27 Club

Anton Viktorovich Yelchin (1989–2016)
Anton Yelchin's parents were stars before he was — celebrated Soviet pair figure skaters in Leningrad who fled to America as refugees when their son was six months old. The family bet everything on a freer life; their only child repaid it by becoming one of the finest actors of his generation. Read more...
Amy Jade Winehouse (1983–2011)
"Rehab" is a true story compressed into a hook. In 2006, walking through New York with producer Mark Ronson, Amy Winehouse described how her family had once suggested she go to rehab — and how she'd refused. Read more...
Kurt Donald Cobain (1967–1994)
The most famous song title of the 1990s started as graffiti. Riot grrrl pioneer Kathleen Hanna spray-painted "Kurt smells like Teen Spirit" on his wall — teasing him about a deodorant brand his girlfriend wore. Cobain, who didn't know Teen Spirit was a deodorant, thought it sounded revolutionary. Read more...
Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960–1988)
The origin story sounds invented: a seven-year-old Brooklyn kid is hit by a car, and during his long recovery his mother gives him a copy of Gray's Anatomy to pass the time. The anatomical drawings burrow into his imagination — later surfacing in the skulls, organs, and X-ray figures of paintings that would sell for more than any American artist's work ever had. Read more...
James Douglas “Jim” Morrison (1943–1971)
Jim Morrison told interviewers his parents were dead. They weren't — his father was a US Navy Rear Admiral who, in a detail almost too strange for fiction, commanded American forces at the Gulf of Tonkin incident that escalated the Vietnam War. The counterculture's dark prince was the admiral's son who erased his own past. Read more...
Janis Lyn Joplin (1943–1970)
Rock and roll had never seen a woman front a band the way Janis Joplin did — not singing prettily out front, but tearing the songs open, feather boas flying, a Southern Comfort bottle on the amp. In four years she went from Texas outcast to the biggest female star in rock. Read more...
James Marshall “Jimi” Hendrix (1942–1970)
Strip away the icon and consider the timeline: Jimi Hendrix arrived in London as an unknown in September 1966 and was dead by September 1970. Everything — the three studio albums, Monterey, Woodstock, the wholesale reinvention of the electric guitar — happened in four years. Read more...
Lewis Brian Hopkin Jones (1942–1969)
Here's the detail that tells you everything: in the Rolling Stones' earliest days, Brian Jones paid himself five pounds more than his bandmates — because it was his band. He founded it, named it, booked it, and shaped its sound. Read more...
Robert Leroy Johnson (1911–1938)
Every legend about selling your soul for rock and roll traces back to one man: a slight, elegant Mississippi bluesman who recorded just 29 songs in two hotel-room sessions, died mysteriously at 27, and waited a quarter century for the world to discover he'd invented its future. Read more...
Derrick “Fredo Santana” Coleman (1990–2018)
Every movement has a face the internet can't forget, and Chicago drill's belonged to Fredo Santana — the intense stare that launched a thousand memes attached to one of the scene's true architects. Read more...
Jonathan Gregory Brandis (1976–2003)
For a few years in the mid-1990s, Jonathan Brandis received thousands of fan letters a week — a blue-eyed fixture of Tiger Beat covers and bedroom walls, beloved as the boy genius of Steven Spielberg's seaQuest DSV. Read more...
Valentín “El Gallo de Oro” Elizalde (1979–2006)
In regional Mexican music, nicknames are inherited like land. Valentín Elizalde was born into one: son of the beloved corrido singer Lalo "El Gallo" Elizalde, he grew into "El Gallo de Oro" — The Golden Rooster — and by his mid-twenties was one of banda sinaloense's brightest stars. Read more...
Randy “Stretch” Walker (1968–1995)
Before the coasts went to war, before the murders that hip-hop never stopped mourning, there was Stretch — the six-foot-eight Queens rapper and producer who was Tupac Shakur's closest early collaborator and near-constant companion. Read more...
Leslie Cameron “Les” Harvey (1944–1972)
Two of Glasgow's greatest musicians grew up in the same house. One, Alex Harvey, became a glam-rock legend. The other, his younger brother Les, was by many accounts the finer musician — a tasteful, soulful guitarist whose band Stone the Crows stood on the brink of stardom in 1972. Read more...
Thomas Fekete (1988–2016)
Some guitarists announce themselves with volume; Thomas Fekete did it with sunlight. As lead guitarist of Florida indie-rockers Surfer Blood, his chiming, surf-flecked leads helped make the band's debut Astro Coast one of the most beloved indie records of its moment. Read more...
Richard James “Richey” Edwards (1967–1995)
Rock has produced many mysteries, but only one Richey Edwards. The Manic Street Preachers' lyricist and rhythm guitarist wrote some of the most unflinching words in British rock, gave the band its intellectual fire and its glamour, and then, on the morning of February 1, 1995, walked out of a London hotel and was never seen again. Read more...
Peter Louis Vincent “Pete” de Freitas (1961–1989)
Echo & the Bunnymen began, according to legend, with a drum machine nicknamed "Echo." Then Pete de Freitas arrived, and the machine never stood a chance. From 1979 until his death a decade later, de Freitas gave one of post-punk's most romantic bands its thunder. Read more...
