazine’s editor, Don Goddard, an Englishman, had seen Steadman’s work and thought his style would mesh well.
Steadman arrived in Louisville a few days before the race. He’d accidentally left his art supplies in a cab back in New York and showed up instead with an assortment of makeup borrowed from his friend’s wife, a Revlon representative, to use for his initial sketches. Thompson was already in town, scrambling to arrange credentials.
“We couldn’t find each other for the first couple of days actually,” Steadman recalls. “I was looking around, you know. There weren’t any mobile phones then.”
The two finally met up in the press room at Churchill Downs. “It was my first time in America,” Steadman says, “and of all the people to meet, you go and meet Hunter Thompson. I mean, the character of all characters. You could meet Mr. Ordinary, but no, you go and meet this weird guy.”
“He said, didn’t he, ‘You look like a matted-haired geek with string warts?’” Williams says.
“Yes, I had a little beard, and Hunter said, ‘What’s that weird growth under your chin?’”
As detailed in the story—and likely aided by the press room’s open bar—the situation quickly unraveled. “Just pretend you’re visiting a huge outdoor loony bin,” Thompson advises at one point. He sent numbered pages torn from his notebook to the editors, accompanied by Steadman’s sketches, one of which prompted one of the story’s more memorable scenes, in which both beat a hasty retreat when a subject takes offense to a Steadman drawing. “I mostly remember that Hunter had to Mace you to get you out of the Pendennis Club, because you upset Hunter’s brother’s girlfriend,” Williams recalls. “You were drawing her, and she didn’t like it.”
Despite the chaotic nature of the narrative and the circumstances surrounding it, Steadman maintained a disciplined work ethic. “I felt I was doing something nine till five, you know, a proper job as it were.” And, in the end, the two forged a lasting friendship. Thompson traveled to see Steadman in England at least once—he remembers the tall, lanky writer often bumping his head on the kitchen doorframe—and Steadman traveled to America several times to visit Thompson at his Owl Farm in Aspen.
“I remember you spent more time with his cat, because he was always asleep during the day,” Williams says. “So you spent an awful lot of time with Jones the Cat, which you made into a little book.”
“We were chalk and cheese, Hunter and I,” Steadman says. “We were so different. It was very odd, but it worked. I suppose it did.”
And the rest, as they say, is Derby history.
A traveling exhibition of Steadman’s work, Ralph Steadman: And Another Thing, is currently on view at the Torrance Art Museum in Los Angeles.
Tom Wilmes is a journalist based in central Kentucky who covers bourbon and other spirits, travel, and food. A contributor to Garden & Gun, he has also written for Whisky Advocate, The Local Palate, Southbound, and other publications. A Kentucky Colonel and Certified Executive Bourbon Steward, he has spent years reporting on—and indulging in—the culture he covers, a responsibility he doesn’t take lightly. Follow him on Instagram @americadistilled.
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