The 27 Club gained notoriety with Kurt Cobain’s death in 1994, but it opened its doors for business decades before and took in some of our most famous, gifted, and missed stars. Some say it’s the most exclusive club in the history of the world. Not all the money in the world will gain you access. No; there are only three criteria you need to get in, you need to be famous, you need to be 27, and you need to be dead.
Today we’re going to be delving into the real stories behind our favorite fallen idols who were taken before their time – some you’ve heardof, some you haven’t. Some old, some new, but all troubled, and all blue. Speaking of the blues, where else to start than with...
ROBERT JOHNSON
The original, founding member of The 27 Club is the man some say invented The Blues, Robert Johnson. Born on a plantation, the young man disappeared and came back a master of the gee-tar, prompting stories he made a deal with the devil at a local crossroads to achieve musical success. That said, Johnson’s lyrics may have helped create that myth as his chilling, folkloric songs about the devil, hellhounds and general despair have influenced rock & roll, heavy metal and the blues for decades. In August 1938, months after his 27th birthday, Johnson flirted with the wife of the owner of a roadhouse, then drank from an open bottle of whiskey – poisoned by the jealous husband – and died three days later of strychnine poisoning and pneumonia. His body was buried in an unmarked grave in Mississippi, but his legacy forever lives on. As for his soul… well, that belongs to someone else!
BRIAN JONES
Did you know The Rolling Stones were originally a blues band? Founding member Brian Jones wrote the blues until Mick Jagger and Keith Richards’ successful songwriting took Jones’ vision in a more rocky direction. In June 1969, they fired Jones from his own band, with Mick Taylor taking his place as guitarist. Less than a month later, Jones was dead, drowning in his swimming pool after a lethal cocktail of drink and drugs. Despite the seemingly cut-and-dried case, conspiracy theories saying Brian Jones’ was murdered with many – including The Stones themselves – questioning the official version of events. “And still, the mystery of his death hasn’t been solved,” Keith Richards said. “I don’t know what happened, but there was some nasty business going on.” One man even confessed to Jones’ murder.
ALAN WILSON
On September 3rd, 1970, Alan "Blind Owl" Wilson enjoyed success with his band, Canned Heat, even appearing at Woodstock. A year later, he was found dead on a hillside behind his bandmate's Topanga Canyon home. His hands were crossed over his chest next to a bottle of barbiturates. The cause of death was attributed to an accidental overdose, but many – including his drummer Fito de la Parra – believe Wilson committed suicide. Even so, like most of our genius/savant-level musicians on this list, the near-sighted guitarist was a deeply troubled man. Estranged from his family; he lacked confidence and suffered from depression. Are you seeing a pattern of the attributes you need to get into the 27 Club?
JIMI HENDRIX
Hendrix was another musician whose guitar skills seemed supernatural, but he made no deal with the devil. He’d been practising hard since he was fifteen after finding a one-stringed ukulele in the trash. Despite his later outlandish on-stage antics, setting fire to guitars and the like, Jimi was a beautiful contradiction—bored with parties and courting the media, he preferred staying in with his girlfriends to play board games. On the fateful morning of Friday, September 18th, 1970, Jimi took many times the recommended dose of sleeping pills. Jimi may have taken as many as nine Vesparax, a strong barbiturate, and had also been drinking. He famously choked on his own vomit in his sleep, and the world instantly became a less interesting place.
JANIS JOPLIN
Brought up in Texas on a diet of blues music, young Janis was bullied at school for being overweight. Her face scarred by acne and never truly fitting in, the kids would call her “pig” and “freak,” so she retreated into books, art, and music. Fast forward a decade, and Janis and her band, Big Brother and the Holding Company, had played Monterey and Woodstock. Who’s laughing now, bullies? After success with songs like "Piece of My Heart" and "Mercedes Benz", on October 5th, 1970, Janis was found dead in her hotel room from what’s believed to be an accidental heroin overdose.
JIM MORRISON
You may think Jim was born to hippie parents, but his dad was a straight-laced Navy Admiral. Nope, it was a peyote-fuelled trip to the desert that turned shy, skilled spoken word poet and lyricist James Douglas Morrison into The Lizard King. Jim wasn’t always the folk hero he is today; yes, The Doors fans a-dored him, but his popularity grew posthumously. Dying within months of Brian, Jimi, and Janis, Morrison’s death helped cement the idea of a link and that his death was destiny. Now folk all around the world knew that there was definitely something weird going on surrounding this dark, magical number 27, but the 27 Club wouldn’t come into existence for another two decades.
