Ideas - 27 Club Lore | The Greatest Numbers of All Time

Episode Date: June 24, 2026

Twenty-seven can be a pivotal and tumultuous age. It’s held up as the year of peak performance in many sports and it's also seen as a cursed age for pop and rock stars, exemplified by the so-called 27 Club. Artists like Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Kurt Cobain and Amy Winehouse, all died at 27. As part of our series, The Greatest Numbers of All Time, IDEAS producer Chris Wodskou makes the case for a number that may not stick out in your mind but is more significant than you think.More episodes in this series:Listen to 12 is SublimeListen to The Curse of 13Guests in this podcast:David Awosoga is a PhD student in Statistics at University of Waterloo and sports performance data analyst.Alan Cross is a music historian, broadcaster, and host of The Ongoing History of New Music podcastDianna Kenny is a professor emerita of psychology and music at University of Sydney and psychotherapist in private practice.Michael Owen is a retired clinical psychologist and author of The 27 Club.Maria Westerstahl is senior lecturer at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden.

I am an actor, fresh out of theater school with big dreams and an even bigger drug habit. But things are pretty good. That is until my best friend is set up on a date with David Lee Roth. Yeah, from Van Halen. If you know, you know. From CBC's personally, this is Discount Dave and the Fix. The true-ish story about how a fake rock star led me to a real trial that held up a mirror to me. And okay, let's just say that not everyone in this story is who you think they are.

Personally, discount Dave and the Fix. Available now on CBC Listen or wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC podcast. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayyed. Some numbers are embedded in culture and consciousness. Being number one. Or three, the magic number. That's a magic number.

Lucky 7. Unlucky 13. And really unlucky 666. Some are nice round numbers that give an immediate sense of magnitude, 10, 50, 100, a thousand, a million. As part of our continuing series, the greatest numbers of all time, ideas producer Chris Wadskow makes the case for a number that may not leap immediately, to mind, but is more significant than you think.

Consider the number 27. It may seem out of place in a series about significant numbers. There weren't 27 people at the last supper. We don't have 27 fingers. There aren't 27 hours in a day, although it can sometimes feel like it. There aren't 27 circles of hell, although it can sometimes feel like there should be. It's not pie. It's not even three times three times pie.

If you want to know, it's about 2.93 times 2.93 times pi. So, close, but not quite. What 27 is is 3 times 3 times 3. 3 cubed. So if 3 is the magic number, then 3 to the power of 3 should be that much more magical, shouldn't it? There are exactly 27 cards in half a deck, if you include the Joker's. And 27 would be the number of the last. letter that comes after Z.

Seriously, why couldn't we have a 27th letter to stand for, let's say, or th, or sh? Think about it. A 27-letter alphabet could be full of nine magical groups of three letters or three clusters of nine letters. Every key in a phone from one to nine could have three letters on it. I don't know. It seems like a missed opportunity, but maybe that's just me.

27 has felt like a compelling number to me since I was a compelling number to me since I was kid. My childhood hero was Daryl Settler, number 27 of the Toronto Maple Leafs. And the time remaining in overtime when Daryl Sittler scored the goal that won the 1976 Canada Cup, 827. Just stand. My favorite baseball player was one of the all-time great Montreal Expos, Vladimir Guerrero Sr. Number 27. The same number his son, Vlad Guerrero Jr. wore when he took the field at an exhibition game in Montreal. He's wearing his father's number. Also, familiar number 27, and there it goes. I also like the shape of 27, the way it takes up space on the back of a jersey.

Solid, sturdy looking. Okay, maybe I'm reading too much into it, but the point is that numbers don't have to glow with intrinsic importance or cultural resonance to be invested with meaning. or myth for that matter, such as the baseball myth of the age 27 season, the belief that baseball players tend to peak at the age of 27. And now many, many researchers have looked closely at this myth of 27. My name is David Awushaga. I am a PhD candidate in statistics at the University of Waterloo.

I also work as a performance data scientist for a Canadian Sport Institute, Ontario. 27 was originally just known observationally and anecdotally as the year at which athletes decline and such that the ages of 25 to 29 were ages shown to be the best production years of a contract. But again, these studies originally were more so anecdotal and not rooted in statistical rigor. Not everyone bought into the age 27 myth, but it was influential. With more sophisticated statistical analysis, though, it's been pretty much debilers. bunked. The careers of baseball players do not universally go into a nose dive after 27. But just for the sake of argument, let's look at some of the greatest ball players who've worn

number 27. Vladimir Guerrero Senior's peak? When he was 27 years old. Mike Trout, arguably the best player of the 21st century, had his last truly great season with the LA Angels at age 27. And Juan Marischel, Jose Altovae, and Jean-Carlo Stanton, three more number 27s who all had their best seasons at age 27. Oh, and the Boston Red Sox's number 27, Carlton Fisk, was 27 when he hit one of baseball's most legendary home runs in the 1975 World Series. And since we're on the subject, care to guess how old Darrell Sittler was when he had his best season? Yep, 27.

