Biographic - Sunday July 12, 2020 Comic Strip Licensing and Permissions

Transcript

The 27 Club The annals of Rock & Roll are littered with casualties of wild and reckless lifestyles. That so many of music's biggest stars were coincidentally lost at the age of 27 is a cultural phenomenon that has given rise to the notion that these young artists became members of a mythical group called the 27 club. The 1969 drowning death of Brian Jones, less than a month after his ouster from The Rolling Stones, was followed a year later by the deaths of guitar legend Jimi Hendrix and blues Belter Janis Joplin. In 1971, Jim Morrison, lead singer of The Doors was found dead in a Paris Bathtub. The early 1970s also saw the death of Canned Heat's Al "Blind Owl" Wilson and Ron "Pigpen" McKernan of Grateful Dead fame. All six deaths were substance abuse related- and all six stars were 27 years old! Although the age similarity was widely noted at that time, it wasn't until the 1994 death of 27-year-old Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain that the concept of the 27 club really began to take hold. When British singer Amy Winehouse passed away in 2011, music historians were quick to point out that the troubled star had joined a pantheon that streatches back to blues pioneer Robert Johnson in the 1930s and includes artists as diverse as Badfinger founder Pete Ham, Hole bassist Kristen Pfaff and vocalist Kim Jong-Hyun of South Korean popsters Shinee.

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