by Howard Sounes
(Da Capo Press)
One night in the spring of 1968, Jim Morrison stopped by Steve Paul’s The Scene, a popular club on West 46th Street, where Jimi Hendrix was performing.
The Doors’ singer, drunk out of his mind, shambled on stage in mid-set, grabbed the guitarist’s hat off his head, took the microphone and began swinging it like a lasso, barely missing some audience members’ heads. He crawled around the stage on his stomach, “put his arms around Jimi’s hips and said, ‘I want to suck your c – – -.’”
When he finally left the stage, he slammed into a table, knocking over Janis Joplin’s drink. Several witnesses said that Joplin was so angry, she “broke a bottle over Morrison’s head.”
Thanks largely to the performers in this book, it’s long been rock and roll lore that 27 is a doomed age for fast-living rockers, as so many greats have passed at that age. This book is an attempt to imbue this fact with meaning, seeking the similarities in these great talents that explain why they left us so young.
Turns out none of them wanted to live.
The childhood of Kurt Cobain, who just this week was voted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame with his band Nirvana, explains the outsider quality that a generation of fans saw as shared experience.
Crushed by his parents’ divorce — a common thread among this group — when he was nine, Cobain “scrawled on his bedroom wall: ‘I hate Mom, I hate Dad. Dad hates Mom, Mom hates Dad.’ ”
Cobain, who would take his own life with a gunshot to the head in 1994, developed an early obsession with death and suicide, including making a film at 15 called “Kurt Commits Bloody Suicide.”
Asked by a friend once what he thought he’d be doing at 30, Cobain replied, “I’ll never see 30.”
Not surprisingly, he almost took his life a few times before finally succeeding. Most alarmingly, while both he and wife Courtney Love were checked into Cedars-Sinai Hospital in L.A. — he for drug detox, she to give birth to their daughter, Frances Bean — “Kurt appeared at Courtney’s side with a gun, reminding her that they had a suicide pact. They argued over who should go first.”
Courtney took the gun to do the deed before rationality prevailed, and Kurt wandered off to find heroin instead.
The others have similar tales of self-destruction. Morrison — who, the author writes, Doors’ drummer John Densmore considered “borderline crazy” — was also death-obsessed, with his bandmates once spending an entire night talking their singer out of ending his life.
Rolling Stones founder Brian Jones, who endured merciless mockery and other abuse from Mick Jagger and Keith Richards as they took over the band, told friends he “wanted to cut his wrists, drown himself in the Thames, or throw himself from a hotel window.” (One book claims that Jones did “cut his wrist in 1964 to punish Mick and Keith for ignoring him.”)
And Amy Winehouse was such a frequent self-cutter that she’d once been photographed in public with fresh blood dripping down her body.
If seeming at times like a litany of unpleasantness and morbidity, the book drives home that with or without the adulation of millions, you cannot make someone love themselves.
Cobain was always “tortured with self-doubt,” and wrote in his journal at 23 that, “I am obsessed with the fact that I am skinny and stupid.”
Note this decidedly un-rock-star like description of young adult Cobain. “Kurt had never had much of a sex life,” Sounes writes. “A misanthropic introvert with morbid obsessions, and somewhat unkempt, Kurt was not every girl’s dream. ‘I never noticed him to be smelly, but he was always dirty-looking, because he was homeless [some of the time], and people knew that. So he couldn’t find a girlfriend,’ says buddy Mitch Holmquist. ‘Before he was big, nobody wanted anything to do with him.’ ”
While the causes of death for these six legends were different, Sounes believes that all of their deaths, when viewed as the result of years of willful self-destruction, were a form of suicide, committed by people with destroyed childhoods who spent their lives seeking a path out of unending misery. That they ultimately sought it in fame, a condition requiring exactly the sort of inner strength they all lacked, was the worst decision they could have made.
Referring to Cobain and Jones — yet really referring to all — Sounes believes that they “lacked the mental toughness to cope with success when it came. “As Mick Jagger has observed,” he writes, “some people simply aren’t psychologically suited to be rock stars.”