RONALD McKERNAN
A hard drinker from the age of 12, hillbilly-lookin’ misfit Ron McKernan was a sensitive soul. His father was a disc jockey, playing blues, and Ron grew up around African American kids and culture, picking up the nickname "Pigpen" after the mud-covered Peanuts character. He got together with Jerry Garcia and Bob Weir in 1964 to form the band that became The Grateful Dead, though he shied away from psychedelics. Ron had been dead for two days when his landlady found him in his apartment overlooking San Francisco Bay on March 8th, 1973. A friend discovered a tape cassette with Ron playing slow, gospel/blues piano and singing, “Don’t make me live in this pain no longer, You know, I’m gettin’ weaker, not stronger…” in an eerie, frail voice.
DAVE ALEXANDER
Think the Sex Pistols invented punk? Wrong! The Clash? The New York Dolls? MC5? No, no, and nope. Some say it was proto-punks, The Stooges, founded in 1967. Dave Alexander was the band’s founder, and the bassist was a loose cannon even compared to hellraiser Iggy Pop! “Zander” dropped out of high school 45 minutes into his senior year to win a bet, and he and fellow guitarist Ron Asheton once traveled from the USA to England with hopes of bumping into the Beatles. Nutters! After frontman Iggy Pop fired him for losing interest in rehearsals and being too wasted to play a festival in their hometown of Michigan, Zander began drinking heavily and died of pulmonary edema in February 1975.
PETE HAM
Whatcha mean you’ve never heard of Pete Ham? Signed to The Beatles’ Apple record label, his band Badfinger had four huge hits between 1970 and 1972, including Paul McCartney’s "Come and Get It". So the band seemed well on their way to the top, right? Unfortunately, Badfinger's manager Stan Polley ran off with an advance, leaving the band penniless. Believing his finances had been wiped out, on April 24th, 1975, Ham hanged himself in his garage three days before his 28th birthday. He left a note telling his pregnant wife and her son that he loved them. It read, "I will not be allowed to love and trust everybody. This is better. Pete. PS Stan Polley is a soulless bastard. I will take him with me.” In 1983, bandmate Tom Evans also hanged himself.
CHRIS BELL
Guitarist, singer-songwriter, and all-round underrated musical genius, Christopher Branford Bell led power pop band Big Star alongside Alex Chilton. He also had a not-so-successful solo career throughout the mid-1970s. After quitting Big Star, Bell fell into depression and drug addiction and later was forced to work at his family's restaurant after many failed attempts to re-launch his career. In December 1978, he crashed his Triumph TR-7 into a telegraph pole on his way home from band rehearsal, killing him instantly. Much of his solo work was released posthumously and massively influenced bands like Beck, R.E.M., Teenage Fanclub, Primal Scream, and Afghan Whigs.
D. BOON
Post-punk band Minutemen began when D. Boon and Mike Watt met at age 13. Like Bad Brains, singer-guitarist Dennes Dale "D." Boon’s band fused hardcore punk with funk and jazz. The Californian band helped define the new era of experimental punk, culminating when Michael Stipe invited them to open for R.E.M on a three-week North American tour. After the tour in December 1985, D. visited his girlfriend's parents in Arizona for Christmas. Feeling ill, he lay down in the back of the band's van so he could sleep while she drove. She fell asleep at the wheel, the van flipped, and the frontman was propelled out of the back door, breaking his neck.
MIA ZAPATA
Mia Zapata was a force to be reckoned with. As the lead singer of The Gits, she was one of the few female voices in Seattle’s grunge scene. The band’s debut album Frenching the Bully made them local favorites, but as they prepared their second album release, tragedy struck. One night in July 1993, Mia walked home from the Comet Tavern. It would be her last night on this earth. At 3:30 AM, Zapata's body was found in Seattle's Central District. She had been beaten, raped, and strangled. Her body was only recognized by the coroner as he was a fan of her band. Seattle luminaries like Nirvana and Pearl Jam helped raise money to hire PI’s to track down her murderer. The crime went unsolved for a decade before her killer, Jesus Mezquia, was tried, convicted, and sentenced to 36 years in prison.
KURT COBAIN
The 27 Club really only became widely known after Kurt Cobain’s death in April 1994. It was his own mother who stoked the flames of the fire, saying, "Now he's gone and joined that stupid club. I told him not to join that stupid club." While conspiracy theories and books still ask Who Killed Kurt Cobain? The disturbed genius, husband, father, and vulnerable man-boy shot himself with a gun he had a friend buy him and left a suicide note. Suffering a horrendous childhood, Cobain struggled with addiction, depression and crippling back pain, for which he self-prescribed heroin. Already the voice of a generation, Kurt’s place in history was cemented with his death. As the Kurgan from Highlander said, “It’s better to burn out than to fade away.”
