The 27 CLub

I learned of Amy Winehouse's death from a posting on Facebook a bit over a week ago. I wasn't a fan, really, but I liked what I had heard of her music. There was a lot of talk about her being one of the "27 Club," musicians, some of them great, even iconic, who had died at twenty-seven. A lot of the Rock-n-roll greats I remember from the '60s never made it to thirty. Morrison, Hendrix, Brian Jones, and, from the next generation, Kurt Cobain are all mentioned. Since I enjoy music of all sorts, I've listened to all of them from time to time. It wasn't until I watched the MTV Unplugged episode with Cobain and Nirvana that I really appreciated his music. Like Morrison, Cobain was a poet who wrote songs. Interestingly enough, one of the members of Cobain's wife's band Hole, Kristen Pfaff, also inducted herself into the 27 Club when she died of an accidental OD.

I was sort of aimlessly traipsing through some YouTube videos, sparked by a Facebook entry from a prep school alum who is a serious '60s music freak. The clip he posted was of a Dead tune by Pig Pen http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8FgdqYzI0EI&feature=share. There are a series of photos of Pig Pen and the Dead, including one taken on the steps of the house where the Dead lived, 710 Ashbury Street. Ron had Janis at his side, and was copping a feel. Janis had one of the biggest smiles I've seen on her face, lighting it up as I'd seldom seen it. I remembered that Janis was also a member of the 27 Club and looked up Pig Pen. Damn, so was he.

I learned of Joplin's passing driving up Second Avenue in NYC. As I neared the Filmore East -- which I knew as The Village Theater, a former Yiddish Theater when the Lower East Side, was mostly made up of Jewish immigrants -- I saw the marquee draped in black with Janis Joplin's dates. I was two days shy of my own 34th birthday. I had to pull my VW to the side, since I couldn't see to drive through the tears. I'd seen a lot of shows at that theater, including one with Chuck Berry that some friends produced. And I'd sat in the light booth or on the Joshua's Lights scaffolding for most of them. In those days, I seldom paid to go and listen to music, for I had friends in the business, as they say. One of the reasons, odd as it is, that Janis resonated with me is that she was from Port Arthur, Texas, a town where my grandfather had worked and lived when he was building ships for Consolidated Steel, a couple of years or so before I was born. It was, in fact, where Pop died not long before Pearl Harbor.

I couldn't say I knew Janis. I loved her music, and when she was in New York, she tended to hang out in places where I hung out, and one year I saw her almost nightly for a week or more in Nobody's, a bar with a great kitchen. She was in the company of the character actor Michael J. Pollard. I don't know if they were an item, but they seemed to go together well. I learned that Janis and Pig Pen were a couple for a short time, and then friends for the rest of their short lives. For some reason, her death, so young, hit me hard.

I don't know what it is about being twenty-seven that it seems to be as far as so many really fine musicians have taken their life and careers. Ana says that maybe, staring thirty in the face and confronted with having to at least contemplate growing up or just growing older, some of them just can't handle it. She may have a point. I was twenty-seven twice. The first time, I was really 17, but the phony draft card I used had my birthday in 1934. And then, not long after I got out of the service, I turned 27 for real. I faced the specter of turning thirty in three years with some trepidation, but, being no musical genius -- or much of any other type -- and with no one counting on me, no entourage, perhaps it held less fear for me.

So, this afternoon, I've spent thinking about the curse of Twenty-Seven, the losses the world of music I inhabited the edges of at one time has suffered and, as I contemplate turning 70 in three years and a bit, I've listened to the music of a lot of people, many my contemporaries, who won't ever be looking at that number.