“Together, the 27s form the veins and arteries of rock & roll in all its beauty, tragedy, ugliness, glamour, stupidity, addiction, and diversity. Music would’ve sounded very different without their musical contributions, yet rock continues without their physical presence. This is the story of The 27s.”
And so begins the book The 27s: The Greatest Myth of Rock & Roll, where tales of premature deaths of notable figures in music are interwoven with bright and haunting collages, photographs, and illustrations cleverly strung together by Eric Segalstad and Josh Hunter.
It has been about a week and a half since the untimely death of musician Amy Winehouse at 27 years old. Before her, I hadn’t realized there were so many other musicians who were part of the tragic “27 club” — Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Kurt Cobain, Jim Morrison, to name a few of the well-knowns, but they are also joined by members of Minutemen, Echo & the Bunnymen, and underground giants The Mars Volta, among many others. After establishing their mutual interest in the 27s phenomenon, The 27s authors Eric Segalstad and Josh Hunter embarked upon the project of profiling the musicians, initially thinking it would be a few quick bios and illustrations. It turned out to be much more; Segalstad explains, “as we dug deeper into the research and discovered more and more 27s, we searched for a narrative arc…that’s when we realized that the lives of the 27s tell the history of rock & roll—it’s various sub genres, the multiform facets of artistdom, and so on.â€
The 27s twists and turns through decades and genres, revealing layers of philosophy, numerology, and astrology, and offers a unique history of rock along the way. Segalstad shares one particularly jarring example of a seer in Morocco reading Jimi Hendrix’s tarot cards, revealing a large group of people, death, and rebirth. A shaken Hendrix then tells people “he was soon going to die and that he wouldn’t live to see thirty,” and sadly, the tarot cards were right. The author explains nature of the numerology and astrology behind the fateful reading, along with other apparent prophecies and signs leading up to other tragic 27s’ deaths.
Thus through a mixture of various methods, we are presented with a celebration of people who at the eponymous age of 27, left us a little too soon. As stated in the book: “The 27s were still young when they died for their art and ideals–a prerequisite for that iconic status.” With that in mind, we want to know what you think. Amy Winehouse has certainly made an indelible mark on pop-soul music, and her increasingly mysterious death at 27 certainly puts her at the right age. Has Amy Winehouse joined the “club” — and how does this change the way she will be remembered?
(Image via Berlinfotos under the Creative Commons license, copyright 2007)