I'm obviously cherry-picking. But you can see how irresistible patterns emerge if you go hunting for them, and that's exactly what we humans do. We seek out patterns even when they only exist in our minds. That dynamic is at the heart of urban legends and conspiracy theories, and maybe even radio shows about the significance of a number like 27. So humor me while I tell you about another reason why I find 27 fascinating, specifically the age of 27, and more pattern recognition.

Two things in particular defined my generation in the year I turned 27. One was Douglas Copeland's novel Generation X, which pretty much pegged my cohort of intellectually and creatively ambitious, but under-employed and underachieving grad students and aspiring writers, musicians, and artists. The other was this. Nirvana's apoccal album, Nevermind. It was the soundtrack to our lives, and when Nirvana suddenly became the biggest band in the world,

we finally felt seen and acknowledged as more than slackers who didn't have their act together. But over the next three years, the fragility and volatility of Nirvana's leader, Kurt Cobain, became clear. And an advisory here. This part of the episode will be discussing suicide, as it was a defining feature of Kurt Cobain's story. So when he died by suicide at the age of 27, not many were surprised. But the shock and grief at such senseless loss felt like a mass unmooring. It was a Friday, April 8th, 1994, and I was working in the afternoon. Alan Cross, a longtime broadcaster, music writer, and the host of the podcast, The Ongoing History of New Music.

I had a news person, her name was Anita. And when I got into the studio, she said, you know, there's something. going on in Seattle. And if it's Seattle and if it's a rock star death is what we suspected, then it's got to be Kurt because Kurt a month earlier had apparently attempted suicide in a Rome hotel room. So I'm on the air at 2 o'clock and between 2 o'clock and 3.38 we were getting reports dribbling out of Seattle, 171 Lake Washington Boulevard East about a body being found in a greenhouse above a garage in the backyard. And Anita came on every 10 or 15 minutes with an update. And then at 338, she presented to me the news. And I read it verbatim from the newswire.

And I remember before starting to read it, don't mess this up. This is a John Lennon moment. This is a Elvis Presley moment. This is the latest from Seattle. A record company official says Nirvana lead singer Kurt Cobain shot himself to death at his Seattle home yesterday. And I got to tell you, in the years since, so many people tell me that they heard of Kurt's death from me through the radio. Because radio back then was social media. It was the thing that tracked news and information in real time. So if you wanted to know what was going on, you had to listen to the radio.

And that's what happened that Friday afternoon. That's how I heard the news that day on the radio. And in the aftermath of Kirk Cobain's death, people started talking about something called the 27 Club, music superstars who died at the age of 27. And this is really only something that has happened in the last 25, 30 years. Before 1994, we really didn't talk about it much, but now it is taken as a given that 27.

is this magical doomed age for rock stars. And I became very curious. How many people actually died at the age of 27? And when I found the answer, I was quite surprised because the answer is not that many. But it wasn't so much how many died at 27 as it was who had died. We've had a number of very big rock artists die at that age.

Jimmy Hendricks, then we had Janice Joplin, Then we had Jim Morrison. All within a span of nine and a half months in 1970 and 1971. And really after that, there wasn't anyone at the age of 27 that we lost until we get to Kurt Cobain. That's important because he dies spectacularly of a suicide. And the day the suicide is reported, his mother was quoted as saying, I told him not to join that stupid club. And from everything that I've read and researched,

that seems to be where the idea of the club of doomed 27-year-olds comes from. A quote from Kurt Cobain's mom. Then we started looking for others to fill this gap. Well, with Jimmy, Janet, and Jim, these were artists who were seen as exemplary of the counterculture of the 1960s. And two years before Jimmy, Janice and Jim,

Rolling Stones co-founder and guitarist Brian Jones, died at the age of 27 in 1969. That's him on the sitar. Those are big names, and for all of them to perish through a series of misadventures, mostly drugs, it becomes ingrained in people's mind and in popular culture that once you get to 27 and you're a famous rock star

with some kind of substance abuse issues, you're going to die. Humans are pattern seekers. And seeking patterns and finding patterns is a way of making sense of a very complex universe. My name is Diana Kenny and I'm a professor emeritor from the University of Sydney. I had conjoint professorships in psychology and music. Currently, I'm in full-time private practice as a psychotherapist. You know, there's been so much talk about the 27 Club, and it's not until relatively recently that people are saying,

well, hang on a minute. You know, is there really such a thing as the 27 Club? So Professor Kenny looked at the data on more than 12,000 musicians who died between 1950s. and 2014. Well, in my sample, there are 137 young musicians who died at 27 years of age. But the 27 club only consists of those six. So that's an interesting issue in itself.

