The 27 club

The death of Amy Winehouse has brought the dreaded "27 club" back into the lexicon. Let's get out of the way first... It's a club, not a curse. If it were a curse there would be a lot more dead. The reason for the "curse" talk is that in general most people claim Robert Johnson was the first member after going to the crossroads and making a deal with the devil to become a great bluesman and traded his soul and that many have done this after him and mate with his same fate. Problem with the theory is that the biggest star to be associated with this deal (at least in my opinion) is Jimmy Page, and he's still kicking around. Also the fame but unusual deaths of stars much bigger then those in the club, but at a much older age (Elvis & Lennon come to mind) makes the idea of a curse seem silly to me.

However one can't deny the coincidence of the age of all these musicians or the impact that a majority of them had. The poster childs of the club are Brian Jones, the founder of The Rolling Stones, Janis Joplin, influential female blues singer, Jimi Hendrix, considered by many the greatest guitar player ever, Jim Morrison, lead singer for The Doors and Kurt Cobain, leader of Nirvana. It's hard to say at this time if Amy Winehouse deserves to be on that list, but she did join the club none the less.

So how does this happen? My personal opinion.... Too much, too young. Maybe that's too easy, but imagine having the world at your feet and more money then you can ever know what to do with and you aren't even 30! And to top it off... No one will dare tell you "No". You are still immature yet you need to make decisions that would stress out an experienced CEO. Band members, road crews, record labels, agents, managers and fans are now depending on you and just a few years ago maybe you were flipping burgers... It's gotta be insane. So you turn to drugs and partying to release the stress, after all... This is what you know, you are too young to understand that you have all the power to tell everyone to just slow down for your own good, heck... You're young... You will live forever!!

I fear we will see this much more often in this TMZ society. The press adds even more pressure to an already volatile situation and it seems our young stars can't fart without a thousand cameras catching it. I see Miley Cyrus and Lindsay Lohan heading down these paths and I'm sure there is more to come. Maybe next time we see a sad pathetic, falling down drunk or stoned star, instead of laughing at them or instead of the courts sending them to jail for 2 hours we take this serious and help them and stop enabling them.