27 Read online

  * The jelly-like substance in the eyeballs.

  † Unusually, there were two inquests into Amy Winehouse’s death, as will be explained in due course. I refer here to the evidence at the second inquest, held in January 2013, though the verdict was the same as at the first.

  * Dave Alexander of the Stooges, Jimi Hendrix, Robert Johnson, Brian Jones, Janis Joplin, Rudy Lewis of the Drifters, Ron ‘Pigpen’ McKernan of the Grateful Dead and Jim Morrison.

  One

  THE YOUNG DIONYSIANS

  The god Dionysus or Bacchus is best known to us as a personification of the vine and of the exhilaration produced by the juice of the grape. His ecstatic worship, characterised by wild dances, thrilling music, and tipsy excess, appears to have originated among the rude tribes of Thrace, who were notoriously addicted to drunkenness.

  James George Frazer, The Golden Bough

  1

  Start at the beginning. If the 27s abused themselves because they were unhappy, which we shall see is generally true, when did unhappiness begin? The poets answer the question with universal truths. William Wordsworth wrote that ‘the child is father of the man’. Philip Larkin added that it’s our parents who fuck us up. ‘They may not mean to, but they do.’ The wisdom of these observations is borne out in the lives of the six principal 27s.

  Let’s take them in order of demise, starting with Brian Jones. Despite his talent and achievements, history has not been kind to Brian. He founded the Rolling Stones. He was a key part of the band’s look and sound in the early years of its success, and precious few bands have been more successful. Yet if Brian is remembered at all, it is as a casualty of rock ’n’ roll – a weak, foolish and unpleasant person who could not cope with fame. He left the Stones by mutual agreement in 1969, dying a few weeks later in a drowning incident that remains controversial. The Stones went on to greater success without him, as if to prove he was never that important. When his former band mates speak of Brian it is often with pity, even contempt. To Keith Richards, Brian was ‘an asshole’. Yet there are those who remember him fondly.

  Brian was born on 28 February 1942, the eldest child of Lewis and Louisa Jones, with two younger sisters, Barbara, four years his junior, and Pamela, who died in infancy. Dad was an engineer, an upright, church-going Welshman, who settled with his wife and family in Cheltenham, one of the most genteel towns in the west of England, where Brian attended Cheltenham Grammar School. As a result of this background, and that he was the best-spoken Rolling Stone – his voice had the self-consciously refined quality people of his background then typically adopted in public and on the telephone – he is often thought of as the most middle-class Stone. In fact, Mick Jagger was from a similar background.

  Brian grew up in a semi-detached house at Hatherley Road, Cheltenham, where neighbours remember Mr and Mrs Jones as reserved. ‘Mum and Dad were very private, they didn’t chat to the neighbours or anything. If you saw them walking down the road they’d say good morning, or good afternoon, but that was about all,’ recalls neighbour Marlene Cole. Brian later complained that his parents were overly strict, and didn’t give him enough love.

  Several of the 27s showed signs of mood or personality disorders from an early age, conditions that border on mental illness. Brian was one. ‘[Brian] was bipolar,’ asserts Linda Lawrence, who had a child with Brian in the 1960s, later marrying the singer Donovan Leitch.* The term ‘bipolar disorder’ has come to replace ‘manic-depression’, though the older term is helpfully self-descriptive. Generally, the sufferer experiences mood swings, from mania, where they become over-excited, to depression. Creative people are often bipolar, and the disorder is found in many members of the 27 Club. ‘The parents thought he was just a bad child,’ says Linda. ‘He was a sick human being that needed comfort and love.’ Brian also suffered from asthma. Linda says that a return visit to Cheltenham in adult life was so stressful to Brian that it would trigger an attack.

  In common with all the principal 27s, Brian was intelligent. He also had a marked musical talent, which was not true of them all. His was a musical home, with Dad playing the organ and Mum giving piano lessons to local children. Unlike many rock musicians, Brian learned to read and write music, and he played a variety of instruments to a high standard, including the piano, clarinet, saxophone and guitar. ‘He could pick up any instrument, particularly stringed instruments, and find his way around them,’ recalls Peter ‘Buck’ Jones (no relation), who played with Brian in a local band. ‘He just lived for music.’

