The 27 Club and the Cross roads:

There’s some kind of 90’s revival going on right now where I’m at, and every time I see the goofy Nirvana logo or a picture of Cobain’s face, the first thought that comes to mind is the 27 club and the curse of the white lighter.

You’ve heard about that before right? How Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, and Kurt Cobain were lefties who bit the dust at 27 years old and were all found with white Bic lighters in their pockets? 

Apparently disposable lighters generally came in either black or white back in the day, so there’s a 50% chance that a white lighter would be listed in an autopsy report for any dead rock star at the time.

The title “27 club” was coined after co-founders Jim Morrison, Brain Jones, Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix died at the same age and within 2 years of each other between ‘69 and ’71.

Morrison died in a bathtub in Paris, officially ruled as heart failure, but rumored to have been heroin related.

A cocktail of booze and drugs and a midnight dip in the pool of his English country mansion in Sussex secured Brain Jones his place in the club.

Psychedelic Acid rocker Joplin shot some over potent heroin for admittance and left behind $2,500 in her will for her friends to party with in the event of her untimely death.

Jimi Hendrix was notorious for boozing and nonchalantly chomping down fistful of whatever pills on a general basis, so it was only a matter of time before one final game of drug roulette claimed him for the 27 club.

Years later Kurt Cobain would follow suit, shoot heroin and then shoot himself with a shotgun, leaving behind him a suicide note and a hell of a lot of question marks.

(Previously unseen photos from Cobain's case, released 20 years after the investigation.)

Fellow grunge rocker Kristen Pfaff hit the Heroin, as did many others.

It comes with the territory I suppose.

The 27 club reaches as far back as Blues legend Robert Johnson who was allegedly poisoned by a jealous husband with a bottle of poisoned whiskey, after flirting with the man’s wife in a club he regularly played at. E

Or maybe his time was just up.

Johnson was rumored to have made a Faust-esq midnight deal with the devil at a cross roads near the Dockery plantation. Legend has it that a large black man, who is thought to have been the devil himself, showed up and turned Johnson’s guitar, before playing a few songs and handing it back to him, transferring the mastery of the art with it.

If that’s not creepy, then I don’t know what it is.

If you’d like to make your own cross roads deal, you might find this article at lucky mojo helpful in assisting you. Be sure to get back to us in the comments with your experience and we’ll just read it from all the way over here, from behind the protective shield of our monitors and tablets.

*thumbs up*

The article also claims that it was actually 20’s delta blues artist Tommy Johnson who made the cross roads deal. He was said to have performed a ritual characteristic of the rituals in the south, and met at the cross roads with a “Spirit”.

"If you want to learn how to make songs yourself, you take your guitar and you go to where the road crosses that way, where a crossroads is. Get there, be sure to get there just a little 'fore 12 that night so you know you'll be there. You have your guitar and be playing a piece there by yourself...A big black man will walk up there and take your guitar and he'll tune it. And then he'll play a piece and hand it back to you. That's the way I learned to play anything I want."

Despite everything I've been talking about in this post, I can't help but escape the feeling that the really creepy fact isn't OD-ing twenty something rock stars, but the surviving, vampiric, almost century old living rockers, the Ozzy Osbournes, the Iggy Pops, the Alice Coopers and the other walking corpses.
If anyone has made a real life deal with the devil, surely, they have.

Well that’s all for tonight folks.

Sleep tight!