On 8 April 1994, electrician Gary Smith arrived at a Lake Washington mansion to install some security lighting and made for the garage to begin his work. There was a greenhouse above the garage, and, as Smith traced some wires along the roof, he saw something unusual through the glass.
“I noticed something on the floor, and I thought it was a mannequin,” Smith told Seattle’s KIRO TV at the time. “So, I looked a little closer and geez, that’s a person. I looked a little closer and I could see blood and an ear and a weapon laying on his chest.”
The person was Kurt Cobain, singer, songwriter, and lead guitarist of rock band, Nirvana, who had taken a lethal heroin dose before shooting himself three days earlier. Both his sister and mother heard of the singer’s death via radio reports, with the latter remarking to reporters that her son had “gone and joined that stupid club”.
The ‘stupid club’ is the 27 Club, named so because it features a list of artists – predominantly musicians – who died at the age of 27. Before Cobain, there was Rolling Stones co-founder Brian Jones who was pulled from the bottom of his swimming pool in 1969, Jimi Hendrix who died of an overdose in 1970, and Janis Joplin, who also died of an overdose the same year. The Doors frontman Jim Morrison suffered catastrophic heart failure while in the bathtub two years to the day that Jones passed, and, in 2011, Amy Winehouse became the latest high-profile inductee into that most cursed of clubs – her cause of death being alcohol poisoning.
Charles R Cross, who has published biographies about Cobain and Hendrix describes the number of musicians that die at 27 as “truly remarkable”, noting that “there’s a statistical spike for musicians” who pass away at that age. However, a study published in the British Medical Journal in 2011 found there to be no spike in deaths at age 27 (though they did find that famous musicians in their 20s and 30s to be up to three times more likely to die than the general population) leading to the New York Times to declare the 27 Club as “rooted in myth”.
Astrologers believe that there is something of the mystical about the number 27 – it is around every 27 years that we experience our Saturn Return, a time when the planet returns to the exact same position in the heavens as when we were born. It is a period said to herald significant life changes, perhaps even existential crises, crises which may just steer especially sensitive, creative souls down a path of self-destruction.
Then there are the conspiracy theories: Jones was rumoured to have been murdered over unpaid debts, Hendrix might have been bumped off because he wanted to get out of his record contract, while Morrison either suffered an overdose or faked his own death (conspiracists are emboldened by the fact that no autopsy was ever performed).
“James Court, a music biographer and author of The 27 Club, believes the inductees are further immortalised by their inclusion…”
Cobain was murdered and that his musician wife, Courtney Love, was somehow involved. (Two months after Cobain’s death, Kristen Plaff, the bass player in Courtny Love’s band, Hole, died of a heroin overdose; she was also 27 – the third member of the Seattle music scene to die at that age within 12 months.)
Howard Sounes, author of Amy 27: Amy Winehouse and the 27 Club, describes the phenomenon as “pure coincidence” but does note that the club’s ‘big six’ names all had “strikingly difficult childhoods” that involved using drugs since their teens and showing signs of personality disorders from a young age. Both Jones and Joplin suffered bipolar disorder, while Morrison and Cobain were obsessed with suicide – which is also linked with self-harming, which Winehouse did, too. “They all,” writes Sounes, “had a death wish.”
James Court, a music biographer and author of The 27 Club, believes the inductees are further immortalised by their inclusion (some call it The Forever 27 Club), becoming even more fascinating, and “weirdly glamorous” as they never “get to retire, or decline”.
As Kurt Cobain wrote in his suicide note, “it’s better to burn out than to fade away”, a quote from the Neil Young song My My, Hey Hey, something which Young has admitted has scarred him greatly. “I, coincidentally, had been trying to reach him,” writes Young about the time around Cobain’s death, in his autobiography, Waging Heavy Peace. “I wanted to talk to him. Tell him only play when felt like it.”
And now, when Young plays live, he adds extra emphasis to another line from the song, “once you’re gone, you can’t come back”.