  Unfortunately, Brian’s taste in music created conflict with his parents. As a teenager, he developed a passion for the blues, teaching himself slide guitar and harmonica in emulation of his American heroes. ‘[Brian’s father] thought it was the Devil’s music,’ says his friend Richard Hattrell. As Brian became more interested in the blues, he started to neglect his school work, which caused further friction. ‘Up to a certain point Brian was a perfectly normal, contented little boy, who behaved well and was well liked,’ Lewis Jones said of his son. ‘Then there came this peculiar change in his early teens … He seemed to have firstly a mild rebellion against authority, which unfortunately became stronger as he grew older. It was a rebellion against parental authority, and it was certainly a rebellion against school authority.’

  Sex was a factor. Brian was a handsome lad, with a mop of blond hair, athletic enough to work as a lifeguard at Cheltenham Lido during his summer holidays. He had an eye for girls, especially young girls, whom he could impress, and they liked him. It was not only his appearance: Brian had a sensitivity that endeared him to the opposite sex, though girlfriends soon discovered that he was jealous, violent, promiscuous and irresponsible.

  While studying for his A levels, Brian dated a fourteen-year-old schoolgirl, who became pregnant with their child, to the consternation of their families. Arrangements were made for the baby to be adopted while the lovers finished their education. As soon as Brian completed his exams, he was packed off to London to train as an optometrist. He lasted two weeks in the capital before returning home. His parents next sent him to live with a family in Germany. He soon returned to Cheltenham where he took a series of unskilled jobs that fell short of his parents’ expectations, working briefly in a record shop, a factory, as a bus conductor and as a coalman. In the evenings Brian haunted local jazz clubs and dance halls, getting onstage to play guitar whenever he could. ‘[He] was not terribly likeable, because he was constantly wanting to play with people who may not have wanted to play with him,’ remembers Declan Connolly, who ran one club. ‘He was [a] bit pushy.’

  A fling with a married woman resulted in Brian’s second illegitimate baby while he was still a teenager. As with the first, he played no part in the child’s upbringing. Then he met Pat Andrews, a fifteen-year-old sales assistant at Boots in Cheltenham, on a blind date at the Aztec Coffee Bar. ‘I walked into this room and there was this angel [with] beautiful golden hair,’ recalls Pat, who fell in love. ‘He was so charming, well-spoken, so articulate and knowledgeable.’ Pat got the impression that Mrs Jones didn’t think her good enough for her son, and that Brian wasn’t loved at home, not like Pat loved him. ‘I think Brian was looking for love,’ she says. ‘The one thing [Brian] wanted was for his father – more so than his mother – to say, “Brian, I’m proud of you. Well done.”’ From their point of view, of course, Mr and Mrs Jones were doing their best to raise respectable children, and Brian wouldn’t conform. He had squandered his education and showed no interest in establishing a conventional career, wasting time on what his parents considered dead-end jobs and vulgar music. Worst of all, their teenage son had already fathered two illegitimate children by two women, and now he was knocking about with another silly girl. It wouldn’t be long before Pat was pregnant, too.

  Brian’s conflict with his parents reached breaking point at Christmas 1960. After work on 22 December, he brought Pat home to Hatherley Road, planning to go out later to celebrate her sixteenth birthday. The teenagers foun
d the house empty, the lights off, and Brian’s suitcase in the drive. His parents had thrown him out.

  2

  Brian Jones’s childhood problems pale in comparison to those of Jimi Hendrix, whose family was poor and dysfunctional. Jimi – named Johnny Allen Hendrix at birth – was born in Seattle, in the state of Washington, on 27 November 1942. Like many African-Americans, his racial history was complex, his ancestors including African slaves, white slave owners and Cherokee Indians. His father, Al, had grown up in Vancouver, before moving to Seattle, sometimes named the Emerald City for its verdancy, derived from abundant rainfall. At a time when much of America was segregated, Seattle had a reputation as a relatively integrated city.

