Blog 3:

DEATH: TERMINATOR OR TRANSFORMER?

A person views death in one of two ways: as the Terminator, or as the Transformer. Most of us take it for the Terminator. The Reaper. The Monster under the bed. We spend our lives running, then hiding. From the inevitable. We feel uncomfortable when Death is discussed. When it is the subject of a book, we -- like the biographers already mentioned -- think it must be doom and gloom, exploitative or morbid. 

The magnificent Seven, on the other hand, all deeply spiritual, viewed Death as a Transformer. A teacher. A motivator. It scared them, sure. They were only human. But it attracted them, too. Each was born with enormous creative talent – where did it come from, and where did it go? Each pondered this question and in their soul knew that the end was not The End.

“The Maharishi told us that death is just an illusion, and we mustn’t get depressed about it,” said John after Brian Epstein, the Beatles’ manager, ODed. “I’m not afraid of dying,” he went on. “It’s just like getting out of one car and into another.” And so he stepped out of a limo at the Dakota then, moments later, was carried to the back seat of a NYPD squad car.

Turn off your mind, relax and float down stream. It is not dying, it is not dying, he sang in Tomorrow Never Knows, based on The Tibetan Book of the Dead. Lay down all thoughts, surrender to the void, It is shining, it is shining. So play the game existence to the end. Of the beginning, of the beginning.

Jerry Garcia was a student of the Tibetan bible too. When he first dropped acid, his friend and lyricist, Robert Hunter, saved him from a freak- out by reading him passages from the book. Captain Trips soon formed the Grateful Dead which he said was “all about the death of the ego.” He married his second wife, Mountain Girl, in a Tibetan ceremony. Toward the end of his life, when he was diabetic, 300 pounds, his cholesterol 900, and his liver shot, he said, “Stick around – for THIS?” Soon, his ashes were spread in the Ganges.

Kurt Cobain called his group Nirvana, defining it as “total peace after death.” He and Courtney kept a Tibetan sanctuary in their house. After his death, the widow had the Namgyal Buddhists make devotional tsatsas from his crematory ashes.

Just before Hendrix’s end, a German fortuneteller, Clara Schuff, told him he was descended from Tibetan royalty and that in his next incarnation he would teach the magical astrology of Tibet. Hear my train a comin, sang the Voodoo Child. And if I don't meet you no more in this world then I'll meet you in the next one and don't be late, don't be late.

Jimi’s lover, Janis, was “a very spiritual person… but afraid to let others see that,” said her friend, Pat Nichols.

Janis’s lover and nemesis, Jim Morrison, called himself a shaman and had studied the Tibetan Bon Po’s who worshipped in graveyards. “People fear death even more than pain,” said the Lizard King. “It's strange that they fear death. Life hurts a lot more than death. At the point of death, the pain is over. Yeah, I guess it is a friend, The End.” 

An avid reader, Elvis counted The Autobiography of a Yogi and The Tibetan Book of the Dead among his favorite works. In the late sixties, he became the student of Yogi Daya Maya at the Self-Realization Fellowship in Malibu. Telling her he sought “a higher level of spirituality,” he pleaded: “I want to get there now. I want a crash course.” By this time, the King was already dangerously addicted to prescription narcotics. Of his drug abuse, his step-brother, David Stanley, wrote: “It was like a fantasy to see how far he could go – almost as if he wanted to die – and come back, just to see the other side.” In his final years, the singer often visited graveyards and dropped in on mortuaries to watch embalmings. “His fascination with human corpses was downright terrifying,” recalled his old friend and bodyguard, Sonny West.

So, in view of all this, my book -- in honor of its predecessor and the great meaning the stars attached to it -- is called The Rock and Roll Book of the Dead. Within its pages Death is viewed as the stars themselves viewed it: as a Transformer, not a Terminator.

More than this, the life of each star was a series of purgatories – or “Bardo” states – challenging them, trying them and leading them to the End.

In the next blogs, we’ll discuss these purgatories. The first trial by fire for each was their childhood in which the seeds of their future stardom and fatalism were planted.