The Myth of the 27 Club

Today is the day I give up on immortality. Or at least, on a certain bizarre, perverse form of it that modern pop culture has created. I speak of the infamous “27 Club,” the designation reserved for famous figures, mostly musicians, who died at that age, and are paradoxically rendered immortal by having perished in youth, undeniably accomplished yet undone by excess. Caught in the vast space of aging where birthdays cease to mean much and haven’t yet started to again, I could see turning 28 as a humbling reminder of what some people who never reached my age managed to accomplish before perishing. But I am, instead, considering the perniciousness of the 27 Club as a concept.

It can’t be denied that the 27 Club counts remarkably famous and accomplished members: Brian Jones, multi-instrumentalist of the Rolling Stones. Jim Morrison, frontman of the Doors. Janis Joplin, one of rock’s most-accomplished singers. Kurt Cobain, lead singer and guitarist of Nirvana. Singer Amy Winehouse. Jimi Hendrix. There are other “members” not so easily rattled off. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer‘s Charles R. Cross once listed,

Chris Bell, of the legendary power pop band Big Star; D. Boon, of the great punk band the Minutemen; Pete Ham, of Badfinger; Ron “Pigpen” McKernan, of the Grateful Dead; bluesman Robert Johnson; Johnny Kidd, of Johnny Kidd and the Pirates; Les Harvey, of Stone the Crows; Raymond “Freaky Tah” Rogers, of Lost Boyz; Gary Thain, of Uriah Heep; Alan Wilson, of Canned Heat; Jeremy Ward, of Mars Volta; Dave Alexander, of The Stooges . . .

Other definitions extend back in time to sweep up famed early Delta blues musician Robert Johnson, or across professions, to include artist Jean Michel-Basquiat. The main criterion is to be a promising, productive talent, yet in one way or another overwhelmed by a high-ambition life, caught up in its extremes, seemingly trying to compress an entire existence into its early years, and eventually succumbing prematurely to the reaper — specifically, before turning that magical 28.

The 27 Club is a modern phenomenon, for the most part. Its early stirrings began when Hendrix, Morrison, and Joplin, who all knew each other, died excess-driven deaths in a ten-month span at age 27, as Cross notes. There wasn’t much self-consciousness to these attempts, though Hendrix prophetically doubted he would make it to 28. But the idea of a “club” truly took off when Cobain, long struggling with depression and already having attempted suicide, “joined” with a shotgun blast to the mouth. His manner of death, and a misinterpreted comment by his mother, gave rise to a belief that he planned to die this way; it is disputed, and likely unfounded. And more recently, Winehouse had feared that she would experience an early demise.

It’s hard to deny the cultural power of the 27 Club. It serves as a seemingly perfect representation of youth cut down in its prime, with an added tinge that these particular members yielded themselves entirely to a kind of reckless excess that seemed inseparable from their talent. They seemed incapable of living lives of anything but extremes, and that can only go on for so long. As the line from Blade Runner goes, “the candle that burns twice as bright, burns half as long.” The power of the 27 Club as an idea is reinforced by one’s simple inability to imagine its members as any older than the age at which they perished. Kurt Cobain, if alive today, would now be 54; who can project his quintessentially ’90s demeanor into the present? Jim Morrison would be 78; would he be joining his fellow Boomer acts in reprising his greatest hits — including his notoriously unpredictable onstage behavior — on Social Security? It’s hard to fathom.

But there are at least two problems with the 27 Club. The first is that it may not actually be real. One study in the BMJ “compared the mortality of famous musicians” who had a No. 1 album on the U.K. charts between 1956 and 2007 “with that of the UK population.” It found “no peak in risk around age 27.” It did, however, discover comparable risks of demise at ages 25 and 32 for musicians, and asserted that “the risk of death for famous musicians throughout their 20s and 30s was two to three times higher than the general UK population.” So perhaps 27 just became the convenient stand-in after some high-profile coincidences, whereas, in reality, the entirety of “youth” is the risky duration for those who achieve fame.

This makes a good deal of sense. Really, the upper echelons of fame are riddled with early deaths, and it makes no sense to exclude anyone just because he “failed” to get to 27, or made it just a day after. There’s also the fact that some musicians by all rights ought to have joined, but got lucky. The things Eric Clapton and Keith Richards have done to themselves ought to have killed them many times over. And they would have killed Ozzy Osbourne, if he weren’t a mutant. For what it’s worth, a study in the Independent challenged this entirely, suggesting that the riskiest age for musicians was . . . 56. But don’t expect the 56 Club to catch on anytime soon.

The second problem with the 27 Club is that it should in no way be aspirational, or any kind of model for a good life. I suppose if you squint, you can see in it the ancient dilemma faced by Achilles in the Iliad: to die gloriously in battle and be remembered forever, or to live to old age but anonymously:

For my mother Thetis the goddess of the silver feet tells me

I carry two sorts of destiny toward the day of my death. Either

if I stay here and fight beside the city of the Trojans,

my return home is gone, but my glory shall be everlasting;

but if I return home to the beloved land of my fathers,

the excellence of my glory is gone, but there will be a long life

left for me, and my end in death will not come to me quickly

“Live fast, leave a pretty corpse” is also a pithy, modern summation. But the manner of death of most 27 Club members is not something to be admired. Many of them had lost control of their lives, become consumed in hedonism, and neglected the permanent things so thoroughly that they made their lives fleetingly temporary. And in Cobain’s case, a life of demons finally caught up with him, only by coincidence at that particular age; he did not kill himself then to make sure he was made immortal. We don’t know what the members of the 27 Club might have done had they lived longer. But it seems hard to believe that they had nothing left to give the world, either in their music or to those whom they cared about, or at least who cared about them. It’s also a false choice: You can do great things and live into old age.

So today, on my 28th birthday, it is not sour grapes that causes me to look in sorrow, not in admiration, at the lives of the members of the 27 Club. It is, rather, that, for all their accomplishments, they did not get the chance to live lives full of the things that truly give life meaning. Their names may live on forever, and mine may fade away. But if my remaining years are as replete with experience and full of friends and loved ones as my first 27 have been, then I think I could live with that.