27 - Howard Sounes

   2013; 307 pages.  Full Title : 27 – A History of the 27 Club through the Lives of Brian Jones, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Kurt Cobain, and Amy Winehouse.  New Author? : Yes.  Genre : Non-Fiction; Biography, Music History.  Overall Rating : 9½*/10.

    It’s music trivia time!  Here’s a couple of tidbits that you might not know about the lives of some of the biggest names in rock-&-roll.

Brian Jones.  One of the founders of the Rolling Stones, he was both asthmatic and bipolar.  He was one of the first British musicians to use LSD heavily.  He had his girlfriend stolen from him by bandmate Keith Richards.

Jimi Hendrix.  His birth name was Johnny Allen Hendrix, and he was part Cherokee.  He played guitar left-handed.  At one time he was an “item” with Janis Joplin.  He served in the army, but got discharged by telling them he was gay.

Janis Joplin.  For a while she golfed at a country club.  She was an “item” with Jimi Hendrix, but had a fight with Jim Morrison, and was once slapped by Jerry Lee Lewis. She was bi.

Jim Morrison.  He wanted to be a poet, not a singer.  His father was a US Navy admiral.  He was an avowed “Dionysian”, and once had a fight with Janis Joplin after he'd acted like a jerk.

Kurt Cobain.  He played guitar left-handed.  At one point early in his career, he was a “sofa-surfer”.

Amy Winehouse.  She was bulimic.  Her favorite book was Catch 22 by Joseph Heller.

    Oh yeah.  They all died when they were 27 years old, which is the central theme of Howard Sounes’ book, “27”.

What’s To Like...

    I liked the book’s structure.  Howard Sounes divides it into two roughly-equal sections: Life (Prologue and chapters 1-7) and Death (chapters 8-13 and Epilogue).  Basically, you get to watch each star’s meteoric rise, and then watch them crash-&-burn.  Sometimes a chapter is devoted to a single person, other times a chapter features several stars.

    It is not a spoiler to say that statistically there is a “spike” for rock stars dying at the age of 27, but it’s not an anomaly, no matter how you manipulate the data.  Still, six mega-stars dying at the same young age is noteworthy, and  Howard Sounes searches for common factors in their all-too-brief lives to explain this.  Here are a couple of the commonalities:

    Heroin use (5/6)

    Little contact with their families growing up (5/6)

    Brushes with the law  (4/6)

    Early success in life (6/6, and yes, that’s a tautological concept since the book is about famous people who died at 27).

    Also, most of them died at night, and all of them were heavily into booze, meds, and other drugs.

    There are 30 pages of “Source Notes" in the back, plus a five-page Bibliography, which gives you some idea of the extent of Howard Sounes’ research for this book.  What’s unique, though,  is that he seems to have done extensive interviewing of friends, family, music business associates, and bandmates to supplement the previous documentation.  I liked this, although admittedly it leaves the door open for unsubstantiated gossip and slanted recollections.

    I enjoyed learning what the “Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy" and the “Yoko Ono Syndrome” are, as well as why we’re still seeing “new releases” by Jimi Hendrix more than 40 years after his death.  There are 16 pages of photographs of these rock stars, some of them less than flattering.  You’ll learn the origin of the band names “The Doors” and “The Rolling Stones”, neither of which was what I had thought.

    Howard Sounes is a Londoner, thus the book is written in English, not American.  Besides spelling differences, here are some of the “English” phrases used that I encountered:  Indian takeaway, sloping off, bunk off, Jack the Lad, tipped up, Readers Wife, bodged, full of beans, tetchy, and rowed.  That last one means “argued”, and the first one is what we Yanks call "takeout food".  I can only guess at the rest.

    The Epilogue does a nice job of bringing closure to these six mini-biographies.  Howard Sounes discusses the size of each star’s estate and how it was handled, since a lot of them didn’t leave a will.  Death brings out the worst in some people, especially when the deceased is famous.  Death is also great for just about any artist’s career, and Sounes updates you on how each of these artists is doing commercially nowadays.  In all cases, it’s better than you’d think.

Excerpts...

    “Just how do you get down after the show so you can sleep? (…) [A] few stiff drinks and a sleeper sped you on your way.  But plane time would come long before the sleeper wore off, hence the leapers.  But the flights are terribly boring when you’re up, so a creeper rounds off the edges and a lot of drink takes a bit of the cotton wool out of your mouth.  But booze (…) makes life a bit grim, so “just a bit” of acid makes you feel all tingly and good.  But it’s hard to concentrate on acid, so a quick sniff of coke (…) brings the brain briefly to attention while you smoke some grass or hash to take the nerviness out of the coke.”  (pg. 119)

    Visitors to Jim Morrison’s grave are a mixed bunch, of all ages from all over the world, not necessarily fans of the Doors.  Rather, the grave has become one of the sights to see in Paris.  “It’s an iconic life – live hard, die young,” observes Kyle Fisher, a middle-aged man from Ohio, visiting with his daughter in 2012.  “I think he was in the 27 Club.”  Peter Niedner from Germany believes that the number 27 is important.  “The two and the seven is a nine, and nine is a special number,” he says enigmatically, at the graveside.  “What I think is amazing is that he is more than forty years dead and you can come whenever you want and you see fresh flowers.”

    “Plastic.”

    “Yeah, but someone put them there.”  (pg. 293)

Tragedy is so romantic when people write about it, but it is horrible to see.  There’s nothing pretty about a person destroying themselves.  (pg. 123 )

    About ¼ of the Amazon reviews for “27” are negative – 3 stars or less.  A lot of the criticisms seemed to fall into three categories: too much cussing, not enough attention to conspiracy theories, and “too much Amy Winehouse”.

    There is cussing, but most of it is when the author is giving a direct quote from one of his interviewees.  Sounes does take the time to debunk some of the wacko conspiracy theories, which frankly ignore Occam’s Razor.  Personally, I rather like conspiracy stories, but here, the evidence of a.) excessive drug-use and alcoholism, b.) mental issues, c.) suicidal thoughts, d.) the soul-destroying grind of near-constant touring, and e.) the jaded despair when finding out that fame early in life doesn’t bring happiness all are far more believable causes for the demise of these six than murderous intent.

    Finally, it is true that the book  devotes more attention to Amy Winehouse than the others, but I suspect that’s because her death is a lot more recent and there are a lot more people worth interviewing around for her than for the earlier subjects.

    In closing, I found “27” to be an enlightening book.  The “warts” that are revealed about the dead six rock stars may not be flattering, but they do show that they were real, albeit flawed, human beings.  There are lessons to be learned here about fame, partying, friends, family, and substance abuse that just might save someone’s life.

    9½ Stars.  If six deaths seems a bit scant to you, Howard Sounes gives a “Long List” of fifty music-industry people who died at age 27 in the back of the book.  If fifty deaths seems a bit scant to you, Wikipedia has its own list of seventy-plus stars who died at 27 as well.  The link to Wiki's list is here.