Because a lot of other young musicians died at 27 as well. Alan Wilson or Jesse Belvin and Rudy Lewis, Kristen Faf, you can probably think of some others. In fact, I can't. Dee Boone of the revered 1980s punk band The Minutemen, or Chris Bell of Big Star, a group beloved by generations of indie bands. And some people also include Robert Johnson in the 27 Club,

the greatest of the Delta Bluesmen who died of unknown causes at the age of 27 in 1938. This idea of the 27 club, it's sort of romantic, and it's interesting, you know, it's a curiosity. but in reality, musicians are dying at every age, and more of them are dying at young ages. Yeah, we don't have a 26 club or a 28 club, even though if you look at the deaths at 26, 27 and 28, they're almost the same. But the power of the 27 club myth doesn't just come from the mere fact that Brian Jones, Jimmy Hendrix, Janice Joplin, Jim Morrison, Kurt Cobain, and Amy Winehouse all died at 26. Well, yes, if we just look at the manner of death, it's really quite chilling.

Alone and in sorted mysterious or self-destructive circumstances, as if victims of some curse. Jimmy Hendricks aspirated vomit from a barbiturate overdose, and there was no one there to incubate him. Janice Joplin died of a hero on a overdose in a cheap, hotel all alone. And she was dead for the whole night before the cleaner found her the next day. And with Jim Morrison,

the doors had broken up. He was living in Paris. He had become unstable over the last couple of years with strange antics on stage and he'd become gained weight and had a puffy and moved to Paris to try and maybe clean up or maybe just be left alone. And then he dies in a bathtub.

Jimmy Hendricks choking on his own vomit, Janice Joplin dying alone in a hotel room, and Jim Morrison dying in a bathtub in Paris. Those stories kind of right themselves. Brian Jones drowned, and he had been consuming substances. And he dies under mysterious circumstances in his swimming pool after he'd been fired by the Rolling Stones for erratic behavior.

And that's what I'm talking about in terms of, disinhibition and impulsivity. Like there was no one to tell him, well, Brian, I don't think you should jump in a swimming pool because you're completely bombed out on heroin. He was living in an estate that was once owned by A.A. Milne, the creator of Winnie the Pooh. So for Brian Jones, the founder of the Rolling Stones,

to die under mysterious circumstances in Winnie the Pooh's pool, it's irresistible. You just have to explore that. It's also impossible. disentangle the myth of the 27 club from the very fact that its members died so young. Before they went into precipitous creative decline, stopped connecting with their fans, or embarked on cringe-worthy comeback tours. Well, here's the thing about dying young.

You never have an opportunity to get boring, to get bad, to fall from grace. You are frozen at that time when you're at the peak or close to the peak of your powers, and that's how you're remembered. Nobody's going to know what Kurt Cobain would have been like through his 40s, 50s and 60s. What kind of music would he have made? We don't know. Would Jim Morrison have turned himself around and maybe become a novelist, for example, because he fancied himself to be a very good poet, and he was.

What would have happened to Jimmy Henrichs if he had continued to innovate with the electric guitar? What might he have done? They are frozen in time when we remember them as the brilliant but doomed rock stars. I'm of that generation and I remember at university standing two steps back from the stage where this guy who just released a record called Hey Joe was appearing and sure enough, Jimmy Hendrix. My name is Michael Owen and I'm a recently retired clinical psychologist and I've worked with a group of indigenous elders for many years. I've written several books. One is about the life of Jung as seen through the moon cycles.

And I've written a book on the 27 Club, and the reason why 27 and age 27 might be important in the human lifespan. Mythology and patterns seeking aside, 27 is a pivotal age, the year you enter your late 20s and are undeniably an adult, whether or not you want to be one, and whether or not you act like one, a hingeier of transition, undoing, and becoming.

