Between September 18th, 1970 and July 3rd, 1971, three of the greatest musicians alive died. Jimmy Hendris, Janice Joplain, Jim Morrison. All 27 years old, all within 12 months. All gone before anyone could understand what was happening. Nobody called it the 27 Club yet. That name wouldn’t exist for another 24 years until Kurt Cobain’s mother said it in 1994.

But the pattern was already there. The shape of it, the terrible logic of three people who were too much for the world they lived in. Jim Morrison knew. After Janice and Jimmy died, he told his friends at a bar in Paris, “You’re drinking with number three.” He was right. This is not a story about a curse.

 It is not a story about the number 27. It is a story about three people who knew each other, crossed each other’s paths, and died within a year. Told from the perspective of the one who was in the middle, who lost Jimmy first and then was gone herself 16 days later. Janice Joplain. The pattern began before Janice knew it had begun.

 July 3rd, 1969, Sussex, England. Brian Jones, founder of the Rolling Stones, was found dead in the swimming pool of his own home. He was 27. The circumstances were disputed. Keith Richards later said, “I don’t know what happened, but there was some nasty business going on in San Francisco. Janice Joplain heard the news.

 She filed it away. Another one gone. She didn’t know she was filing away the first entry in a list that would include her own name. Nobody named it. Nobody counted. It was just one death. One 27year-old. Janice Joplain and Jimmyi Hendris had a complicated relationship. They were rumored to have been intimate.

 They were mirrors. Hris the greatest guitarist alive. Joplain the greatest rock vocalist alive. They had performed at Mterrey together in 1967. The same stage, the same afternoon, both on fire. What they shared beneath the fame was more specific. Both had grown up as outsiders. Hris was a black man in a white dominated industry who had to go to England to be taken seriously.

Joplain was a woman who had been literally voted ugliest man on campus at the University of Texas. Two different wounds, the same location. He gets it. Not in the same way. The world told him different things than it told me. But the underneath is the same. The place that never healed. The thing you play from because playing is the only thing that helps. September 18th, 1970.

Hrix died at St. Mary Abbott’s Hospital in London. He had taken sleeping pills, nine of them, 18 times the recommended dose. He left a message on his manager’s answering phone the night before. I need help, bad man. The message was found after he was already gone. He was 27 years old.

 In Los Angeles, recording Pearl, Janice Joplain heard the news. She had been clean for 6 months. Recording was going well. And now Jimmy was gone. The way one person standing on a ledge might feel when another person falls. Jimmy. How did Jimmy go? If Jimmy couldn’t make it through, what does that mean for the rest of us? 16 days later, Janice Joplain was dead.

 October 4th, 1970. Room 105. Landmark Motor Hotel, Los Angeles, 27 years old. And then there was Jim Morrison. He was in Paris trying to become just a poet in a city where nobody cared who he was. He had been there when Brian Jones died. He had been in the same world when Jimmy died and now Janice.

 According to people who were with him in Paris, Morrison began telling his friends at bars, “You’re drinking with number three.” He meant it as dark humor. He also meant it literally. He and Janice had a violent history. She had hit him with a bottle at a party in Hidden Hills in 1967. She had done it again at the Scene Club in New York in 1968.

He had tried to get her phone number the next morning. She had declined. They were, as David Crosby once said, two of a kind, people who hated what they saw in each other because it was the same thing they carried themselves. On July 3rd, 1971, exactly two years after Brian Jones, Jim Morrison was found dead in the bathtub of his Paris apartment.

 He was 27 years old. No autopsy was performed. Number three had arrived. Here is what the 27 club is really about. Not the number. The number is a coincidence. Statisticians have studied it. The math does not support a curse. The pattern feels significant because the people involved were significant. What the 27 Club is really about is a specific kind of person.

 A person who grew up as an outsider and found in music the only place they were allowed to be exactly who they were, who gave everything to that place, who had no practice at living in the ordinary world because the ordinary world had always rejected them. Hris was a black man who had to leave America to be taken seriously.

 Joplain was a woman who had been rejected by every social structure she encountered. Morrison was a naval officer’s son who built a new self from poetry and leather and alcohol. Three different wounds, three different paths, the same gap between the stage and the room after the wound that the music came from and the music could not heal.

 The 27 Club did not exist in 1970. There was no name for what happened between July 1969 and July 1971. There was just grief four times in quick succession for four people who had made the world sound different. The name came 24 years later. Kurt Cobain died at 27 in 1994. His mother said, “Now he’s gone and joined that stupid club.

 I told him not to.” That sentence launched a concept. Amy Winehouse died at 27 in 2011 and the concept became permanent. But here is what gets lost when we use the name. Janice Joplain knew Jimmy Hendris. She felt his death as a warning she couldn’t hear clearly enough. 16 days later she was gone.

 Jim Morrison watched both of them go and called himself number three and then became number three. These were not statistics. They were people who crossed each other’s paths and died in the same terrible year without anyone being able to stop it. Janice Joplain was 6 months clean. Jimmy Hendrickx had left a message saying, “I need help, bad man.” And nobody heard it in time.

 Jim Morrison had moved to Paris specifically to try to become something different than what was killing him. None of them wanted to be in the club. None of them had a name for what they were in. When you say the 27 Club, what are you saying? Are you saying something mysterious happens at that age? Or are you saying we keep producing people who can make extraordinary art and then failing to keep them alive? Because Jimmyi Hendris left a message saying, “I need help, bad man.

” And nobody got to him in time. And Janice Joplain was clean for 6 months and trying. and Jim Morrison moved to Paris to become something new. They were all trying. The club didn’t want any of them and it got all three. Subscribe. The next story goes somewhere nobody has taken you