Blog 2:

DANGEROUS FRUITS

“I’ll grab him by both hollow cheeks

and give him a big wet kiss right on his moldy teeth

because that’s the only way to go –

headed into the wind and laughing your ass off!”

John Lennon, speaking of Death, just before his own

            Recently I contacted some of the most prominent biographers of the stars. I asked if they might like to review The Rock and Roll Book of the Dead, since their own titles were important sources of information.

            Several writers declined to do so because of the focus of the book: Death. They felt that any such title would be “doom and gloom,” morbid, and exploitative. They preferred a focus on the stars’ vitality and creativity.

             Point well taken. My book does indeed concentrate on the extraordinary creativity of the Seven. But the fact that all died young, four of them at age 27, cannot be ignored. Nor that all had contemplated suicide, and that at least two had actually tried (Hendrix, Cobain). Nor that four (Elvis, Lennon, Garcia, Hendrix) had miraculously survived horrific car accidents , and that the other three (Morrison, Janis, and Cobain) were kamikaze drivers themselves. Nor can any responsible biographer gloss over the fact that six died from drug abuse and that the seventh, John Lennon, may have done so as well (as he nearly did during his “Lost Weekend,” 1974-75) had he not been gunned down by a demented reborn Christian.

             If these fatal attractions cannot be overlooked, how do we understand them in the context of unparalleled creativity of the Seven?

            Quite simply, like other extraordinary but unstable artists of history – whether musicians, writers, painters – all Seven had self-destructive tendencies. When his lover, Linda Thompson, asked Elvis what his greatest fault was, he told her: “I’m self-destructive. But there’s not a lot I can do about it.” The other six stars freely admitted this, too.

             Each was a high-wire artist working without a net in the world’s most explosive and dangerous business: rock and roll. Living on the edge stoked their creative fires and made their art all the more urgent, intense, and mesmerizing to fans. They all lived and rocked the way they drove: at 200 mph and passing on blind curves (the way Janis, Jim, and Jimi did down Mulholland; and Elvis on EP Boulevard). In the end, they all died by rock and roll just as surely as they had lived for it.

            Destructiveness and excess can be the other side of the creative coin. Freud’s life-drive / death-drive divide often at the heart of creative genius. As his student, Carl Jung, wrote: “Great talents are the most lovely and often the most dangerous fruits on the tree of humanity. They hang upon the most slender twigs that are easily snapped off.”