And that may have something to do with why some people attach great importance to the return of Saturn. The idea in astrology that the true passage into adulthood comes when Saturn returns to the place it occupied in the sky when one was born. And if this is your first Saturn return,

then you're between the ages of 27 and 30. And that's, you know, at the beginning, beginning third of your life, let's say. Saturn is a planet that talks about hard work over a long period of time. Saturn's full orbit is about 29 and a half years, but the return of Saturn is thought to bring about change, maturation, and the assumption of the responsibilities and difficulties that come with adulthood from the ages of 27 to 30.

And that cycle parallels the 27-year moon cycles that Michael Owen writes about. drawing on indigenous traditions. It's a natural rhythm of life that's based on the number three, the number nine, number 27, that reaches its first major transition at age 27, and then again at age 54, and then again at age 81. Well, I spent some time at the Young Institute in Zurich, and when I was there, I was familiar with the teachings of the moon cycles.

and out of that came a book called Jung and the Moon Cycles. So that was really the beginning of my interest in the 27 Club. Well, Jung didn't have much to say about 27, but he did recognize that the number three is the number of increase and growth and multiplication, so that the number three always has to do with movement. And three times three is nine. So it's very much a number of maximum chaos and change.

and in our everyday language, there's dressed to the nines and on cloud nine and the whole nine yards. It means the maximum. And then the age 27 is composed of nine three-year cycles. And during each three-year cycle, we go through what's called a nine-month chaotic journey. And that's a time when there's often a lot of change and all the dominoes get shaken up in the box. and age 27 there's a what we call it a large chaotic journey from one 27 year cycle to another 27 year cycle. Big changes.

Around age 27, late 20s. So age 27 to 54 is all about death and change. So 27 doesn't have to take a backseat to numbers that are more storied in myth and lore. At the same time, something really does seem to happen among athletes and pop and rock stars around the age of 27. It's not just pattern-seeking. There's research and hard data on when elite athletes

reach peak performance across different sports, and they tend to average out around age of 27. There are always outliers, of course, like the teenage swimming sensations. The great Canadian kid, Summer Macintosh, a world record. Amazing. And the ageless wonders of pro sports. after, wrong with Jeffrey. Elman, Gahow, he's used to score. Strike the lead, two to one.

But athletic performance typically crests by mid-20s and starts declining by late 20s. And in a study he co-authored on track and field athletes, the University of Waterloo's David O'Walsiga found a peak around, you guessed it, 27. I'm actually turning 27 next year, so this is very relevant to my research and personal understanding of developmental patterns. He focused on track and field athletes in part because their performance is not affected by teammates and because he himself was a varsity track athlete, competing in the four and 800 meters.

So we found that the probability of achieving a peak performance after age 27 is 44%, meaning that athletes before the age of 27 are more likely to achieve at peak than after they turn 27. We also found that peak age is actually nearly identical between men and women. That's what the statistics say. And it's corroborated by a recent biomedical study. My name is Maria Westerol. I'm senior researcher, lecturer at Karolinska Institute in Sweden. In my research, I'm focusing at the moment on aging. And we're studying in what way the fiscal capacity decreases when we age. She's one of the authors of the longitudinal study spanning six decades.

It started in the mid-70s with more than 416-year-olds from across Sweden. They filled out questionnaires and then had their physical capacities tested. They were invited again at age 27. And those who were invited again at age 27 were the ones that at age 16 provided with muscle biopsy. and that tissue was all put in a low-temperature freezers. Kind of like ice core samples of muscle tissue. So we want to know if something happening in the muscle tissue, nervous system that help us in the long run to stay fit.

And now with the new methods that have developed to extract RNA and so on, we are analyzing what's happening in the actual muscle from 16, 27, and now they are almost 70 years old. They tested for four different capacities. For three of them, endurance, maximal strength and aerobic capacity, the average peak was in the early 30s. And it's quite similar for men and women. Also the rate of decline after peak,

we saw that's similar for men and women. So there's one exception. Power. We tested it with a vertical jump. There you start to decline in performance much earlier. So the peak is around 2025. And power, which speed depends on, is a key difference maker for many elite athletes. The general athlete progression is parabolic in nature,

in the sense that it starts low and then it increases as they develop more physical strength and technical capabilities. And then after around the age of 27, their performance is decline. And the rate of maturation and the rate of decline for athletes, athletes is different depending on the event and the athlete themselves. And so we found that for a lot of the athletes in speed power events, for example, they had a decline that was sharper, whereas athletes in longer running events like marathons had a decline that was less steep. So the more important raw speed or power are, the larger the age of 27 looms. Here's why. Comparing the muscle tissue between

