BEFORE: This seems like the perfect Netflix documentary to watch here, to sort of sum up the first 17 films in my chain (centered Hendrix, Joplin, Morrison...) and also provide a solid intro to the next few subjects coming up (Cobain, Winehouse). Already I'm realizing it's the same story, over and over again - form a band, get famous, get rich, get stoned, get dead. But does the pattern have to be that way, or is there even a pattern at all? People sometimes like to find patterns and coincidences where they don't really exist, so is the "27 Club" just a myth, and if not, what exactly is going on here? That's what I aim to find out today.
Jim Morrison carries over from "The Doors: When You're Strange"
THE PLOT: An examination of the lives and deaths of the famous members of the "27 Club" - musicians who died at the age of 27: Brian Jones, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Kurt Cobain and Amy Winehouse.
AFTER: And so I'm back to the "talking heads meets archive footage" format, actually I've been stuck on that format for three days now, but when your archive footage included Jim Morrison collapsing on stage, or threatening to expose himself, at least that's very enthralling. This film basically contains a bunch of journalists and music "experts" talking about what it means to be famous, in hopes of arriving at some explanation for why so many rock stars burned out and died at the age of 27. I'll admit it seems like there are a lot of those, but I'd like to see more of the stats, how people arrived at the conclusion that this "keeps happening" to people at this particular age. One expert mentions in this film that "when you add in the number of rock stars that died at 26, and 28, the numbers go up." Yeah, thanks, genius, and if I keep going and include the rock stars that died at the age of 29, 30, 25, and 26 they'd probably go up even further.
That doesn't answer the question about whether this is a statistical anomaly, or if the analysis has chosen to make it SEEM that way - in other words, if you only include the people who DID die at the age of 27, and ignore any stats that don't support your theory, yeah, you're going to get a result, but you've skewed the results in order to get there. A better way of crunching the numbers would be to look at ALL the rock stars who've died, and be as inclusive as possible, to see if there's some kind of spike at the 27-year mark. For example, and this is just based on the 17 movies I've watched so far, you've got to lump in Joplin, Hendrix, Brian Jones, Morrison, Cobain and Winehouse with John Lennon (age 40), George Harrison (age 58), Jerry Garcia (53), Terry Kath (31), Elvis Presley (42), Ray Manzarek (74) and Chuck Berry (90). OK, even after I factor all of those people in, there's clearly a spike at 27, and I didn't even include Ron "Pigpen" McKernan from the Grateful Dead (but then again, neither did this film...) who died at 27. So that's 7 rockers who didn't make it to 28, and 7 who did, and died later.
OK, but what about all the ones who are still alive? What about McCartney, Clapton, all the OTHER guys from the Grateful Dead, all the OTHER guys from Chicago, the guys from the Doors and from Big Brother and the Holding Company that are all still above ground. What about Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, both turning 75 years old this year, huh? We can play around with numbers all we want, but the truth is, we don't have enough statistical evidence to make conclusions about when rock stars tend to die, because we don't have enough of a sample set yet. It's still in progress. If you narrow the focus to only accept the evidence that supports your theory, yeah, you may end up "proving" your theory, but you cheated to get there.
My point is, when you take a long enough view of anything, everyone and everything withers and dies if you give it enough time. People have also talked about the "Superman" curse, where the actors who've played Superman over the years all seem to have some kind of tragedy in their lives, like Christopher Reeve's paralysis, and Margot Kidder going crazy and wandering around other people's backyards. But guess what, there's tragedy in EVERYBODY'S life, eventually, and so we all must face our own mortality at some point. When you look at a classic film like "Casablanca" or "Gone With the Wind", it's disheartening to think that everyone who appeared in those films is now dead, but it doesn't mean that those films are "cursed", it just means they were made a long time ago, and nobody can outlive the clock.
But it's the concentration of the period between 1969-1971 that saw the death of four big rock stars, all from drugs, we can assume, that makes the coincidence appear. Then there wasn't another high-profile 27-year old drug-related death for about 23 years later, when Kurt Cobain blew his brains out. I'll get more into the Cobain thing tomorrow - but can this statistic survive with this huge gap in the timeline? Furthermore, what, exactly, causes the kind of mentality that allowed so many people in this field to burn out at the same age, at the height (or thereabouts) of their careers?
Is there something going on with rock and roll musicians that prevents them from making it to their 28th birthday? Well, yeah, it's called drugs, and money enough to buy the drugs, and influence enough to have people buy the drugs for them, and to get the press to look the other way while they take the drugs and get addicted to the drugs. You've got to figure if someone starts a music career at the age of 18, or even 21, there's some pressure there to get famous before the age of 30, which is probably too late to be taken seriously by the fans. So by 27 there's probably an impetus to craft that masterpiece album that will make them famous before they run out of time.
