The 27 Club

Can’t resist including this one: Me, age 22, in Georgia, with broom, jug of wine, and future that could go either way.

I remember my 27th birthday. Not the events of the day, but a thought I had at the time. It was this: “27, what kind of a nondescript number is that?!”  Inauspicious, it seemed, and lacking any kind of real potential. That was my thought. But that was the year my life changed.

I had been reaching a sort of climax, or a sort of vortex. I had already hit the fulfillment of life goals and found myself empty. It wasn’t just that I wasn’t happy, but more, that setting new goals would result in the same thing. In other words, I was not happy-able. All that lead to a downward spiral of emotional stasis, loss of health and mental questioning about the state of the world and the purpose of life. I felt I was already in the body of an old man, a dying old man, and I was only in my mid-20s.

But two months into my 27th year, in Mexico, on a month-long reading trip, I surprised myself and everybody else with a return to the Father who had long been waiting for me. I’ll not tell the details here as it’s not my point . . . and I’ve often told it elsewhere (like in the book Our Lives Together).  The point here is that it happened in my 27th year, the one for which I had the least expectation.

It was the year when I came back to life. Who’d have thought? Age 27. Born again! (For that really is the best term for it).

Since then, over the years, from time to time I’ve seen evidence of another spirit at work, as if by some spiritual coincidence, with that same age number, 27. I don’t know when I first saw it but in time I thought to myself that I ought to be writing these down. Now I find that others have. From today’s California Sun, an online news service to which I subscribe, there’s a link to an article in Rolling Stone (to which I don’t subscribe) with a whole list of rock stars and notables from that industry who died at age 27! This, often at their own hand, or at least as a result of certain lifestyle. It’s uncanny.

Among the most famous are Jimmy Hendricks, Janice Joplin and the Doors’ Jim Morrison, all dying at age 27, and within ten months of each other. The article is titled, The 27 Club, a Brief History, which also references a book, The 27s.

Leading it off is Robert Johnson, Delta Blues legend, who died in 1938. What’s not mentioned is the “folklore” of his having traded his soul to the devil for his talent . . . which was non-existent before but afterward, prodigious. Then the devil claimed his trade. He was 27.

What is it with him and age 27? Who knows?

All I know is that there is indeed something to this 27 thing and that my own history somehow corresponds. But for me there was a cosmic escape; I went the other way.  To say I’m grateful is an eternal understatement.

Return of the Son, oil on canvas, 24×24.

By coincidence, I just painted and delivered a piece for a new friend in Texas that relates to all this. She’d been looking for some time for just the right rendition of The Prodigal Son.  She wanted a traditional look but with bright colors, and loves the result. The story’s a parable, but I can’t help but wonder if that young man was in his 27th year.