Collage by Sonja.
The “stupid club” she was talking about doesn’t hold meetings—all its members are dead (though one can only imagine the band they could form in heaven). Known as “the 27 Club,” it’s a list of rock stars who died tragically at the age of 27. Among its most famous members are Brian Jones, the Rolling Stones guitarist who drowned in a swimming pool in 1969; Jimi Hendrix, who purportedly choked on his own vomit while under the influence of barbiturates in 1970; Janis Joplin, who died 16 days after Jimi of a heroin overdose; Jim Morrison of the Doors, 1971, cause undetermined but seemingly drug related; Chris Bell, Big Star founder and songwriter, car crash, 1978; D. Boon of the Minuteman, van accident, 1985; Hole bassist Kristen Pfaff, heroin overdose, 1994; Richey Edwards of the Manic Street Preachers, who suffered from depression and disappeared without a trace in 1995; and Amy Winehouse, who was found dead on her bed, surrounded by empty vodka bottles, in 2011.
What is it about 27? Ever a huge nerd, I did some research. I already knew how Jimi, Janis, and Jim had died because I’d gone through a ’60s phase in seventh grade (before I discovered grunge), but I hadn’t realized that they’d all been the same age. Twenty-seven. Eerie. Messed-up. But legendary. I was (and still am) obsessed with myths, and here was one that was going on in the real world. The old myths I read about in books were invented to help humans explain things like why the seasons change, but that’s just another way of saying they help us make sense of the bad in the world. The 27 Club did that for me—it gave me a way to understand the climate of my own life.
Like many of Kurt’s fans, I was devastated when he died. I was a freshman in high school, and Nirvana was my favorite band. I was struggling with depression, self-injury, and being bullied, but Kurt had been an outsider like me, and if he was able to become insanely famous and adored, maybe the world was a more accepting and less cruel place than it seemed to me at the time. He was my hero, in other words. In the journal entry I wrote the day I learned the news, I was straight-up pissed. I called him “dumb” and wondered if he’d considered his wife or their daughter. I questioned why people take their own lives, asked Kurt why he did it, and said I never thought he was “like that.” Meaning suicidal. Meaning not “strong enough” to fight through his depression. But I knew why—not why he, specifically, chose suicide, but why anyone might feel like doing that.
By that point in my high school career I’d been sent to the guidance counselor for writing poems that “sounded suicidal” (“I lie there, thinking, wondering / How would it be if I were gone?”—in retrospect, I understand my eighth-grade English teacher’s concern), and even though I’d sworn “I don’t want to be that girl” in my angsty poetry, there had been a couple of incidents where my best friend had to wrestle a bottle of Tylenol from my hand. Though I couldn’t explain it to her or even articulate it in my tortured poetry, sometimes it felt like I was trying to contain a thunderstorm inside of me—I had flashes of anger that burned my stomach, I often wanted to cry so hard I couldn’t breathe, and the world around me was tinged gray like I was living inside a dark cloud. Suicide would be a way of stopping those feelings. I got that. I think I was angry at Kurt for being “like that” because I was afraid that I might be “like that.” I wanted him to be stronger to assure me that I could be too.
In the days that followed his death, I read every article about Kurt’s life that I could get my hands on. I felt like knowing what was behind his torment would give me insight into my own. His mother’s quote about “that stupid club” made such an impact on me that I memorized it. I found it weirdly comforting, because if so many of these brilliant artists struggled with depression and/or addiction, that meant it might be possible to make something beautiful out of my own dark feelings. Even though they died young, they had managed to leave behind an incredible legacy, and that was inspiring.
The most fascinating story in all 27 Club lore is undoubtedly Robert Johnson’s. Johnson was a master of blues guitar whom people like Eric Clapton, Keith Richards, and Jack White count among their biggest influences. But he wasn’t a prodigy - the story goes that in the beginning, even though he loved the blues, he was terrible at playing it. Then one day he disappeared, and when he returned to his hometown of Robinson, Mississippi, a year or two later, he was scary good. Like, supernaturally good. A legend sprang up that he had had a midnight meeting with the Devil himself at a crossroads in Clarksdale, 50 miles away. Satan had offered Johnson musical genius in exchange for his immortal soul, and Johnson took the deal. Sadly, the Devil didn’t have to wait long to collect on his end of the bargain: Johnson died, apparently of strychnine poisoning, seven or eight years later, at, yes, the age of 27.
