The day the music died

Young singer. Precocious. Heaps of talent. Alcohol. Drugs. Basket case. Dead. But what lies behind the self-destructive trajectories of the 20-something Club? By Andrew Donaldson

It sounds like a prison gang, doesn't it? The 27 Club. In a sense, that's what it is, and with her death last weekend, Amy Winehouse received a life term along with the rest of those artists who left this vale of tears at the age of 27, seemingly on the cusp of a waning, golden youth and the loom-ing drabness of adulthood.

They include Rolling Stone Brian Jones, Jimi Hendrix, blues legend Robert Johnson, Texan bawler Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison of The Doors, Warhol protégé Jean-Michel Basquiat, Nirvana's Kurt Cobain ...

In fact, it was the latter's mother, Wendy O'Connor, who apparently came up with the name. After her son blew his brains out with a shotgun in April 1994, she reportedly remarked: "Now he's gone and joined that stupid club. I told him not to join that stupid club."

The media ran with that then, just as they're running with it now; the newspapers and the internet have been on the rampage with the 27 Club following the discovery of Winehouse's body in her Camden, London, flat.

Why not? It's a good story. Will always be a good story. Young singer. Precocious. Pretty. Heaps of talent. Alcohol. Drugs. Basket case. Dead. The familiar trope.

Inevitably, there came the preposterous suggestion that she had craved membership all along. "I think Amy Winehouse may have secretly wanted to be part of the 27 Club," Reuters quoted Pax Prentiss, the co-founder of Passages Malibu, a California rehabilitation centre, as saying on Tuesday. "Amy was on a dark path and she may have glamorised the idea of being part of that group."

Prentiss, perhaps unsurprisingly, is of the opinion that Winehouse never received the kind of treatment she needed for her struggles with addiction. "I believe she was dealing with deep psychological pain," he said. "To get her sober and to keep her sober, rather than treat her for alcoholism, you have to go to the root cause. The drinking and the drugs are a symptom of deeper problems."

Much has been made of Rehab, the first single off Winehouse's 2008 masterpiece, Back to Black, with its emphatic refrain: "No! No! No!" The song, it has been noted, was based on her refusal to seek help for her drinking problems. Said refusal may have been due to an aversion to people like Prentiss. Whatever her state, she would surely have known, perhaps instinctively, that her problems could not be papered over with the simplistic jargon of bumper stickers and the sort of pop psychology schtick popular with the Oprah contingent.

The very idea of a 27 Club is nonsense. What happens if, like punk rocker Sid Vicious, your drug habits and alcohol abuse kill you at 21? Or, like the English rock guitarist Paul Kossoff, at 25? Or, like country-rock pioneer Gram Parsons, at 26? Or, like country legend Hank Williams, at 29? Or, like Keith Moon of The Who, at 34?

What happens if you die at 22, like Buddy Holly? Or at 33, like Karen Carpenter? Or at 36, like Bob Marley? Or at 42, like Elvis Presley? What do we make of artists like Jerry Lee Lewis and Keith Richards, who were supposed to die - but didn't? Does it matter how you die? Some of the above died in motor accidents, others of overdoses, some were murdered.

The continued obsession of the chattering class with the statistical quirk of "27" does, however, serve to underscore our fascination with the apparent self-destructive behaviour prevalent among such talented artists.

The observation that it's a case of having too much money and not enough sense may well wash with the likes of Britney Spears or Nicole Richie or whatever other spoilt Hollywood brat happens to be falling out of a limo, drunk and flashing shaved vaginas to the world, and squandering, as one blogger put it, "the fruits of their celebrity". It's worth noting that, as I write, vast chunks of the bloggersphere appear concerned that, given her current self-destructive paroxysms, actress Lindsay Lohan could well be the next to join the club. After all, as celeb.gather.com cryptically notes: "On July 2, 2013, Lindsay Lohan turns 27 ..."

One satirical blog, unsoliciteddrivel.com, has suggested that the 27 Club would have nothing to do with Lohan, and "quoted" Joplin as saying: "Man, are y'all f**king kidding me? Lindsay Lohan? This group is for musical artists, man. The real deal ... When I told Jimi what y'all were thinking about Lohan, he damn near choked all over again ..."

So Lohan will never be able to hold a candle to the likes of Winehouse, let alone the club's so-called founding figures, Hendrix, Joplin, Jones and Morrison.

Point taken. But the fascination with Hollywood actresses and rock stars who fall apart in public nevertheless persists, regardless of artistic merit.

Perhaps this is a deeply entrenched throwback that has its roots in Calvinist theology. We despise these people, we resent their ill-gotten gains, the millions they have due to their "instant" success, and we wholeheartedly condemn their behaviour and their scorn for convention because we fear the collapse of our own values.

