Last month I tuned 25 (I know, Me!), and so far I have managed to outlive a whole bunch of historically significant people including: Joan of Arc, Tutankhamen, Duncan Edwards, Buddy Holly, Jack Sheppard, River Phoenix, Sid Vicious and James Dean.

But I’ve got two years to make something of myself before I can inaugurate myself into the 27 Club

The 27 Club, also known as Forever 27 Club or Club 27 is a list of musicians, specifically blues or rock musicians who all died at the ages of 27.

There are currently a staggering 41 members of the 27 Club, which is an awful lot. The most well known inductees include:

Brian Jones

One of the founder members of the Rolling Stones. Orignially the leader of the group, he was overshadowed by Keith Richards and Mick Jagger.

He left the Rolling Stones in June 1969 to be replaced by guitarist Mick Taylor, and died less than a month later when, full up of drugs, he drowned in his own swimming pool at the age of 27.

His girlfriend called foul play, claiming he had been killed by a builder that had been renovating their house at the time of his death

Jimi Hendrix

The legendary guitarist that changed the way musicians play guitars (and then set fire to them) died on Speptember 18, 1970 after taking nine double strenght sleeping tablets and drinking a whole bunch of red wine. He choked to death on his own vomit, aged 27.

A roadie subsequently claimed Hendrix’s manager killed the star because he wanted to end his contract.

Janis Joplin

One of the greatest singers of all time, Janis Joplin rose to fame as the lead singer of Big Brother and the Holding Company,

She was found on October 4, 1970 in her hotel room having died from an overdose of heroin.

The band’s road manager believed that Joplin had accidentally been given a much more potent heroin, as several of her dealer’s other customers also overdosed that week.

Jim Morrison

Morrison, lead singer of The Doors, was seen as ‘one of the most iconic frontmen in rock music history’ died on July 3, 1971.

No autopsy was conducted on Morrison, so no cause of death could be identified.

Since his death, there have been many conspiracy theories about him, including being killed by the goverment, he faked his own death and being killed by a coven of witches(?)

Kurt Cobain

Nirvana’s lead singer and poster boy for Generation X was found dead on April 8, 1994 having believed to have died on April 5, after shooting himself in the face with a shotgun.

As seems to be the way with the members of 27 Club, there is mystery and conspiracy surrounding his death with discrepancies in his suicide note and with the fingerprints on the gun.

The heroin levels in his blood would also make it unlikely he’d be able to pull the trigger.

The full list of the 27 Club also contains the Echo & The Bunnymen drummer, the bassist for the stooges and the keyboardist of the Grateful Dead.

So, If I want to join the 27 Club, I’ve got two years to become a successful musician and then die under mysterious circumstances (although there’s no chance of that).

Get busy livin’ or get busy dying.

—Andy Dufresne

Source: Peter the Meehan

Nirvana guitarist and singer Kurt Cobain took his own life 17 years ago, on April 5, 1994. His mother, Wendy O’Connor, famously said: “Now he's gone and joined that stupid club… I told him not to join that stupid club.”

The “stupid club” was not just that of suicides. Cobain was 27 years old, and many legendary rockers have died at a youthful 27. Coincidence? Or the rock ’n’ roll curse of 27?

Kurt Cobain

The Nirvana frontman was clearly troubled months before his death. He’d overdosed on heroin in Rome (March 1994) and nearly died then. Cobain went into rehab but his wife, Courtney Love, reported him as being suicidal. Kurt’s sister later claimed that, even as a kid, Cobain would talk about how he wanted to join the “27 Club.”

Cobain’s eventual demise remains an issue of huge discussion: its timing, the gun bought, Kurt’s movements and whether he was so disabled by heroin he would have been unable to pull the trigger. Kurt last listened to R.E.M.’s Automatic for the People before he went (he wanted Nirvana to sound more like R.E.M. by many friends’ accounts). But he’d already done that, hadn’t he? “About a Girl” managed to be grunge-y, tender, yet also indebted to The Beatles.

Jimi Hendrix

Like Cobain, there is still much speculation on how/why Hendrix died. Best to remember the music of one of guitar’s great alchemists. Blues, funk, neo-jazz, proto-metal, tender ballads, guitar pyrotechnics… there wasn’t much Jimi did not master. Blues on a 12-string acoustic? Jimi did it.

Jim Morrison

The Doors’ singer died of heart failure (due to acute respiratory distress, officially) in 1971. A wild frontman and unique lyricist, Morrison was rock star incarnate. Later life photos of Morrison suggest he could have been 50: he lived hard and died young at 27. Best to remember The Doors’ finest, with Robbie Krieger playing great Gibson SG guitar.

Janis Joplin

An exceptional vocalist, Joplin also died at 27 due to heroin/alcohol overdose. Maybe she knew death was coming because at 26, Joplin put aside $2,500 for her own funeral. At Joplin’s wake, brownies laced with hashish were passed around to grieving friends. High times!

Brian Jones

Jones was sacked by The Rolling Stones a month before his death. Yet his drowning still came as a shock. Jones, in many ways, was the heartbeat of the original Stones. Calling himself “Elmo Lewis,” the 17-year-old Jones made crucial contacts in London’s blues scene and according to drummer Charlie Watts, “Brian was very instrumental in pushing the band at the beginning. Keith [Richards] and I would look at him and say he was barmy. It was a crusade to him to get us on the stage… and to be billed as an R&B band.” Jones died at 27. Again, many theories abound whether his death was an accident or murder.

