Between July 1969 and July 1971, three of the most famous musicians in the world died at the age of 27, and Jim Morrison, the last of them, had reportedly joked to friends that he would be “number three”. The phrase “27 Club” came later, but the idea took hold then: that rock music had a curse, and that it struck at 27.
The bluesman who started the legend
The story usually begins with Robert Johnson, the Mississippi blues guitarist who died on August 16, 1938. He was 27, he had recorded only 29 songs, and almost nothing about his death is certain. Stories of poisoned whiskey and a deal with the devil at a crossroads grew up around him decades later. Keith Richards and Eric Clapton both said his recordings changed how they played, which is why his name heads every 27 Club list today.
Three deaths in two years
Brian Jones, the founder of the Rolling Stones, was found at the bottom of his swimming pool in Sussex on July 3, 1969, weeks after the band had pushed him out. Jimi Hendrix died in London on September 18, 1970. Janis Joplin died of a heroin overdose in a Hollywood hotel on October 4, 1970, sixteen days later. Jim Morrison of the Doors was found dead in a bathtub in Paris on July 3, 1971, two years to the day after Jones. All four were 27. Ron “Pigpen” McKernan, the Grateful Dead’s original keyboard player, joined them in March 1973.
Kurt Cobain and the name
The legend got its name after Kurt Cobain died in Seattle in April 1994. His mother, Wendy O’Connor, told a reporter: “Now he’s gone and joined that stupid club. I told him not to join that stupid club.” The quote was printed around the world, and the club had a membership list from then on. Cobain had been the most famous rock musician of his generation, and his death fixed 27 in the minds of fans who had been too young to remember Hendrix or Joplin.
Amy Winehouse and the modern era
When Amy Winehouse died of alcohol poisoning in London on July 23, 2011, the coverage was full of the number. She had sold millions of copies of Back to Black and won five Grammys in one night in 2008. Her death made the 27 Club a subject for newspapers that had never written about Robert Johnson. The painter Jean-Michel Basquiat, who died in New York in 1988 at 27, is often added to the list too, which shows how far beyond music the idea has spread.
What the study found
In December 2011, the British Medical Journal published a study that tested the legend. Researchers looked at 1,046 musicians who had a number one album in the UK between 1956 and 2007 and asked whether 27 was a riskier age than any other. It was not. They found no spike at 27. What they did find was that famous musicians in their 20s and 30s died at two to three times the rate of the general British population of the same age. The danger was real, but it was spread across a decade of a musician’s life, not packed into one birthday.
Musicians died at 26, at 28 and at 32 in those same years, and nobody wrote songs about it. Twenty-seven stuck because it had Hendrix, Joplin, Morrison, Cobain and Winehouse on it, and those are names that sell newspapers.