And, boy, oh boy, don't we take delight in their punishment. There's a special joy, that fun in being right, in being able to purse your lips, to point your finger, and say: "I told you so!"

We pore over the unflattering photographs. "Jennifer Lopez has a fat arse! There is a God!" Or, in the case of Winehouse: "Jeez, look at how thin she is! It's the drugs! It's the bulimia! It's the anorexia! But she's messing herself up nicely, hey?"

As Kathryn Schulz, the author of Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error, put it: "In our collective imagination, error is associated not just with shame and stupidity, but also with ignorance, indolence, psychopathology and moral degeneracy."

It's religion. Again.

On another level, the suggestion that stardom and continued public exposure comes with certain pressures and does take a toll on health is certainly valid.

Perhaps the drug-taking, the alcoholic binges, the food splurges and the rampant promiscuity can be seen as attempts to cope with such pressures - the inevitable "cries for help" so beloved of talk radio and the self-help supermarkets - just as the inevitable breakdowns and public collapses can be seen as the folly of such behaviour. It is not only young musicians, though, who fall prey to such pressures. Look, if you can stomach it, at Michael Douglas.

Perhaps the real reason for the addictive, self-destructive behaviour that so bedevils young musicians is not psychological, but neurological. Winehouse, by her own admission, was a manic depressive who refused to take her medication. In the years since Jones was found dead in July 1969, the suggestion that he, too, had suffered some sort of mental problem has been gaining in currency.

In his book, Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain, Oliver Sacks, professor of neurology and psychiatry at Columbia University Medical Centre, suggests that such disorders are not only prevalent among rock musicians - or those in their mid-20s.

He writes: "There are professional musicians who are deeply schizophrenic but can nonetheless perform at the highest professional level, and their performances bear no trace of their disturbed mental states. Tom Harrell, an acclaimed jazz trumpeter and composer, is considered one of the foremost horn players of his generation, and he has maintained his artistry for decades, despite having lived with schizophrenia and virtually constant hallucinations since adolescence. Almost the only time he is not psychotic is when he is playing, or, as he puts it, 'the music is playing me'."

The difference between Harrell, say, and Winehouse is that the former sought help - and got it. So did actor and comedian Russell Brand. He was close to Winehouse and, like the singer, a regular on the Camden scene who did a prodigious amount of drugs.

"When you love someone who suffers from the disease of addiction, you await the phone call," Brand wrote in his tribute to Winehouse. "There will be a phone call. The sincere hope is that the call will be from the addict themselves, telling you they've had enough, that they're ready to stop, ready to try something new. Of course, though, you fear the other call, the sad nocturnal chime from a friend or relative telling you it's too late, she's gone."

There has been some criticism of Winehouse's management for allowing her to embark on a potentially lucrative, but ill-fated tour of Europe in June in her pitiful condition. The tour was called off after she was booed off stage in Belgrade, Serbia, apparently too drunk to perform.

But for all the charges of exploitation - "pushed on stage like a machine," was how one broadcaster put it - there were the countering claims that Winehouse had wanted to do the European shows. She had, after all, performed a well-received "warm-up" gig at a London club before the tour, and earlier this year she had appeared without a problem in Brazil and Dubai.

These were encouraging signs, but to no avail. A week after the debacle in Serbia, all her scheduled performances were cancelled, and it was announced that she would stay out of the spotlight until she had recovered from her addictions.

She wouldn't recover. That's the truth of it, glib as it seems. And, of course, there is the awful cliché that we'll always have the music. That's the thing about membership of the 27 Club. It's a good career move. Joplin and Hendrix continue to sell well. Cobain and Nirvana continue to shift units. The Rolling Stones' 1960s catalogue, made when Jones was still a member, remains hot property. The same could be said for Morrison and The Doors, whose entire recorded output has just been re-released yet again - this time in a nifty box set, with CDs in miniature replica cardboard sleeves of the original vinyl covers.

Even the club's figurehead, country blues singer and guitarist Robert Johnson, is doing rather well these days, with a newly remastered edition of all his songs recently released to mark the centennial of his birth. Johnson, who reportedly struck a deal with the Devil in exchange for his soul one night at a crossroads outside Clarksdale, Mississippi, was murdered in 1938 by a jealous husband in circumstances that remain unclear to this day.

As critic Greil Marcus put it in his book, Mystery Train: "He died in a haze: if some remember that he was stabbed, others say he was poisoned; that he died on his hands and knees, barking like a dog; that his death 'had something to do with the black arts'."

The black arts? Smells like profit. Winehouse's posthumous career is likely to be lucrative. While she was alive, her record company wanted a follow-up to Back to Black. Her management moved her to the Caribbean island of St Lucia in 2009 to get her off drugs and start recording again. It didn't work. She drank heavily instead, and none of the music she recorded there was deemed fit for release - a decision that may shortly be reversed. We may only wonder at what might have been.