when you're 16 and 27, it's pretty much the same. But when looking at the tissue, when you're 60. Then you see you lost some fast fibers and your muscle fibers start to group indicating that the nervous system doesn't talk to your muscle in the best way. But between 16, 27, there's no difference. So I'd say the muscle tissue is on top when you're 27 around that age. What our preliminary data says is partly connected to inflammation to produce a less elastic tissue. And that relates to the, I guess, the power capacities slowing down. You get more connective tissue in the muscle. And that's also why we think the aerobic capacity that concerns mostly the heart, start to decrease at the same age, and getting the heart to be less able to

contract in the optimal way. And here's the thing about most individual sports like track and field. the ultimate stage is the Olympics. If you're fortunate, you'll hit 27 and your peak in a year within Olympic Games. But there's only a one in four chance of that happening. So we did find that the age of Olympic participation does coincide with the median age of peak performance of 27. And interestingly enough, this hasn't changed over the last 25 years. So the window by which athletes have the best probability of making, in Olympic Games is less than four years on average.

And so understanding your age relevant to the Olympic cycle allows you to inform your training decisions based on, okay, how can I, knowing my age and technical maturation in the current event that I'm in, best prepare myself for success at a future Olympic Games? We found that nearly 80% of athletes only ever go to one Olympics and less than 8% of athletes attend more than two. So because you only really have one reasonable shot at making an Olympic Games, maximizing your probability of doing so in and around the age of your peak is really important. So if you're an aspiring Olympian who was born in 2001,

the stars and perhaps even Saturn may be aligned for you for 2028. Good luck. This is ideas. I'm Nala Ayyed. If you sold somebody a loaded gun who you knew was in a vulnerable state, and they shot themselves. I think it is murder. Just because you're using the internet

doesn't mean you get away with murder. I'm Damon Fairless, host of Hunting Warhead. This season, I take you inside the business of suicide and the places desperate people go when they can't find what they need in the real world. Hunting the Suicide Salesman. Available now wherever you get your podcasts. It's probably not a big surprise

that elite athletes tend to peak at a young age, typically around 27. But there aren't many other fields where people are at the top of their game in their 20s. And on the face of it, one of them seems like the polar opposite of athletics. Diana Kenny is a professor emerita in psychology and music at the University of Sydney, Australia. I mean, there has been work that has looked at the different professions and when the different professions peak. Brilliant mathematics. Peechians peak early, and academics tend to peak later, and brilliant philosophers peak later. And broadcaster and music historian Alan Cross points out another counterintuitive pairing with mathematicians.

There are a lot of similarities between successful rock stars and mathematicians. Anybody in the field of mathematics will tell you that a mathematician will do his greatest work or her greatest work before the age of 35. But there's no 27 club for mathematicians or elite athletes, for that matter. In his documentary on 27, The Number and the Age, ideas producer Chris Wadskow examines the career arcs of seemingly doomed music stars and what they say about the nature of creativity in what can be an outright lethal industry.

If you look at Rolling Stone magazine's list of the 50 Best Albums of All Time, you'll find a striking demographic bias. More than 80% of them were recorded by artists than their 20s. And when you look at the most influential popular music stars of the past 75 years, like, say, The Beatles, the Stones, Elvis, Aretha Franklin, Bob Dylan, Jimmy Hendricks, the Velvet Underground Prince, Joni Mitchell, the vast majority, of them reached the apex of their creative energy and cultural importance in their 20s. By their mid to late 20s, pop and rock stars generally start becoming less relevant album by album, if they don't flame out, become tabloid fodder or die young. And the reasons for their creativity waning appear to be a structural part of the very machinery that creates popular music stardom. You get into music in your teens, you learn to play an instrument, you learn to play an instrument,

You learn to write songs. You learn to perform. You're full of all kinds of youthful angst. Everything in the world is new to you. You have a clear view of who you are and what's going on. And you have an agenda. You want to be a big star. You want people to hear your music.

Well, there's always the stairway to fame. They get discovered and they get some gigs. Then they get a record deal. And everybody thinks they're great. And one of the difficulties for pop musicians is that often they start in their career very young when they're still, you know, relatively immature. They're just post-adolescence. You know, there's a lot of impulsivity.

