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A review by brcw
27: A History of the 27 Club Through the Lives of Brian Jones, Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Kurt Cobain, and Amy Winehouse by Howard Sounes
2.0
I picked this book up for no other reason than I'm turning 27 soon and I wanted to know what to look out for.
Joking aside, this book is a passable run-through of the most famous of the 27 Club—and unfortunately doesn't reach any new information or insights into these coincidental deaths. I imagine when this was published some of the Amy Winehouse sections were new, but they're covered much better in the documentary "Amy." The Brian Jones section was the most interesting, because he's the least well-known of the Club (at least to me). Therein lies the problem.
Sounes misses the mark in glossing over the vast majority of the rest of the 27 Club—smaller names, for sure, but at least that would have been relatively unexplored territory. Sounes hints at these, mentioning Robert Johnson, Kristen Pfaff, and Pigpen McKernan in passing, but devotes far too little time to what very well could be more interesting stories.
Instead we're left with plodding rehashes of stories everyone knows already, punctuated by weird poetic riffs imagining the spectre of Death haunting these rock stars. Not to mention Sounes devotes pages—far too many pages—to exploring the idea that each one of the book's subjects may have committed suicide, when all evidence points to the contrary (aside from Kurt, but we already knew that).
Joking aside, this book is a passable run-through of the most famous of the 27 Club—and unfortunately doesn't reach any new information or insights into these coincidental deaths. I imagine when this was published some of the Amy Winehouse sections were new, but they're covered much better in the documentary "Amy." The Brian Jones section was the most interesting, because he's the least well-known of the Club (at least to me). Therein lies the problem.
Sounes misses the mark in glossing over the vast majority of the rest of the 27 Club—smaller names, for sure, but at least that would have been relatively unexplored territory. Sounes hints at these, mentioning Robert Johnson, Kristen Pfaff, and Pigpen McKernan in passing, but devotes far too little time to what very well could be more interesting stories.
Instead we're left with plodding rehashes of stories everyone knows already, punctuated by weird poetic riffs imagining the spectre of Death haunting these rock stars. Not to mention Sounes devotes pages—far too many pages—to exploring the idea that each one of the book's subjects may have committed suicide, when all evidence points to the contrary (aside from Kurt, but we already knew that).