Back when I first read that story, I decided that the Devil had written Kurt’s, Janis’s, Jimi’s, Kristen’s, and the rest of the club’s deaths into the fine print of Johnson’s contract, and that metaphorically, this meant an early death was the price that Satan had decided all mortals should pay for artistic brilliance. I didn’t even believe in the Devil, but this made a good story, and even back then I thought of myself as a storyteller. I was also a depressed person looking to give her depression a purpose.
Around the same time I first hear Nirvana, I discovered another bastion of teen angst: Sylvia Plath.
Her poetry spoke to me even more directly than their music, because
she wasn’t just a tormented artist, she was also a woman, and her
writing seemed to capture with intimate precision the rage and sorrow I
was battling. The first thing you learn when you start reading about
Sylvia Plath is that she killed herself when she was 30 years old. I
remember hearing this fact in English class, and I had mixed feelings
about it. I empathized with her depression and heartache, but I wondered
what more there was to her life, and to her art. If she had lived
longer, would she have written something completely different from The Bell Jar—something
more optimistic? Or did being a creative woman mean you had to be
tortured until it killed you? I noticed that people talked about Janis
and Mia differently from Jimi, Kurt, and Jim. The men were revered as
gods, practically, while the women were more often seen as tragic
figures who just couldn’t handle life.
I went back and forth a lot about whether it was good or bad to die for your art. On one hand it seemed noble somehow, and more important, it looked like a nice escape plan from pain. On the other, it seemed unnecessary—Courtney Love was a hero of mine, too, and she was a survivor, which I thought was even more powerful. Part of me wanted to be a survivor, too, but sometimes it felt like I would never escape the tumult of emotion inside of me, so I might as well embrace it and use it to make stuff, and then when I didn’t feel like I could cope with it anymore I could just let my illness consume me.
I had a lot of friends who lived by the maxim (from the 1949 movie Knock on Any Door and not, as it’s often misattributed, uttered by James Dean) “Live fast, die young, leave a good-looking corpse.” In practice this meant they engaged in a lot of wild and crazy behavior. I didn’t necessarily care about the dying young part, but I naïvely believed that living fast was a necessity for making art. People like Courtney, Kurt, the Beats, Hunter S. Thompson, and everyone else I was reading and listening to at the time seemed to bear this out. I needed experiences to write about, and they had to be outrageous to be interesting. While I didn’t necessarily take risks just to gather material, I gravitated toward and tolerated risky situations throughout my teenage years because I felt they fueled my work. I stayed in bad relationships with addicts and abusive guys, I pushed my friends away so I could wallow in my anger and my sadness, I drank too much, I did drugs. I did these things because I was depressed, but I had also decided that being a writer justified my self-destructive behavior, and that if I got treatment for my depression I would lose my ability to write. Being healthy meant being “normal,” and I’d bought into the myth that “normal” people couldn’t be creative.
But drugs didn’t work for me the way they did for Hunter S. Thompson. When I look back at the stuff I wrote in high school, it makes me cringe. The characters and stories, which at the time I thought were really promising, are flat and empty, because I was. I’d get high or drunk and the words would just flow out of me, but when I looked at them later they were gibberish.
After a few years of this my writing slowed down. I ran out of ideas. It became clear to me then that self-destruction was not actually a magical fountain of talent or inspiration. So I finally started going to therapy, stopped using drugs, moderated my drinking, and focused on my writing. And instead of dying at 27, I sold my first book that year. And a year later I sold another one.
My college’s alumni publication ran an interview with me when the second book, Ballads of Suburbia, came out. That novel was informed by my struggles with depression, addiction, and self-injury, and the interview was accompanied by a photo of me looking haunted in the park where I did drugs as a teen and a splashy pull quote: “I had to go to dark places.” Staring at it, I felt like I’d arrived. All that pain had been worth it.
