27

Much is being made of yesterday's announcement of Amy Winehouse being found dead from a drug overdose — that she has now joined the "27 club," which includes such music immortals as Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison and Kurt Cobain.

Amy was undeniably talented, and it is always a shame when someone so young, with possibly so much promise, has died. I was too young to mourn Joplin, Hendrix or Morrison — they became rock legends when I was just a child. Kurt Cobain's death hit home hard for me. I was a big fan of Nirvana and just a few years old than Kurt. I remember being on vacation in 1994 in the south of France, a trip that was a mad adventure that I had planned and saved for for quite some time, and the first news I heard from home was about a recent rehab stint of Kurt's. I may have even bought a silly postcard with his face on it — he was fine, and as popular as ever, on the postcard stalls in Nice. So it was a huge shock to hear a few months later that he had died an apparent suicide.

Conspiracy theories aside, maybe that is why Kurt's death still twinges me more than Winehouse's does. His witty and gritty songwriting had always made him my personal selection to follow in the footsteps of John Lennon. To suffer so that you would leave a child behind ... And I'm older now. He died, unbelievably, 17 years ago.

I have great sympathy for the family and friends and fans that Winehouse has left behind, as I do for poor Amy herself. I bought and liked Back to Black. But she has undeniably been on her own personal path of destruction for so long, it is hard to feel too surprised at her death. I wish, as I do for all of these artists, that their lives had taken a different turn. Who knows what they would have become if they had survived. Some may have still become legends. But our society looks away while such folks are destroying themselves or being destroyed and then enshrines them when they are gone. Strange ...

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