There's a lot of experimentation. And often in the pop music industry, there's not enough structure or scaffolding around these young artists that's going to keep them on the straight and narrow, so to speak. And it's when you get to a pinnacle of some kind, you're going to be in your mid-20s for that process to have occurred. But what happens is that as you get older, you become more proficient at your instrument, and maybe you start adopting styles and influences

that take you away from what got you to where you were at that point. And then with all the money that you have made, you're no longer, you know, raging against the system. You are part of the system. You are a famous rock star and you have all the trappings of a famous rock star. You don't have to worry about cash. You don't have to worry about where you get your drugs. You don't have to worry about any of those things. You have people taking care of everything for you.

Well, you're supposed to be an adult by then, you know, brain development is essentially complete by 25. But, you know, there's a lot of individual variation in that, and it depends on, you know, what your early life was like in terms of building confidence and resilience and developing the skills that you have in a sustainable way. So if you took the world by storm as a young musician, by the time you hit 27, you might be losing your edge, making bad decisions and barreling down a self-destructive lifestyle. You might also be running out of steam, creatively, physically and emotionally, even if you possess an unparalleled mastery of your craft. I mean, Jimmy Hendricks in his day was thought to be the greatest rock guitarist. In order to experiment with sound in the way that Jimmy did, you had to have a prodigious talent in a, in performing on the instrument. He was an outstanding technician of the guitar.

But he actually told someone that he'd run out of inspiration. He said that, you know, people are going to keep expecting this off me, but you can't endlessly create something if you feel as if you've reached the pinnacle of what is possible to create with a particular instrument. You know, what else can you do with a box with strings stretched across it, you know, after Jimmy had his go at it.

Hendricks and the other members of the 27 Club all made huge creative breakthroughs and achieved massive, critical and popular acclaim by their mid-20s. But the psychological and physical toll of writing and recording songs, touring, fame, and the rock and roll lifestyle can sap creative energy.

And at the same time, they may have been burning out creatively, they would also have been under enormous pressure to replicate their creative and popular success. Another daunting roadblock to creativity. We don't really understand the creative process sufficiently well to kind of reproduce it on demand. Creativity is a spontaneous process. All we have to do is look at Kirk Cobain.

Nevermind comes out, which, basically rewrites the rules for rock in the 1990s. How do you follow that up? So Kurt was already in a very contrary mood going into the next album. And he wanted it to be the anti, nevermind. He wanted it to be raw and rugged. And the record company wasn't very happy with that because they wanted, never mind, part two.

But if you're an artist, you don't respond to that sort of direction kindly. And you can't turn creativity on and off. It's either there or it's not. every successful songwriter from Neil Young on down will tell you that there is a muse out there that you can't see, and then every once in a while that muse touches your brain. And all of a sudden, a song appears out of nowhere.

You can't explain it, you can't force it, it just happens. And then sometimes it doesn't happen for a very long time. Well, you've got people knocking on your door saying, hey, listen, we've got a marketing schedule, we've got a tour schedule, we've got to keep you in the marketplace, we've got to keep you top of mind with the audience. Where's this new record? Where's this new record? And, you know, the creative process doesn't involve well under circumstances and intense pressure.

People eventually say, I'm tapped down. So imagine you're a rock star. And now your creative spark has been rung out of you, your muse has gone AWOL, and you're staring into the abyss of irrelevance, all the while being hounded to make yet another hit album. Emotionally vulnerable, creative people grow to a certain point, then what's left? What's next?

Where is there left to go? And they become a drift. Start questioning themselves. Am I as good as I was seven years ago? Where can I possibly go with the music that I have? I've run out of ideas. I've run out of passion. I've become cynical because of the way the music industry and people around me have treated me.

And I need some kind of respite. I need some kind of escape. They have this sense that they're not interesting anymore. They're not new. So, you know, a kind of panic sets in. And when you're panicked, you can't be creative. So I think there's a lot of very complex psychological processes happening in young musicians

that really does need to be looked at and managed by parental-type figures in the industry who end up being anything. but parental, you know, they end up being like slave drivers. And so they turn to drugs for relief. I mean, fans are great when they're positive, but they're horrible, brutal, unforgiving when their pop idol has not lived up to expectations.

And this can have a profound effect on mental health. Jimmy Hendricks actually explicitly said that he wouldn't live past 27, or he didn't think he would. Another irresistible part of the mythology, almost romance of the 27 Club, is the trope of the doomed artist. The sensitive soul who was too singular

and felt too deeply for this world, an archetype that dates back to romantic poets who died in their 20s, like John Keats and Percy Bish Shelley. Perhaps it's another instance of pattern recognition, but in retrospect, there's almost a sense of inevitability around the 27 club deaths. The members of the 27 club were all very psychologically fragile people.

