DUES 2 PAY THE BLUES

“What always worried me, John, was that you wouldn’t be so much famous as notorious. You were certainly that as a child…If the Beatles hadn’t come along, you could have ended up on the scrap heap.”

So said Aunt Mimi, Lennon’s guardian. 

The parents of the most of the other stars might have said the same about the future prospects of their own problem children.  

After dropping out of high school, Hendrix mowed lawns for his landscaper father, Al, for a $1 per day; he quit, got rejected for a grocery bagger job; got arrested in a stolen car; enlisted in the Army on a plea deal; then got kicked out of paratrooper school and blew all his severance pay within hours. 

Three decades later, Hendrix’s fellow Washington homeboy and high school drop-out swept the floors of his alma matter till he got fired; then lost gigs as a wasted hospital janitor; then got shot down for a dog kennel shit scooper position, all the while sleeping under bridges and in junker cars.

The self-described “pathologically anti-authoritarian” Garcia, like Hendrix, enlisted in the Army on a stolen car plea bargain, soon got kicked out for serial AWOLS, then lived in hippie crash pads of Palo Alto while selling weed and the odd pint of plasma.

After a hospital detox for booze at 17, Janis became a bowling alley waitress, then a key punch operator, then hitched to San Francisco where she pursued a career as a dealer, occasional hooker, and panhandler, returning home as an 87-pound speed freak and apologizing to her parents for being “such a disappointment.” 

Morrison “disinherited” his parents and enrolled in the UCLA Cinema program, telling friends he was an “orphan.” Then, after becoming the only college graduate of the Seven, he retired to a rooftop where he wrote poetry and ate acid all day. 

Elvis, the original beacon for them all, and the only one blessed with parental love, promised to buy his mother a mansion, delivering her from the Memphis housing projects. But he had no idea how he would afford this. He had been fired as a movie theatre usher for absconding candy from the concession, then took a job driving truck for Crown Electric though he dreamed of being a Tennessee highway patrolman. 

So all Seven miraculously resurrected from hellacious childhoods, escaping Aunt Mimi’s seemingly inevitable “scrap heap,” to become the greatest living legends of the century. 

How in the world did it happen? And, in spite of the superstardom, did the wounds of their past rejections and hardships ever heal?