I was kind of melancholy last night, having watched the last episode in the Andy Warhol Diaries series on Netflix. It was about death-- Andy’s, Jed Johnson’s, Jon Gould’s, all the unnamed people who died of AIDs in the ‘80s… and Jean-Michel Basquiat’s. I walked away from the TV recalling what the narrator had said about Basquiat dying at age 27 from a heroin overdose. I started thinking of all these musicians I knew when I was a kid, musicians just a few years older than me who also died at age 27. The images and melancholia started taking over my mind and then one of my neighbors called to tell me P-22 had been captured. P-22 is the increasingly aggressive mountain lion who was living in my neighborhood, sometimes on the flat roof just outside my second floor bedroom.
They didn’t kill him, but they probably will, although he’s very popular in L.A. They caught him in one of my neighbor’s yards and the NY Times had a story up immediately. “On Monday, wildlife authorities captured Los Angeles’s infamous puma, otherwise known as P-22, in a resident’s yard, they said, just days after announcing that they were looking for him. According to the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, the antisocial behavior of the ‘remarkably old cat’ (P-22 is thought to be around 12) was a worrying sign of distress— one they might have expected given that he lived alone, so far from other mountain lions and wildlife.”
Robert Johnson died 10 years before I was born, probably poisoned by a jealous husband at a gig. He was born May 8, 1911. And died Aug 16, 1938— age 27. He never had any commercial success and only went into 2 recording sessions ever, one in 1936 and one in 1937 and recorded 29 songs in total, which isn’t much considering he’s considered one of the most influential musicians in pop culture. Eric Clapton called him “the most important blues singer that ever lived.” Dylan said that “In about 1964 and '65, I probably used about five or six of Robert Johnson's blues song forms, too, unconsciously, but more on the lyrical imagery side of things. If I hadn't heard the Robert Johnson record when I did, there probably would have been hundreds of lines of mine that would have been shut down— that I wouldn't have felt free enough or upraised enough to write. [His] code of language was like nothing I'd heard before or since." Keith Richards and Robert Plant were as enthusiastic about Johnson as Dylan and Clapton.
His legend-- Faust’s legend-- was that he was living in rural Mississippi when he was told to take a guitar down to a nearby crossroads at midnight, where the Devil tuned his guitar, played a few songs and gave it back to Johnson— along with complete mastery of the instrument. The Devil kept his soul but Johnson became one of the creators, or progenitors, of Delta blues. He doesn't really look 27 in his photo, does he? He looks older but people looked older then— and died younger, especially if you were Black in rural Mississippi.
Johnson became famous after his death. So did Otis Redding. Otis wasn’t much known to white people when I was a kid. He had recorded These Arms of Mine as a one-off single, kind of out of the blue, when I was in high school and he was around 20. I loved his voice and the way he styled the song. When I graduated from high school he had written— with Jerry Butler— I’ve Been Loving You Too Long and it was my favorite song when I started college at Stony Brook. I played the record in my dorm all the time and then when The Otis Redding Dictionary of Soul and then King & Queen (with Carla Thomas) came out, he was huge on my quad, if nowhere else. By then I was the chairman of the student activities board booking mostly psychedelic music but I couldn’t wait to get Otis Redding to play the campus. He played the Stony Brook gym late in 1967, just before he was killed in the crash of his small touring plane on December 10, age 26, not quite 27, and just three days after recording “(Sittin' On) The Dock of the Bay,” the song he’s best known for.
One of the very first pages I put up for this memoir I’m writing was about my one encounter with Brian Jones. I never got to book the Rolling Stones at Stony Brook, though they were my favorite band all through college. But Brian kissed me on a crowded staircase at Salvation (AKA- One Sheraton Square). I was going down to the basement club and he was going up to the street. He gave me a rose and kissed me. I didn’t understand why that happened. But I kept the rose in a shoebox under my bed long after the petals had disintegrated, though before he drowned on July 3, 1969, age 27 (having been born February 28, 1942).
I also only had one encounter with Janis Joplin. It was a couple of years before she OD-ed on heroin. Big Brother had already broken up and I booked her and her new band to play Stony Brook. She was so great that night. And then my friend Stephen, the hospitality chairman of the SAB, handed me a beautiful bouquet of roses and told to go up on the stage and give them to her. That was so smart of Stephen; he was so thoughtful. So I did and she kissed me, just like Brian Jones had. She was born on January 19, 1943 and OD-ed on Oct. 4, 1970, age 27. I think I was in Tehran when that happened.
Neither of the 27 year olds who died who I was closest to ever kissed me. First was Jim Morrison and I loved his band, which I met just before they released their first album. Jim wanted DMT and I was the connection. I saw them every night they played Ondine's while they were doing some mixing and overdubs and we did drugs together. They agreed to play Stony Brook for $400. Tim Buckley opened the show for $50. It was September, 1966 and the album came out soon after. The president of the sophomore class tried, unsuccessfully, to impeach me for wasting student money on the concert. Morrison died in Paris on July 3, 1971 a heroin overdose. I was very sad.
Another drug buddy who I booked to play Stony Brook and who died at 27 was Jimi Hendrix (September 18, 1970). I’ll talk later about my 5 top Jimi Hendrix experiences:
1- Hanging out with Brad Pierce when Jimi came into his office and pawned his guitar
2- Watching Jimi’s band back up John Hammond at the Cafe Au Go Go and asking him to play Stony Brook afterwards
3- Finally getting him to play at the campus gym on March 9, 1968 after he had returned from the U.K. where he formed the Jimi Hendrix Experience
4- Waking up and seeing him smoking a doobie with my mom at my house after the concert
5- Hanging out with him in Essaouira in Morocco in July, 1969, where he talked me into trying yoghurt for the first time
I didn’t know Kurt Cobain or Amy Winehouse. They both died at 27 too, him on April 5, 1994 (either suicide or murder made to look like suicide) and her on July 23, 2011, alcohol poisoning.
Songs For Drella was my favorite Lou Reed album and one of my favorite albums I ever worked on… albeit not a very commercially successful one. Lou and John Cale recorded it in 1989, 2 years after Andy died, and we released it in 1990. They met at Andy’s memorial service at St. Patrick’s and decided to write and record a song cycle about the Warhol they knew. I love every song on the album and can probably sing more songs from it than any other Lou album other than the Velvet's first album. This was our single, although no one tried getting it on the radio except our wonderful German company.
One story that wasn't in The Diaries or on Songs for Drella Lou told me one time when we were walking around the West Village in the early morning hours. He said he was with a bunch of friends-- maybe at the Factory or maybe at his place; I can't remember what he said-- and they ordered some pizza. When the deliver guy showed up no one had any money. So Lou gave him a painting that Andy had given him. When he told me about that many years had passed and Lou was still so pissed off at himself. Anyway, we made this video, which really encapsulated who Andy was. And Andy communicated that message to Lou who in turn communicated it to me. I've never stopped thinking about it. But I've never been able to communicate it to anyone else; I've tried but, in Andy's words, no one listens. The video never got played on MTV.