KRISTEN PFAFF
Kristen Marie Pfaff was the bassist in Kurt’s wife, Courtney Love's band. She and guitarist Eric Erlandson scouted Pfaff from her own band, Janitor Joe. After helping Hole’s 1994 album “Live Through This” (released eight days after Kurt’s death) become an instant hit, Kristen attended Kurt’s funeral in Seattle. Then, two months later, Kristen tragically died of a heroin overdose. Similar to Jim Morrison, she was discovered in the bath of her Seattle apartment. Even though it was ruled suicide, Pfaff’s then-boyfriend Erlandson said, “You know someone’s suicidal, you know someone’s playing with death, but you don’t know how to deal with it… I admit I made some stupid mistakes with some people, and people are dead because of my stupid mistakes.”
RICHEY EDWARDS
Richard James Edwards was lead guitarist and lyricist for Welsh punk-rockers, the Manic Street Preachers. He disappeared on February 1st, 1995, and weeks later, his car was discovered at a motorway service station in Gloucestershire, England. Due to the service station's proximity to the Severn Bridge, a known suicide site, it was widely believed that Edwards had jumped from the bridge that links England with his home country, Wales. But the mystery doesn’t stop there. No; the plot thickens. Richey Manic has allegedly been spotted several times across the globe since his disappearance, speculating that the troubled, self-harming punk guitarist had faked his own death. If you see this man, let us know.
RANDY "STRETCH" WALKER
Some say Randy “Stretch” Walker was lucky to be in the right place at the right time. Others say he was hanging on to Tupac’s coattails. Both claims are unfair. Stretch was a skilled producer and a raw, dextrous rapper regularly appearing on Tupac’s studio records after a run with his own group, Live Squad. Whether behind the mixing desk or on the mic, Stretch always lived the OG lifestyle. Unfortunately, it was that gangsta authenticity that meant he definitely wasn’t in the right place at the right time. Stretch was assassinated in New York in November 1995 – less than one year before his friend Tupac was also murdered, aged 25; two years too young to join the 27 Club.
JEREMY MICHAEL WARD
At the Drive-In founding members Omar Rodriguez-Lopez and Cedric Bixler-Zavala went on to orm prog-rock band Mars Volta with longtime friend and collaborator Jeremy Michael Ward. Ward was an unseen, off-stage “sound manipulator”. Things were going well - their first LP, De-Loused at the Comatorium was hotly anticipated by fans, but a month before it came out, Ward was found dead of a heroin overdose in his L.A. home in May 2003. De-Loused was a Rick Rubin-produced prog-punk opera set in the mind of a drug-induced coma patient and told the story of friend Julio Venegas, an artist who leaped to his death off a Texas freeway overpass in 1996. After Ward’s death, Mars Volta continued, though nothing equaled the success of their first album with Ward.
JONATHAN BRANDIS
Jonathan Brandis began acting at age six before graduating to feature films like Stephen King’s It and The NeverEnding Story 2. Then, in 1993, at the tender age of 17, TV show SeaQuest DSV thrust him into the spotlight. The teenager became an instant heartthrob, receiving tens of thousands of fan letters. But you can guess what happened next - DSV was cancelled and aged just 20, Brandis struggled to maintain his career, fame and image. In 2002, Brandis was set to appear in Hart’s War with Bruce Willis. This was his big shot to get back into Hollywood feature films… but then all of his scenes were cut. A year later, he hanged himself in his Los Angeles apartment and died at Cedars-Sinai Hospital.
AMY WINEHOUSE
So many youngsters just aren’t ready for their fame, but the mercurial talent that was Amy Winehouse never wanted fame. Similar to Kurt Cobain, Amy had become sick of her career - sick of maintaining a persona for the media. She had become a prisoner to her image, but all she wanted to do was sing. And boy, was she good at it. English magazines called her "a filthy-mouthed, down-to-earth diva" and "a perfect storm of sex kitten, raw talent and poor impulse control". As drugs, alcohol, eating disorders, exhibitionist parents, and a jailbird husband took their toll on the young woman’s mind... Amy cracked. At 3:54 p.m. on July 23rd, 2011, ambulances were called to her home in Camden, London. She was pronounced dead at the scene. Amy Winehouse had drunk herself to death. Just three years earlier, she had expressed a fear of dying at 27. We still miss you, Amy.
ANTON YELCHIN
Born in St Petersburg in 1989, Anton Yelchin came to the United States as a baby and became an actor who always brought an understated sensitivity to his roles. Most famous for his three appearances as Russian USS Enterprise engineer Pavel Chekov in the Star Trek reboots, Anton Yelchin achieved a staggering amount in his 27 short years. He appeared in Jim Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive and Jeremy Saulnier’s punk-horror thriller Green Room. Tragically, in 2016, he died in a freak accident when his own car pinned him against a brick pillar, crushing him. Police reports stated there were no suspicious circumstances involved… other than the curse of The 27 Club.