27: The Legend & Mythology Of The 27 Club

Gene Simmons

Kiss man deconstructs rock’s macabre club.

Considering the amount of press coverage that’s been given to the ‘27 Club’ in recent years, it seems strange that it’s been so little discussed on the bookshelves. As any rock bore knows, a string of stars – beginning with bluesman Robert Johnson and including Jimi Hendrix, Brian Jones and Janis Joplin – all died at the age of 27.

Media fascination around this statistic has grown steadily since the death of Kurt Cobain in 1994 and peaked with the death of Amy Winehouse in 2009. All of which suggests there’s a serious investigative book to be written on the correlation between fame, youth and mental illness. Simmons, however, isn’t the man to do it.

An outspoken critic of those who abuse drink and drugs throughout his career, the 68-year-old admits in the introduction that: “for most of my adult life I did not know a thing about major depressive disorder”. Having set out to write more of a “judgement piece” on those who have succumbed to temptation, he thanks his son Nick – who has endured his own emotional struggles – for helping him to take a more enlightened view.

Accordingly, the Kiss mainman is on his best behaviour here, writing pen portraits of each club member, peppered with his own thoughts and self-deprecating observations.

The chapter on Kurt Cobain contains the revelation that Simmons once spoke to the singer on the phone about recording a track for an album of Kiss covers (he later discovered he’d been talking to guitarist Pat Smear while Cobain chuckled in the background), while an essay on The Doors’ Jim Morrison finds Simmons explaining that it’s possible to “stumble into rock stardom with the right look, the right time, the right place, the right confidence (I should know)”.

While there’s a sense that Simmons was running out of creative steam with his inclusion of Otis Redding and Tim and Jeff Buckley under the bracket of the ‘Almost 27’s’, 27 isn’t without insight. Simmons explains that, statistically, almost as many famous musicians die at 25 or 32 than the dreaded 27, and a closing essay on EDM DJ Avicii – who died in April this year at the age of 28 – finds him belatedly recognising that mental health issues can get “brushed aside” because of material wealth.

Rock stars will never eat their greens, but Simmons should be applauded for at least asking why.