I always tell people that it’s better to pour your dark feelings into creating something rather than into destroying yourself, and that is how I handle those emotions now. But after Ballads came out, I spent years worrying that I had used all my darkness up, and without that, what was there to write about? Well, a lot of things. First of all, you don’t have to live something in order to be able to imagine it. And second (and more important for my own mental health), I had to remind myself that one of the most incredible things that art can do is to bring beauty to the world. I had been obsessed with darkness because it seemed “honest” and “real,” but I was ignoring other honest, real feelings—like love, happiness, and excitement.
I still write about sad stuff, because I think it’s important to acknowledge it, but I have a lot of fun writing about lighter things too these days. That’s the part of life that’s important for me to acknowledge. That’s the part that made me live past 27. I wish it could have done the same for all of those artists whose work has meant so much to the world. I wish they’d never gone and joined that stupid club. ♦
I went back and forth a lot about whether it was good or bad to die for your art. On one hand it seemed noble somehow, and more important, it looked like a nice escape plan from pain. On the other, it seemed unnecessary—Courtney Love was a hero of mine, too, and she was a survivor, which I thought was even more powerful. Part of me wanted to be a survivor, too, but sometimes it felt like I would never escape the tumult of emotion inside of me, so I might as well embrace it and use it to make stuff, and then when I didn’t feel like I could cope with it anymore I could just let my illness consume me.
I had a lot of friends who lived by the maxim (from the 1949 movie Knock on Any Door and not, as it’s often misattributed, uttered by James Dean) “Live fast, die young, leave a good-looking corpse.” In practice this meant they engaged in a lot of wild and crazy behavior. I didn’t necessarily care about the dying young part, but I naïvely believed that living fast was a necessity for making art. People like Courtney, Kurt, the Beats, Hunter S. Thompson, and everyone else I was reading and listening to at the time seemed to bear this out. I needed experiences to write about, and they had to be outrageous to be interesting. While I didn’t necessarily take risks just to gather material, I gravitated toward and tolerated risky situations throughout my teenage years because I felt they fueled my work. I stayed in bad relationships with addicts and abusive guys, I pushed my friends away so I could wallow in my anger and my sadness, I drank too much, I did drugs. I did these things because I was depressed, but I had also decided that being a writer justified my self-destructive behavior, and that if I got treatment for my depression I would lose my ability to write. Being healthy meant being “normal,” and I’d bought into the myth that “normal” people couldn’t be creative.
But drugs didn’t work for me the way they did for Hunter S. Thompson. When I look back at the stuff I wrote in high school, it makes me cringe. The characters and stories, which at the time I thought were really promising, are flat and empty, because I was. I’d get high or drunk and the words would just flow out of me, but when I looked at them later they were gibberish.
After a few years of this my writing slowed down. I ran out of ideas. It became clear to me then that self-destruction was not actually a magical fountain of talent or inspiration. So I finally started going to therapy, stopped using drugs, moderated my drinking, and focused on my writing. And instead of dying at 27, I sold my first book that year. And a year later I sold another one.
My college’s alumni publication ran an interview with me when the second book, Ballads of Suburbia, came out. That novel was informed by my struggles with depression, addiction, and self-injury, and the interview was accompanied by a photo of me looking haunted in the park where I did drugs as a teen and a splashy pull quote: “I had to go to dark places.” Staring at it, I felt like I’d arrived. All that pain had been worth it.
I always tell people that it’s better to pour your dark feelings into creating something rather than into destroying yourself, and that is how I handle those emotions now. But after Ballads came out, I spent years worrying that I had used all my darkness up, and without that, what was there to write about? Well, a lot of things. First of all, you don’t have to live something in order to be able to imagine it. And second (and more important for my own mental health), I had to remind myself that one of the most incredible things that art can do is to bring beauty to the world. I had been obsessed with darkness because it seemed “honest” and “real,” but I was ignoring other honest, real feelings—like love, happiness, and excitement.
I still write about sad stuff, because I think it’s important to acknowledge it, but I have a lot of fun writing about lighter things too these days. That’s the part of life that’s important for me to acknowledge. That’s the part that made me live past 27. I wish it could have done the same for all of those artists whose work has meant so much to the world. I wish they’d never gone and joined that stupid club. ♦
http://rookiemag.com/2013/08/the-27-club/
prodigy - miracle, wonder, marvel (csoda)
tormented - troubled, hard-pressed, unrestful, harassed (zaklatott)
consume - eat up, mop up (felemészt)
survivor -
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