Then you've got to figure that a certain percentage of people who attempt that will succeed, so there they'll be at the age of 25 or 26, suddenly famous, suddenly richer than they planned, and with a lot of free time to spend, and a gold record or Grammy Award up on the shelf. Time to celebrate with some alcohol, or pot, which leads to coke, which leads to heroin, and I think we all know where THAT can lead. As some of the talking heads in this film point out, nobody in the 1960's really knew how much was "too much", and it seemed that the richer a star was, the better (stronger) drugs they could buy, thereby making it easier to overdose.
On top of that, supposedly what all of these members of the "27 Club" had in common was some form of childhood trauma, either Mommy died or Daddy went away or the other kids made fun of them, and therefore that type of person is always going to be looking for something chemical to take the pain away, and then having the money and the influence to get those substances is going to lead them down the spiral. Unfortunately it's all idle speculation, and third-party hearsay, because I didn't hear one person being interviewed here who claimed to know the subjects directly, it all seems like they're repeating the stories they read in the news or heard from other documentaries. By all means, if you want to get inside the heads of rock stars, you should ask a bunch of writers who are not rock stars. Where's the logic in that?
The closest they get to talking to a real rock star here is an interview with Gary Numan, who you might remember from the early 80's song "Cars", and then pretty much nothing after that. He describes some of the social anxiety and brushes with self-destruction that he encountered during his 14 minutes of fame, but since he always brings the topic back to his Asperger's, we can never be sure if his experiences were anything close to the ones encountered by Joplin, Morrison, Hendrix and Cobain. So ultimately it's impossible for this film to lead to a conclusion other than the one they reached by skewing the data in the first place, that a lot of 27-year old people have died.
Yet again, somebody somewhere failed to properly submit the list of both interviewed people AND archive footage appearances to the IMDB. I know this is going to sound crazy, but for a film that set out to cover these six rockers as its subject matter, NONE of them were listed in the IMDB as making appearances in this film - not Janis, or Jimi, not Brian Jones or Jim Morrison, not Kurt or Amy, but the film is wall-to-wall stock footage of these 6 people! This is not just insane, it's gross negligence! I stepped up and submitted the names of 16 interviewed subjects that were not listed, and 38 people who appeared in archive footage, including the SIX MAIN SUBJECTS! Still, a day later, IMDB has not made all of the corrections, most notably they still have not added Jimi Hendrix and Amy Winehouse! What's the hold-up? The film is ABOUT THEM, it says so right in the plot synopsis!
NITPICK POINT: This film is probably hardest on Amy Winehouse, because this was the most recent music-related drug death covered, and supposedly people around her knew that she had a problem, hell, she even had a song about not going to "Rehab", and by now you'd think that a music label would take better care of its talent. But just because she showed up a few times with her hair in a bad beehive, that's not enough evidence to state that she was self-harming. Sometimes a bad hair day is merely that. Also, who cares whether Kurt Cobain listened to ABBA records? Even if it's true, it added nothing to the debate, so why include it?
The bottom line is, everybody's got to go some time, and did we really want to see what Jimi Hendrix or Jim Morrison would look like at the age of 75? I've seen Keith Richards at that age, and it's just not pretty. So maybe it is better to burn out than to fade away.
Also starring Olly Alexander, Dave Ambrose, Steve Blame, Keith Cameron, Paul Gambaccini, Dan Gillespie Sells, Dr. Cosmo Hallstrom, Ann Harrison, Barney Hoskyns, Peter Jenner, Chilli Jesson, Dylan Jones, Lesley-Ann Jones, Martin Lloyd-Elliot, Korda Marshall, Gary Numan, Mick O'Shea, Pete Paphides, Tris Penna, Tom Robinson, Chris Salewicz, Paul Trynka, with archive footage of Janis Joplin (also carrying over from "The Doors: When You're Strange"), Jimi Hendrix (ditto), Brian Jones (last seen in "Keith: Under the Influence"), Mick Jagger (ditto), Keith Richards (ditto), Bill Wyman (ditto), Charlie Watts (ditto), Elvis Presley (last seen in "Elvis Presley: the Searcher"), John Lennon (ditto), Paul McCartney (ditto), George Harrison (ditto), Ringo Starr (last seen in "Eric Clapton: Life in 12 Bars"), Maharishi Mahesh Yogi (last seen in "It Was Fifty Years Ago Today"), Chas Chandler (last seen in "Jimi Hendrix: Voodoo Child"), Andrew Loog Oldham (last seen in "Crossfire Hurricane"), David Bowie (last heard in "Atomic Blonde"), Anita Pallenberg, Monika Dannemann, Bing Crosby, Davy Jones, Micky Dolenz, Michael Nesmith, Peter Tork, Benny Andersson (last seen in "Mamma Mia!"), Björn Ulvaeus (ditto), Agnetha Fältskog, Anni-Frid Lyngstad, Kurt Cobain, Amy Winehouse, Dave Grohl, Krist Novoselic, Courtney Love, John Lydon, Glen Matlock, Diane Sawyer, Lucian Grainge, Mitch Winehouse, Blake Fielder-Civil.
RATING: 4 out of 10 coroner's reports
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