And the majority of them had very sad early childhood history. And they came from broken families, they were neglected, and there was absolutely no parental figures to step in, to, help these young people navigate childhood and adolescents. So they were coming into their profession already very vulnerable and needy. And this is a profession that just drags it out of you and doesn't necessarily give enough back. I couldn't resist him. His eyes were like yours.

His hair was exactly the shade of brown. Perhaps the one who is most vulnerable, most tragic, and most typifies the 27 club was Amy Winehouse. And there was no question that she was extraordinarily talented. But she was also very vulnerable. She had bad family relationships. She had bad boyfriend relationships. And the paparazzi and the tabloids were after her all the time, trying to catch her out doing something crazy. And the fact was that she was doing something crazy a lot of the time.

She was a heavy, heavy smoker. She was always drinking, and she got into some pretty hard drugs. And these behaviors, along with her vulnerable nature, eventually caught up to her. She was told on multiple occasions by her physicians that she would end her life very quickly if she did not stop drinking. And you could see that she was falling. apart in front of her very eyes. Her performances became erratic. There were a couple of shows she couldn't finish. It was obvious that she was in trouble. So Amy was probably in a very despairing frame of mind because she was alone on the night that she died and she apparently tried to ring a

number of people, you know, who were friends or support people. And she couldn't get any of them. And so instead of being able to talk to someone and to kind of relieve the terrible despair and anguish she was feeling, she just kept drinking, knowing how much she was putting her life at risk by doing so. You know, professional psychologists would say that that is parasuicidal behavior. She had basically drank herself to death with a couple of bottles of vodka. And when it happened, Nobody was terribly surprised because we could see that she was on the road to ruin. Remember what Michael Owens said about moon cycles?

So age 27 to 54 is all about death and change. So perhaps none of the deaths of 27 club members, with the possible exception of Jimmy Hendricks, came as a surprise. Shocking and tragic, but not surprising. But is there a reason why they all died at 27 beyond simple coincidence? Is 27 an age at which self-destructiveness, compounded by vulnerability, despair, and stress is liable to come to a head? And if it is, why do athletes who also tend to peak around 27 not have a 27 club?

For elite athletes who hope to turn 27 during an Olympic year, competing on the biggest stage coincides right when they're about, is at its apex. But if athletes hit their peak by around then, that means they also start their decline shortly afterward. And they live in their own pressure cooker, subjected to relentless scrutiny, measuring, comparing, their every misstep picked apart

and criticized by coaches, fans, and media alike. And in sports like boxing, football, or even downhill skiing, there's the ever-present danger of career-ending injury or even death. And yet, athletes don't tend to drift into substance abuse, self-destruct, or die at a young age, at least not the same way so many music stars have. They typically keep at it until the toll of age or injuries makes it impossible to compete anymore. Because they have spent their entire lives looking after their body. They know what's good for them and what's not good for them.

And it doesn't mean that they're not going to go through a mental crisis where, okay, I'm too old to do what I've been doing my entire life. but I am not going to give up on my body and everything that I have done to turn me into an elite human being as far as athletic promise is concerned. Elite sports people, they've got a massive amount of scaffolding around them.

They've got their coaches, their massers, their physiotherapists, their sports psychologists, their peers, whereas it's just anything goes in pop music. Contrast that, with classical music. Professional classical musicians

typically have much longer careers than pop and rock musicians. A lot of pop musicians don't have the sustainable training that classical musicians have. It's a very intense period of preparing your instrument, whether it's the voice, the violin,

the trumpet. There's a very long period of mastering your art whereas with some of these popular musicians, they've got natural talent, but many of them have never had professionals teaching them how to sing and how to breathe and how to preserve their voice. So often their performance is more insecure because they're relying on gut instinct and raw talent.

Professional athletes, professional musicians, mathematicians, are like thoroughbred racehorses. They're good for a couple of years, and hopefully they earn everything that they're owed, everything that they're due in that couple of years because it's going to end. And when it ends, you're on your own, and you have to find something else to do.

But star athletes do have exit ramps into other careers within sports. They can become coaches, scouts, commentators, or move into sports management. And mathematicians, of course, can teach long after they've made their breakthrough. But pop and rock stars, what future do they have after music? Well, that's the problem.

They can become producers. They can reconcile themselves to the fact that they're not going to have any more hits. So they play the casino circuit going back and replaying their greatest hits from their career. Or they just disappear. I mean, I know of certain musicians who have decided that they don't want anything to do with the music industry anymore. those people have, I think, a really good attitude about what they did and where they're going. This isn't going to happen for me anymore. I'm going to have to reinvent myself.

