ROSEN: You’ve said that you’d like to follow up this book with The Rock & Roll Book of the Living Dead, which would be about people who, due to drug abuse, hard living, etc. “should” be dead, but somehow survived, like Keith Richards, Eric Clapton, Bob Dylan, Mick Jagger, Ringo Starr, Paul McCartney, Grace Slick, Ray Davies, and Peter Townshend, to name a few. As Joseph Heller might have asked in Catch-22: Why is Sid Vicious dead and Johnny Rotten alive?

COMFORT: Rotten once called Vicious’s better half, Nancy Spungen (Courtney Love’s role model), “the Titanic looking for an iceberg.” Ironically, Nancy’s iceberg was Sid himself who took her out with a hunting knife at the Chelsea Hotel, only to be euthanized with a hotshot by his own mother four months later. 

So, why Sid not Johnny? The short answer: Johnny was lucky. And, in spite of crucifying himself for the cover of Melody Maker in ’77, the Pistols’ frontman had some sense of moderation: he went on to become a pitchman for a butter company.

It comes down to moderation or luck for the others too. McCartney and Jagger, in particular, have always been conservative. When Lennon once invited McCartney to jump off a cliff, Paul replied, “‘No, man, I’m not gonna jump off that cliff; I don’t care how good it is.” Jagger agreed. Wrote his lover, Marianne Faithfull, “Mick is so grounded as a person he never loses his footing. He can be right there next to the person falling off the edge but not slip himself.” 

Richards, Clapton, Starr, and Townshend are another matter. In the day, each did his share of pharmaceutical skydiving and demo derby driving, and admits now to being just lucky. 

Richards, however, also credits his survival to his mature perspective, lacking in his bandmate, Brian Jones. “Brian really got off on the trip of being a pop star, and it killed him,” he once told an interviewer. “Suddenly, from being very serious about what he wanted to do, he was willing to take the cheap trip. And it’s a very short trip.”

Interesting, Keith. In fact, Brian was drying out but got drowned in his swimming pool by his live-in carpenter. Jagger and Richards then took over the group he founded, labeled it “the greatest rock and roll band in the world,” and took the world by storm as the Stones’ “Glimmer Twins.” Then, the anti-pop star star became a junkie for ten years and miraculously resurrected from many ODs. 

What then was the real survival secret of rock’s Lazarus? A new kind of inoculation. After kicking heroin, Keith, confessed to snorting his father’s crematory ashes. He who is not on “the cheap trip” now says, “I intend to live to 100 and go down in history."

ROSEN: Four of the people that you wrote about—Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, and Kurt Cobain—died at 27. So did Brian Jones, Ron “Pigpen” McKernan, Robert Johnson, and quite a few others. John Lennon was murdered because Mark Chapman believed that by doing so, he’d write Chapter 27 of

 The Catcher in the Rye in Lennon’s blood. 

What’s the deal with the number 27 and rock ’n’ roll?

COMFORT: No deal. Coincidence. But rock numerologists would disagree. 

In fact, Hendrix, Morrison, Lennon, and even Elvis himself were avid students of Cheiro, “the father of modern numerology.” The number 9 – alone or by addition (2 plus 7) – had enormous significance for all. Especially John Lennon. Cheiro called it the number of “cosmic, universal consciousness.” 

ROSEN: Is there anything else you’d like to add?

COMFORT: I’m often asked why I include John Lennon in the book. At the time he was murdered, he had just released his first album in five years, and seemed to be optimistic and vital personally and professionally. Why do I write that he was self-destructive?

Lennon himself admitted that he had nearly killed himself with alcohol and drugs during his “Lost Weekend” separation from Yoko.  After their reunion, his 5-year “househusband” period was not a retirement as he told the press; he admitted to friends that he was creatively dead. The fallow period tormented him so badly that he confessed to suicidal thoughts. Yoko was about to divorce him in 1980, inspiring his tragic song Losin’ You. He freely admitted that “I couldn’t survive without Yoko.”