  Just before he was drafted for the Second World War, Al Hendrix had a relationship with a teenager named Lucille Jeter, which resulted in her becoming pregnant. Al and Lucille married in haste before Al went away. He didn’t see his son until he came back to Seattle after the war, by which time Jimi was three years old. The marriage was fractious. Al suspected Lucille had been unfaithful to him and threatened to divorce her, but they stayed together for a further six years. During this time, Lucille gave birth to five more children: Leon, Joe, Kathy, Pamela and Alfred. The last four were born with health problems, probably linked to poverty, and were given up for foster care. In later life, Al denied that he was their father. The only child he seemed to want to claim as his own was the one who became famous.

  Al and Lucille eventually divorced in 1951 when Jimi was nine, around the same age as Kurt Cobain and Amy Winehouse when their parents broke up. It is established that parental break-up can be a traumatic event in the life of a child, with consequences for their behaviour and mental health. Al and Lucille still saw something of each other, but increasingly Al lived alone with his eldest sons, Jimi and Leon, calling on relations, neighbours and friends to help raise the boys. The male Hendrix family moved frequently, living in cheap apartments and shack houses, mostly in the Central District of Seattle, where Jimi received his schooling and made friends, having dirt-bomb fights, acting out scenes from Flash Gordon and playing cowboys and Indians. ‘Jimi is part Cherokee, so we wanted him to be the Indian,’ remembers elementary-school buddy Sammy Drain.

  Friends came to know a shy boy with artistic talent, a passion for music and an eccentric wardrobe. In adult life, Jimi was renowned for his individual clothing. He started dressing unconventionally by necessity, wearing cast-offs because his father didn’t have the money to clothe his sons properly, though he did find the money to drink. Al worked as a gardener, and after a hard day mowing lawns, he relaxed with alcohol. ‘His daddy drank a lot … he was a lush,’ says Sammy Drain. ‘He was a drunk … a wine drunk,’ says another friend, Pernell Alexander. ‘His dad would never buy [Jimi] anything.’ A third friend recalls that Jimi’s father also had a bad temper: ‘I was scared of Mr Hendrix,’ says Anthony Atherton, who met Jimi at Washington Junior High and stayed friends with him into adult life. ‘After he’d get home from work, he was pretty tired, and he had a pretty short fuse, and alcohol didn’t do him any justice.’

  Jimi’s friends tended not to visit Jimi at home because of his father’s drinking and temper, and when they did call round they rarely saw Jimi’s mother. A drinker herself, Lucille Hendrix collapsed in an alley behind a bar and died of a ruptured spleen in 1958, when Jimi was fifteen. Al did not attend the funeral. Neither did his sons. ‘We both wanted to go,’ Leon told Hendrix biographer Charles R. Cross, ‘but Dad wouldn’t let us.’

  Jimi’s interest in music started young, and became his obsession. Initially he pretended to play guitar on a broomstick, mimicking guitar sounds. ‘He was just going around the darn streets playing on this broomstick,’ chuckles Atherton. ‘People thought he was crazy.’ At the time Al and the boys were living in a boarding-house, whose landlord had a battered acoustic guitar for sale. When Al refused to buy the guitar for Jimi, a family friend gave him the money. The instrument was a wreck, with only one string, but Jimi coaxed music out of it, playing left-handed. Al tried to make his son use his right hand, with the result that Jimi learned both ways.

  Whatever his shortcomings as a father, Al bought Jimi his first electric guitar when he was sixteen, a right-handed instrument that he restrung. Jimi took his guitar everywhere, carrying it in a bag because he didn’t own a case. Neither did he have an amplifier. He went to Pernell Alexander’s house to plug in and play. Jimi’s obsession with music brought him into conflict with his father who wanted him to help with his gardening work. Jimi wasn’t much interested in gardening, and feared his father would confiscate his guitar as a punishment. He asked friends to look after it. ‘[He] was afraid his father would destroy it,’ says Anthony Atherton, who formed a jazz combo with Jimi and Pernell, the Velvetones. Unlike his friends, Jimi’s musical passion was for what the boys called ‘rotgut blues’, the Delta blues of Robert Johnson and others, the same music that had caught Brian Jones’s ear half a world away in Cheltenham, England. Jimi learned guitar licks from a local musician named Randy ‘Butch’ Snipes, whom friends also credit with teaching him such stage tricks as playing his guitar behind his back and with his teeth. As with Brian Jones, the guitar had come to dominate and define Jimi’s young life. ‘He always said he was going to be the world’s greatest guitar player, and no one ever really took him seriously,’ says Anthony Atherton. ‘But he did.’