Jacob “Killer” Miller (1952–1980)
In late-1970s Jamaica, only one act could challenge Bob Marley and the Wailers as the island's biggest live draw: Inner Circle, fronted by a mountain of charisma named Jacob Miller. Nicknamed "Killer" for what he did to audiences, Miller was reggae's great entertainer. Read more...
Helmut Köllen (1950–1977)
For a brief stretch of the mid-1970s, the answer to "who is Germany's biggest progressive rock export?" was a keyboard-driven trio from Cologne called Triumvirat — and the voice and bass at its center belonged to Helmut Köllen. Read more...
Gary Mervin Thain (1948–1975)
Ask hard-rock bass players about the greats of the early 1970s and Gary Thain's name arrives with reverence. The New Zealand-born bassist powered Uriah Heep through their classic era with a style all his own. Read more...
David Michael “Dave” Alexander (1947–1975)
Punk rock's founding document has a bass player, and his name was Dave Alexander. As the original bassist of The Stooges, Alexander anchored the two albums — The Stooges (1969) and Fun House (1970) — that essentially invented punk before the word existed. Read more...
Ronald Charles “Pigpen” McKernan (1945–1973)
Before the Grateful Dead were psychedelic explorers, they were a blues band — and the blues was Pigpen. Ron McKernan was the Dead's founding frontman. Read more...
Alan Christie “Blind Owl” Wilson (1943–1970)
The two most recognizable voices of the Woodstock generation's blues revival belong to opposite characters: Bob "The Bear" Hite's roar, and a ghostly, floating high tenor that sounds beamed in from another century. That second voice — on "On the Road Again" and "Going Up the Country" — belonged to Alan Wilson. Read more...
Malcolm John Hale (1941–1968)
Sunshine pop was a team sport, and every great team has a player the box score undersells. For Spanky and Our Gang — the Chicago group behind some of the breeziest, most sophisticated pop of the late 1960s — that player was Malcolm Hale. Read more...
Dennes Dale “D.” Boon (1958–1985)
Punk rock has produced few figures as beloved as D. Boon — the big, sweating, joyful guitarist of San Pedro's Minutemen, who proved that punk could contain funk, jazz, folk, and politics, and that a working-class kid with a Telecaster could say as much in ninety seconds as most bands say in a career. Read more...
Peter William “Pete” Ham (1947–1975)
Pete Ham wrote some of the most beloved melodies of the early 1970s — including one song, "Without You," that topped charts across two different decades in two different voices. He led the first band signed to the Beatles' own label. Read more...
Christopher Branford “Chris” Bell (1951–1978)
Big Star is the most influential band almost nobody bought records by — the secret ingredient in R.E.M., The Replacements, Teenage Fanclub, Wilco, and every jangling guitar band that followed. Alex Chilton became the cult icon, but Big Star was Chris Bell's band first. Read more...
Arlester “Dyke” Christian (1943–1971)
Before funk was a genre, it was a word polite radio wouldn't touch. Arlester "Dyke" Christian changed that. His 1966 record "Funky Broadway" was among the very first hits to put "funky" in a song title. Read more...
Rodrigo “El Potro” Bueno (1973–2000)
In Argentina, you don't need his last name. Say "Rodrigo" — or just "El Potro," The Colt — and everyone knows: the kid from Córdoba who took cuarteto, a working-class dance music the Buenos Aires establishment looked down on, and turned it into a national obsession. Read more...
Linda Jones (1944–1972)
There are technically great singers, and then there is Linda Jones — a vocalist so fearless, so drenched in gospel fire, that soul devotees speak of her the way jazz fans speak of lost geniuses. Read more...
Jesse Lorenzo Belvin (1932–1960)
Ask soul historians about the great "what ifs" of American music and Jesse Belvin's name comes up fast. A velvet-voiced singer, songwriter, and arranger at the center of the Los Angeles R&B scene, Belvin was being groomed as the next great crossover star. Read more...
Jeremy Michael Ward (1976–2003)
Most bands have a guitarist, a bassist, a drummer. The Mars Volta had something rarer: a sound manipulator. Jeremy Michael Ward didn't play a conventional instrument — he ran vocals and instruments through banks of effects in real time, warping, echoing, and dissolving the band's sound into something hallucinatory. Read more...
Kristen Marie Pfaff (1967–1994)
In the flood of grief that followed Kurt Cobain's death in the spring of 1994, Seattle barely had time to absorb its next loss. Just two months later, Kristen Pfaff — the classically trained bassist whose playing anchored Hole's landmark album Live Through This — died at 27. Read more...
Kim Jong-hyun (1990–2017)
Kim Jong-hyun — known to millions simply as Jonghyun — was one of the finest vocalists K-pop has ever produced, and one of its most complete artists: a singer, songwriter, author, and radio host whose sensitivity defined him as much as his talent. Read more...
Charles “Rudy Lewis” Harrell (1936–1964)
Everyone knows "Up on the Roof." Everyone knows "On Broadway." Far fewer people know the man who sang them. Read more...
Mia Katherine Zapata (1965–1993)
Before Seattle became shorthand for grunge superstardom, its underground belonged to bands like The Gits — and The Gits belonged to Mia Zapata. Read more...
Synopsis
The 27 Club is the name given to a haunting pattern in music and art history. Read more...
Patrick Lamark “Fat Pat” Hawkins (1970–1998)
If you want to understand why Houston rap sounds the way it does, start with Fat Pat. Read more...