Beyond Jimi Hendrix: Five members of the 27 Club that deserve more attention
In a chain of bars that will remain nameless, one of the most crass things I’ve seen in the world of rock music is a mural that decorates the walls with a perverse sense of pride, depicting the 27 Club having a drink together.
That gang’s all here, Kurt Cobain, Amy Winehouse, Robert Johnson, Janis Joplin, and many more. All toasting you as you go about your night, pretending like this jumped-up sports bar was exactly where you wanted to be on a Friday night. Dear reader, as someone who fancies themselves a music lover, this should be catnip to me. Except, because I’m a music lover, I fucking hate it. Because there are few things I hate more in this world than the concept of the 27 Club.
The very concept of the 27 Club glamorises the tragic death of young artists with the world ahead of them, at best, and outright fetishises it, at worst. That’s even before you take into account that the mural itself depicts them doing the very thing that killed them in most cases. Sadly, that doesn’t matter to the people who still cling to this fairly outdated, ghoulish marketing campaign.
Let’s be honest, the last thing that the 27 Club is about is paying tribute to artists gone before their time. Otherwise, musicians like the ones below would be talked about in the same breath as Jim Morrison and Brian Jones. If this really is about the music, then give any record by these artists a spin right alongside Electric Ladyland or Back to Black.
Ron ‘Pigpen’ McKernan
It’s a cruel twist of irony that the first member of San Francisco psychedelic legends The Grateful Dead to pass away was the one who didn’t do drugs. Ronald McKernan was the rock ‘n’ roll heart of the group, who we lost far too young. Pigpen doesn’t often get lumped in with the traditional names of the 27 Club despite being of the same era as the most famous members.
He was a blues and R&B purist who had a genuine love for the genres passed down from his father, a disc jockey for several radio stations that specialised in them. In fact, the band was arguably formed around him and his considerable singing voice and guitar chops.
However, although he wasn’t a drug taker, McKernan more than made up for it as a drinker. His alcoholism worsened in his mid-20s, making him an erratic presence in the band and causing other members like Jerry Garcia to step up as frontman and lead guitarist in his absence. A diagnosis of the autoimmune disease primary biliary cholangitis worsened his condition as well, to the point that by the early 1970s, Pigpen was a member of the Grateful Dead in name only. Despite that, he was still beloved by the band all the way up to his death in 1973, with Garcia remarking in his eulogy, “After Pigpen’s death we all knew this was the end of the original Grateful Dead”.
D. Boon
Punk is a medium, not a genre. No band proves that quite like Minutemen. Led by guitarist and songwriter D. Boon (Dennes Boon to his mum), the San Pedro power trio did so much more than thrash through three chords at the loudest possible volume. Their sound was inflected with funk, jazz, flamenco, hardcore to heavy metal and everything in between. It was still at the loudest possible volume, though. Boon was the band’s talisman, whose socially conscious lyricism made them so much more than just another bunch of hardcore hardmen.
In fact, if you met them before the show, they’d look like office drones who got lost on the way to the bar. This thrilling uniqueness made them unforgettable. By 1985, Minutemen were becoming one of the most respected and revered cult acts on the hardcore scene. Their status only made Boon’s death in a freak car accident on December 22nd all the more shocking. Boon may have been an artist taken before his time, but sometimes, artists don’t go because they’re burning out quick. Sometimes fate just gets in the way, the way it does for so many unfortunate people.
Mia Zapata
God, this one’s just horrifying. Mia Zapata was the frontwoman of The Gits, one of the genuine heroes of the Seattle grunge scene, whose hook-laden, yet heavy take on punk rock had marked them out as the next band from that scene to follow Nirvana into the stratosphere. In July 1993, the future looked incredibly bright for the band. They’d just finished their second album, Enter: The Conquering Chicken, and according to reports, they had just signed to a major label. What happened next was the worst thing that could possibly happen.
In the early hours of July 7th, Zapata was raped and murdered on her way home from a bar in Capitol Hill, Seattle. The world of rock was shattered, particularly the Seattle scene that had nurtured the band for the past half-decade. The perpetrator wouldn’t be found for another decade, but in the meantime, the women of the Seattle rock scene set up the non-profit Home Again in her honour.
A good legacy to leave for anyone, but arrived at from the most mind-bendingly horrific circumstances.
Richey Edwards
I was two years old when Richey Edwards disappeared, yet when I got into the Manic Street Preachers over a decade later, his loss was something that still haunted the band as strongly as it did in the months following that terrible day in February 1995. His band should have been leaving for a US tour on the day of his disappearance. Instead, he checked out of his London hotel room early, drove back to Cardiff, and there hasn’t been a confirmed sighting of him since.
It’s something of a miracle that the band continued without him, as Richey was the heart of the band. He may have never played a note of guitar, either live or on record, but he was the band’s main lyricist and artistic director. The decline of his mental health gave us arguably the best rock album of the 1990s in the form of The Holy Bible, but given the choice of that record and him having a long, happy life outside of the so-called 27 Club, I think we all know which we’d rather choose.
Kim Jong-hyun
If you think that being in a rock band sounds like a hard, demanding job, it’s got absolutely nothing on the K-Pop industry. Take the constant scrutiny and endless work schedule of a Premier League footballer, take away 90 per cent of the cash, and then you’ve got something resembling the constant nightmare of being a K-Pop star. The dark side of which was exposed with the suicide of SHINee frontman Kim Jong-hyun. Prior to the rise of BTS, there was an argument to be made that SHINee were the biggest band in South Korea.
Jong-hyun, known by his mononym Jonghyun, was the highest profile member, with a successful solo career to boot. In December 2017, his sister Kim So-Dam called first responders to an apartment he was renting after receiving worrying texts from him saying a “last goodbye” and to “say I did well”.
It turned out that, unbeknownst to anyone outside of his inner circle, he’d been struggling with chronic depression his entire life and decided that he couldn’t go on due to the toxic combination of his mental health struggles and the constant pressure of fame. A toxic cycle that the idea of the 27 Club still permeates, even after its victims pay the ultimate price for it.