And anybody who's gone through any sort of life crisis knows that reinventing yourself is hard, especially if it's the only thing you've ever done as a late teen and early adult. You don't know any other lifestyle. You may not, for example, have ever had to write a check for rent. because you had people to look after that. It can seem like we're cruising until we hit our late 20s when we have to start reckoning with the realities of getting older. But as Maria Westerstahl found in her research,

age isn't necessarily destiny, if you follow a few simple and by now familiar guidelines. When we're around age 27, it seems like the lifestyle hasn't affected our performance as much. But as we reached a peak and start a decline, the lifestyle seemed to have more and more impact on the fitness. We found that physical activity, of course, keeps you biologically younger, not drinking alcohol and no smoking. And we put so many variables into this analysis. And what fell out was the exercise, exercise, exercise, exercise.

And no alcohol, no smoking. By comparison, classical musicians have more in common with elite athletes than they do with popular music stars, even though they face many of the same pressures. And so musicians are under enormous pressure to do very well every time they perform. And this creates quite a lot of hyper arousal and possible distress. And so at any given time, there are about 30% of professional musicians taking some form of medication to manage their anxiety. And the most popular one is beta blockers. And then I started to think, well, professional classical musicians tend not to be heroin addicts or cocaine addicts or, you know, they're not smoking weed all night.

So they are very different to popular musicians. The conclusion seems inescapable. It's just harder to live a happy, healthy life in the popular music industry. Its pitfalls are tied too intimately to its rewards. And for some of these young people, it's impossibly anxiety producing. And so the substance abuse starts, you know, the uppers and the downers. then they don't eat properly and they take hours to come down after a concert and their sleep patterns are destroyed. Before long, they're so dysregulated and so substance affected that their

overall body systems start to fail. Add to that, being surrounded by enablers who indulged their worst excesses and self-destructive behaviors. You know, just thinking of Michael Jackson, for example, he had this sycophantic physician who was pumping anesthetic level medication into him because his body was so dysregulated that he was a complete insomniac. So he wasn't properly managed medically, and you can say that for a lot of these pop musicians.

Such as Amy Whitehouse. And there's a good example of someone who didn't have anyone looking out for her best interest, including her father, who was quite predatory from a financial perspective, and he would force her to go on stage when she was in no fit state to do so. And many musicians' lives are ended through accidental or deliberate overdoses of a whole range of substances, which we don't see in classical musicians. So the overall effect is that the lifespan of popular musicians

is about 20 years less than the general population matched for age and sex. Think about that. The lifespan of pop musicians being about 20 years less than the general population. You wouldn't expect such a stark difference in life expectancy even in notoriously high-risk professions like coal mining or deep-seep diving. I remember feeling when I heard that Hendry, had died, a kind of longing for what have we missed. And so we're left with the feeling of a great waste of human brilliance, of human talent.

And the sadness and the grief associated with that. The members of the 27 Club were generational, original, wholly singular talents, which made them both more iconic and more vulnerable. Two qualities that, in the end, made them more than rock stars. It made them mythic, supernovas who died at 27. And that makes 27 a paradox. It's a number of myth-making. It can be a lucky number for an athlete or an unlucky number for a pop musician.

Yet, it's also a number of verifiable patterns. And it can also confound the wishful things. thinking of pattern seekers. Number 27 on the Blue Jays, Vlad Guerrero Jr. is having the least productive season of his career at the age of 27. And here is the brute reality of 27. It can be a year of great turbulence and change,

a hump that must be gotten over to reap the fruits of a thriving adulthood. The human body really does start its long slow decline around 27. And for all the seismic, changes the music industry has undergone in the past 15 years, young pop stars really do still get overwhelmed by fame and pressure, and some still die right around the age 27. That is a real load-bearing number.

That was Chris Wadskow with his documentary about the number and the age 27. It's part of our series The Greatest Numbers of All Time, the Second Edition. You can find it in the first edition on our website, cbc.ca.ca. Special thanks to Michael Owen, Maria Westerstall, Diana Kenny, Alan Cross, and David Awoshaga. And thank you to CBC Kitchener. This episode was produced by Chris Wadskow. Technical production, Emily Carvezio. Our web producer is Lisa Ayuso, Senior producer Nicola Luxchich.

Greg Kelly is the executive priest. producer of ideas, and I'm Nala Ayed. For more CBC podcasts, go to cBC.ca.ca slash podcasts.