Richey Edwards

“Who?” you may ask. ”Richey Manic” was one quarter of Wales’ Manic Street Preachers. He simply disappeared in 1995, at age 27. No body has ever been found, no word ever heard, and he was officially declared “presumed dead” by U.K. authorities in 2008. Edwards could only play guitar at a basic level, and did not often record guitar on albums (James Dean Bradfield, singer/lead guitarist is more than able). But Edwards was the lyrical mastermind behind the Manics’ early albums. The Holy Bible (1994), lyrics written mostly by Edwards, remains as compelling as it is harrowing.

Robert Johnson

Johnson is the ultimate “curse of 27” guitarist. Despite diligent research, real facts about “The King of the Delta Blues” remain hard to pin down. Johnson’s music is worshipped by Eric Clapton, Keith Richards and many others. His acoustic blues still sound eerie and the cause of his death at 27 years old remains unsolved: Johnson was poisoned, but if it was with strychnine added to whiskey (the popular theory), no one really knows. There is still debate about the exact location of Johnson’s grave.

Film director Martin Scorsese puts it simply: “The thing about Robert Johnson was that he only existed on his records. He was pure legend.” There is no film of Johnson, and only two/three verified photographs, but his music remains timeless.

Source: Gibson

Club 27 by g0dspeed91 Digital Art / Pixel Art / Characters / Non-Isometric © 2008

Story ideas don’t have to die. They can simply evolve into other ideas.

I’ll share an example since this date plays a part in the story.

Seventeen years ago, Kurt Cobain shot himself dead at the age of 27. Not long after that happened, I discovered that his age wasn’t a random thing. There were quite a few famous musicians who have died at the age of 27. They’re called “The 27 Club”. Musicians like Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, and Jimi Hendrix all died when they were 27-years-old, thus becoming a part of this infamous “club.”

So I had the idea of a man who happened to be a musician who believed that he was going to die when he was 27. I wanted to write it when I was 27, thus taking this journey with this character. I wasn't sure if it was going to be deadly serious or slightly funny or what.

This idea really went nowhere, but I kept it in my back pocket like so many other pieces of ideas I have.

A few years ago, I decided to morph this idea into another one. It was about a man who worked in the music business (but this time he’s a producer) who’s told he’s going to die on his 40th birthday. Same idea in one sense—a man who believes he’s going to die and the journey of whether he will or won’t. But it’s a very different story than one I would’ve written if I was writing about the 27-year-old.

Some story ideas don’t work. Period. Other times, they need a little time to ferment. Sometimes one idea will lead to another. But don’t just toss an idea away into a black hole to never find again. You never know when that idea might lead to something else, which might lead to a book that coincides with someone’s birthday.

Amazing how things like that can work out. 

Source: The Journey is Everything

Jim Morrison may not have actually died in his bathtub, but somehow that’s where he wound up after overdosing on heroin he thought was cocaine. His girlfriend found him there, three years before overdosing herself, also at the age of twenty-seven. Like Jim’s life, his death has a cloud of mystery hanging over it. He’d been living in Paris, renting an apartment on La Rive Droite and going for long walks throughout the city, admiring its architecture in those four months he had left. I imagined that bathtub looking just like Charlotte’s, whose apartment we used for this photo shoot. She would also host my birthday party that same night — the only one Guillermo and I have spent together during the course of our relationship.

We’d been dating for just seven months when I turned twenty-three, but were on opposite sides of the planet. The culture shock that came with my move to Japan was still fresh, and still stung. It fell on the same night as my office holiday party, held at the Hilton Osaka. And like most work events in Japan, I spent the time feeling like a deaf person — a lot going on around me, none of it making much sense. At one point, a coworker, dressed as what had to be a Christmas elf, surprised me with a small cocoa-dusted cake and the attention of the entire ballroom as it erupted into a Japanese version of the birthday song. I straightened my bowtie and stood to gush, holding my red face in my hands.

Guillermo’s birthday was just two months prior, right after I’d left New York, and him. We were still working out the kinks in our now long-distance relationship, making the most of our new Skype accounts. In the care package I’d sent him was a black fundoshi, a kind of loincloth I’d picked up in Osaka. Though the brand was called ‘Black Man’, it didn’t seem to cover much. As he figured out how to put it on, I watched his dick begin to rise and lift the small curtain of fabric draped over it before the fundoshi was off again.

Stripped to the waist, Guillermo laid back in the tub with his eyes closed, his arms outstretched like Jim’s in the famous “Young Lion” photo session. A bright vein appeared across his chest like a bolt of blue lightning, his skin translucent in the light of surrounding candles. Were his arms not adorned with inked mermaids and bumblebees, he could easily pass for the lead singer of The Doors. Out of all his 27? subjects, Jim Morrison seemed to me the most like Guillermo. His passion, his intensity, were what initially drew me to him. Both had been affected by violence they’d witnessed as children. Jim had seen a family of Native Americans killed in a car wreck while driving through the desert, which he believed to be the most formative event of his life. Guille had horror stories about Colombia in the ’90s: abortions on city buses, shopping malls exploding and people gunned down on the street. It made me reluctant to ever visit the place.

By the time my 24th birthday party was over, everybody was dead except one. I’d been cut in half by the sliding door to Charlotte’s bathroom. Guillermo was stabbed in the living room before collapsing on the kitchen floor, the second to die that night. Our 1970s porno murder mystery had been a success, the corpses of our friends scattered among the Disney princess party cups and half-eaten slices of cake. But I forever lament never playing The Doors, or at least the song “Five to One,” or at least the line where Jim sings, “No one here gets out alive”.

When Guillermo officially outlived Jim Morrison, we were once again on separate continents. We met on Skype for a date, to drink the same wine and watch each other jerk off. He had no idea I was flying to Bogotá the next day. He had no idea his father would be picking me up at El Dorado airport, to bring me home to wait in the living room and surprise him. He had no idea I’d be sitting there when he turned on the lights.

Source: East Village Boys