Each of the Seven Interludes between biographies explores a common fatal undercurrent of the stars' lives: The lonely, traumatic childhoods (Orphans); The mental instability (Crazy); The drug addictions (Stoned); The disastrous affairs and marriages (Love); The attraction to the other side (Mr. D); The Spiritual Longing (Soul); The consumptive celebrity and struggle to survive (Life).

Kurt Cobain, with doll heads.

ORPHANS

“My life is over!”
Elvis, at his mother’s funeral

…Each star had endured early traumas and a kind of virtual orphanhood that fed their later fatal isolation and distrust. Like so many other artists, most were raised by overshadowing mothers with whom they shared a love/hate relationship. And most had weak or absent fathers whom they resented, feared, or held in bitter contempt....

…The Seven were indeed born artists. In their cases, artist stereotypes are not without truth: their highs were higher, their lows lower, and their actions often more compulsive than reasonable. But these childhood loners and misfits sought to reinvent and glorify themselves in a profession of exhilarating power and freedom: rock and roll, the only true art form created for and by the young – children.

In spite of the most humble and troubled beginnings, Roy the Sweeping Boy with his broom guitar became the Voodoo Child; the admiral’s prodigal son became the Lizard King; the seaman’s orphan became the Walrus; the mama’s boy from Memphis became The King himself; the fatherless delinquent became Captain Trips; and the “pig girl” from the little Texas backwater became The Queen of the Blues.

Jim Hendrix, arrested for heroin possession, 1969.

STONED

“Getting high had become a new competition: a game of Russian roulette.”
Noel Redding, Hendrix’s bassist

…Each of the Seven spent most of his or her professional life getting stoned or recovering from a stone. If psychedelic consumption could be creatively and spiritually liberating, most stars agreed that doing other kinds of dope – speed, booze, and smack in all varieties  -- could be just plain fun. No one denied the simple hedonism of it. Life can be a drag. Why not get high?

More sensitive and depressive than others, the stars spent many millions on feelgoods. They squandered many more millions on detoxes, busts, and substance-abuse health problems. Still, the politically incorrect truth remains: if drugs are so terrible, why do so many do them?

The problem is simple: at first, dope tends to give more than it takes away; but, with over-consumption, it takes far more than it gives. Too often there is a balloon payment after an all to short honeymoon. This is not a problem intrinsic to the dope itself, but to the user. The over-user, the insatiable, the addictive personality. The person, often an artist, for whom a high is never quite high enough. The person who regularly crosses the line from getting high, to getting blitzed, blottoed ,wasted, wrecked, totaled.

The Seven were the proverbial candle-burners at both ends: they rocked and fixed almost all the time and the double helped kill most. But, for them, life without the high was life lite, life unplugged -- no life at all. And rock without dope was rock unplugged – it wasn’t rock at all.

Jim Morrison, 19, Florida State University student,
arrested for Drunk & Disorderly conduct.

CRAZY

Once I had a little game: I liked to crawl back in my brain.
I think you know the game I mean: I mean the game of going insane...
Jim Morrison, Go Insane

…“Craziness is like heaven,” the Lizard King [Morrison] declared.

John Lennon was of the same mind, even in his youth. “I used to think, well, I can’t be mad because nobody’s put me away, therefore, I’m a genius,” he reasoned. “Genius is a form of madness… Genius is pain.”

Each of the other suffering geniuses cultivated their craziness, too. Crazy was a drug for each – the natural high of their magical circuitry. “You have to go on and be crazy,” said Hendrix. Janis told her biographer, “You’re supposed to be doing an article on me, man. Fuck reality!” Cobain called himself “a sicko… pathological type.” As for Jerry Garcia, the more things got “good and weird” the better.

The hero and original inspiration of all the stars went by many names: E, Boss, Mr. Tiger (his karate handle), Aron Silve (his detox moniker), the King of Rock and Roll. But the one engraved on Elvis’s I.D. bracelet was: CRAZY.

... Like Elvis – the original sun around whom they all orbited -- all sought to recreate themselves as stars. During this reinvention, their childhood specialness and egocentrism became megalomania; their extrovert/introvert split developed into a kind of schizophrenia; their high-spiritedness evolved into violence and paranoia.

And it was at the point when their dreams of stardom were realized that things truly got crazy for the Seven.

Mark David Chapman, 1980.

MR. D.

“I’m not afraid of dying. It’s just like getting
out of one car and into another.”
John Lennon, who got out of his limousine and, moments later,
bled to death in an NYPD squad car.

…Many rock legends have physically burnt out or come very close because they had been unable or unwilling to separate their explosive on-stage persona from their lives. Hendrix, Morrison, Janis and the others would never have become legends had their lives and their performances not been one and the same. They died by rock because they had lived  by rock. “For me, it was never really an ‘act’, those so called performances,” Morrison told an interviewer. “It was a life and death thing.”

He and the others were like aerialists working without nets, unlike their more cautious colleagues. “Rock’n’roll is like a drug,” Neil Young pointed out. “I don’t take very much, but when I do rock’n’roll, I fuckin do it. But I don’t want to do it all the time ‘cause it’ll kill me.” Bruce Springsteen’s secret of survival was staying, in his words, “very concerned about being in control.”.