  Jimi dropped out of Garfield High School in 1960, at a time when he was increasingly at loggerheads with his father. Anthony Atherton says Jimi decided to join the military to get away from the old man: ‘He just couldn’t tolerate his father any longer.’ The boys went to the USAF recruiting centre in Seattle, hoping to sign up for pilot training, but failed the physical. ‘They said the G-force of flying a plane would be a little too much [for us],’ says Atherton, who later concluded that racism was probably the real reason they were rejected.

  Shortly after this, in May 1961, Jimi was arrested for stealing a car and jailed overnight. No sooner had he got out than he stole a second car. The judge agreed to a suspended sentence on the proviso that Jimi enrol in the military. He signed up for the 101st Airborne. If they wouldn’t let him fly planes, he would learn how to parachute out of them. So it was that Jimi Hendrix left his unhappy home in Seattle.

  3

  In many ways, Janis Joplin is the 27 Club member most like Amy Winehouse. Apart from the fact that both were female stars in a male-dominated industry, they were highly intelligent, articulate, quick-witted, well-read women with a lust for life; they loved to sing, joke, have sex and get high; they were also outspoken and flamboyant, with a unique sense of style. Yet Janis and Amy were profoundly insecure.

  Born on 19 January 1943, Janis was the first child of Dorothy and Seth Joplin. She had two younger siblings, Laura and Michael. The family lived in Port Arthur, Texas, an oil town twenty miles inland from the Gulf of Mexico. Seth Joplin worked for Texaco. In her biography of her sister, Love, Janis, Laura Joplin describes a happy, stable, middle-class home, in which ‘Janis was a bright, precocious child with a winning smile’. But Janis’s adolescence was blighted by severe acne and, despite her cleverness and wit, she was ranked down the scale of teen popularity in Port Arthur because of her complexion, plain face and inelegant figure, which hurt. In interviews Janis gave the impression that her childhood had been a humiliation, complaining to the chat-show host Dick Cavett: ‘They laughed me out of class, out of town, and out of the state, man.’ She may have been self-dramatising: in her book, Laura Joplin recalls that Janis had many friends at high school, including a nice-looking boyfriend. This may be so. But it is Janis’s perception that is important and, as with other 27s, she seemed to have had a distorted vision of herself, as if seeing herself in a fairground mirror.

  On the surface Janis’s background was conservative and predictable, which is true of Amy Winehouse’s, though there were hidden tensions. Neither girl was raised in the epicentre of a great city, nor had parents of part
icular achievement, ambition or sophistication, though there was a modest degree of creative flair in both families. By background, Janis might have been expected to become a housewife and mother, sharing the values of her parents. Yet she made herself extraordinary, becoming a Bohemian who lived without regard for convention, moreover a white girl who sang the blues with as much heart as Bessie Smith.

  Janis found inspiration for the person she became in literature as well as music. ‘Janis always said, “I’m a beatnik,”’ notes her friend and road manager John Byrne Cooke. Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, published when Janis was fourteen, had a powerful influence on her, as it did on many contemporaries who went on to be music stars. Janis was enthused by the lust for life Kerouac captures in his novel, and his romantic vision of America, ‘all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, and all that road going, all the people dreaming in the immensity of it …’

  Beatnik themes of travel, exploration and experience were also part of the folk-music revival of the late 1950s/early 1960s, and Janis was a folk singer before she became a rock vocalist. It was from singing a song made famous by Odetta that Janis discovered she had a voice. Like all the great singers, Janis sounded as if she meant what she sang. Singing was not so much a performance as an expression of her inner self.

  She began to seek out and embrace all kinds of experiences, including drunkenness. The characters Janis read about in novels typically drank (apart from the beats, she was taken with F. Scott Fitzgerald); and most of the adults she knew drank. Indeed, there may have been a problem in the Joplin family. Musician Sam Andrew, who was close to Janis throughout her career, came to understand that Seth Joplin was an alcoholic, though he managed to conceal and control it. ‘Janis’s father was a drinker. There may be some connection – maybe it was chemical.’