What’s in a Number?

By Adwait at 11 January, 2010, 2:19 pm

There are numbers everywhere you look. We’ve got numbers associated with everything, well almost. Basically all the numbers and lists come from the stats, like in sport it’s your achievements, or the number of hits you get with your song, if you are a musician. Or maybe the amount your movie grossed at the box office and so on.

I’ve been a big music buff. I’ve religiously followed bands that I love and also made it a point to learn and read up on the band members. Over the years, I came across a very strange yet highly interesting coincidence while I was busy stalking some of my dead famous musicians. Now the dictionary definition of coincidence is as follows - ‘the temporal property of two things happening at the same time’.

Once a musician becomes famous, his work spreads like wild fire. The news of the album which topped the charts, or the lyrics of one particular song are all over the internet, Facebook and suddenly your email is filled with emails from your friends, acquaintances staying in far away countries asking whether you’ve heard the song in India or not. So when a noteworthy musician passes away, it’s no different. It is even bigger news when the concerned musicians are young and were in the middle of a meteoric rise in the world of fame and glory, working towards that star, in the hall of fame in Hollywood.

I’m a big fan of the classic rock and roll genre of music, not much into metal though. But I do enjoy listening to one particular band of the ‘thrash metal’ genre, which is Metallica. In the classic rock ‘n’ roll, I’m a big fan of Jimi Hendrix, AC/DC, Led Zeppelin, The Doors, The Beatles and Black Sabbath to name some very few artists, I also like grunge metal, for its hoarse vocals and heavy drumming and guitar riffs. In a word association test, ‘Grunge’ will lead to ‘Nirvana’ and its poster boy Kurt Cobain. For Metallica it is James Hetefield (Lead vocals, rhythm guitar and lyrics), for AC/DC it’s Angus Young (Lead guitars) and for The Doors it’s the great American poet Jim Morrison (Vocals).

While I was doing ‘research’ on three of my favourite dead musicians, Hendrix, Cobain and Morrison, I found to my surprise that, all of them, had died at the young age of 27, just after the peak of their musical careers, and surprisingly all their deaths had been brought on by none other than themselves through the use of drugs.

Hendrix, Cobain and Morrison were famous for the usage of illegal substances. They claimed that it took them to a far away land, where there were no inhibitions and were lyrics of their songs came to them naturally. Well they had their reasons. But eventually as it most of the times does, it transcended from a source of creativity to an addiction, a fatal one.

Morrison died of a heart failure while in Paris according to the medical practitioners, but his friends and close sources say it was an overdose of Heroin. Cobain shot himself with a shotgun leaving behind a suicide note, but he too was submerged into drugs as there were high concentration traces of Valium and Heroin were found in his body. As for Hendrix, it was an overdose of sleeping pills which led to him asphyxiating (choking) on his own vomit.

There are two other musicians who are a part of this ‘Club 27′. Brian Jones, the founder of the British rock band, The Rolling Stones and Janis Joplin, who was the lead vocalist and songwriter Big Brother and the Holding Company and The Kozmic Blues Band and Full Tilt Boogie Band. The former died by drowning in a swimming pool and the latter, not surprisingly, by heroin overdose.

So there, the hearts of some greatest musicians stopped beating. Abruptly as one would put it, leaving their family and fans in utter disbelief and shock. As Kurt Cobain wrote in his note, ‘It is better to burn out than to fade away’, Well certainly these musicians did burn out and how I would have wished if they had stayed and gradually fade away, but sigh, it wasn’t to happen.

Have been often my blog, Why don't you subscribe to our RSS feed.

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed! Hope to see you again