Not so with most of the Seven. Each was a rock and roll Icarus: both for themselves and for their breathless audiences, wearing a parachute would have taken all of the exhilaration out of their spectacular death-defying skydives.

Besides, each was a fatalist. When your time is up, it’s up, they believed. The Reaper laughs at the cautious. So, waiting for their number to come up, each danced with Mr. D in the meantime. It was a dance of material destruction: smashing guitars, trashing hotel rooms, shooting TV’s, inciting riots. And, most exhilarating of all -- crashing cars. 

Buddhist Tstasas. Courtney Love had a portion of Kurt Cobain’s crematory ashes fashioned into
twelve such holy relics and placed in a “Nirvana Stupa” by the monks of the Namgyal Monastery,
in Ithaca, NY. For believers such as Cobain’s widow, Tsa-tsas prevent disasters and provide atonement.
Courtesy of Traditional Tsatsa-Studio Bochum, Susa and Franni Nientiedt, www.tsatsa.org

SOUL

“Fame is the soul eater.”
Jerry Garcia

… According to his song, God, John Lennon stopped believing in everything after the Fab Four break-up- --  the Beatles, the Bible, Buddha, Jesus. Everything. Except “Yoko and me – and that’s reality… now I’m reborn.”

Elvis wanted rebirth, too. “It was as if he wanted to die… just to see the other side,” wrote his step-brother, David Stanley. “I think E’s death was so spiritual because he wanted to know.” In fact, Elvis, a firm believer, did know. He just wasn’t sure about the details. He wore both a crucifix and the Star of David because, “I wouldn’t want to be kept out of heaven on a technicality.”

Jimi Hendrix had a Baptist burial like Elvis. But both were part Cherokee, a tribe rich in searchers and visionaries. Like the King, the Voodoo Child claimed to be a messenger, too. “I’ve wanted to go into the hills sometimes, but I stayed,” he told an interviewer. “Some people are meant to stay and carry messages.“

A fellow musical shaman, Morrison called himself “an oracle, a priest… a ventriloquist of God.”

A spiritual rebel and loner like the others, Garcia was the unofficial Buddhist of the group. If God is a bank in which Jesus saves, Moses invests, and Buddha plays the market – Jerry was a player too and took his inspiration from every corner of the cosmos. Some Deadheads even called him the Buddha. Which he hated. If some of his colleagues got into self-deification, the guitarist wanted none of it.  After he resurrected in 1986 and Deadheads started calling him a saint, he said, “I’ll put up with it until they come to me with the cross and nails.”

LaChapelle exhibition - Palazzo Reale 11nov2007 Milano Italy
Courtesy of http://www.flickr.com/photos/nothinginside/

LOVE

“I'd rather be hated for who I am,
than loved for who I am not.”
Kurt Cobain

...  But this was the one thing neither Lennon nor any of the others had in their last days. The Seven were easy to worship. But, too often faithless, temperamental, childish, selfish, they were not easy to love. Even so, each had been fortunate enough to find a person who did indeed love them, not their legend. Yet, tragically, they abandoned these souls, gravitating to those who used them and helped bring them down.

As the saying goes, a beautiful song comes from a broken heart.  Love can break a heart, but so can so can its masqueraders – infatuation and need. The hearts of these great musicians were broken, but by which? They had been loved, but had they really loved?

 
LAZARUS. Bone & glass.
David Comfort

LIFE

"The more you live, the less you die.
You can destroy your now by worrying about tomorrow.”
Janis Joplin

… Elvis wanted to entertain and enrapture. Hendrix to electrify. Lennon to teach and challenge. Garcia to enlighten and transport. Morrison to awaken and provoke. Cobain to purge his rage, and Janis her aching heart. But they all sought to realize themselves in the same thing: rock and roll. Not the tame kind. But the wild kind. The kind that bursts the limits of emotion. The dangerous kind. The kind that captures lightning in a bottle.

Better one day as a lion, than a hundred years as a lamb, the Seven believed. In their one day, each experienced timeless, ecstatic moments the likes of which few ordinary mortals will ever know. But the highs came with crushing lows. If each had known heaven on earth, they had been through hell, too.
Life’ll kill ya, sang Warren Zevon. Especially those who live it and play it to the hilt as a spectator sport.

The Seven had such an insatiable lust for life, they amped themselves and turned the dials to the max. Pure life is electricity. To watch any of them perform at their peak was to watch pure, uniquely filtered, electricity. Soon their performances became their lives and their lives their performances. One never knew if it would all end for them in one final explosive spectacle or just a slow burn-out. Few in their audiences would have traded the security of their own cautious lives for the dangerous excesses of the stars. But to watch them on the hirewire was a vicarious thrill.

Each had a sense their time on earth wouldn’t be long. This lent their music an even greater power and urgency. Even though their times had been short, each left us with an unforgettable and brilliant body of work. Their early deaths were indisputably tragic. But, in the end, most had given all they possibly could, not only inspiring us with their incomparable art but teaching us through the example of their own lives what it is to reach for the sky and immortality.

As Morrison’s mentor, Nietzsche, said, “One has to pay dearly for immortality; one has to die several times while one is still alive.”