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She could have been so much more. RIP, Amy Winehouse, 1983 - 2011


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This is a {censored}ing drag.

 

Amy Winehouse Found Dead

 

 

 

LONDON (KTLA) -- Singer Amy Winehouse has been found dead in her London home, Reuters reports. Police said they had found Winehouse's body about 11 am Easter Daylight Time in her flat in Camden Square, north London, after being called by ambulance
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RIP, Amy.

 

[video=youtube;w1evzhSast8]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w1evzhSast8

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Wow, 27. There it is again, that magical (cursed?) number. So many great musicians and singers have died at that age.

 

I remember listening to Back To Black over and over on my mp3 player shortly after it came out. It was pretty unique for its time and I really liked it. I always wondered if she could create a followup to it. Sadly, it looks like that and Frank are the only albums she was able to create (although the cynic in me says there will be unreleased material and repackaging ad nauseum from her record label).

 

At least she will have finally found peace at last from her turbulent life.

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Wow, 27. There it is again, that magical (cursed?) number. So many great musicians and singers have died at that age.


I remember listening to Back To Black over and over on my mp3 player shortly after it came out. It was pretty unique for its time and I really liked it. I always wondered if she could create a followup to it. Sadly, it looks like that and Frank are the only albums she was able to create (although the cynic in me says there will be unreleased material and repackaging ad nauseum from her record label).


At least she will have finally found peace at last from her turbulent life.

Yeah... I just got done writing this under my FB post about Winehouse's sad death:

_____________________________________

 

 

When I was going through a really tough time in my early teens, battling (and mostly losing) a serious case of OCD, I became obsessed with the number 3 as the 'number of death' after one of my pals told me a couple chilling stories about a couple of his mother's Scots family's traditional death harbingers -- one of which was the familiar 3 knocks on the door but no one there. The OCD was raging in me and my math-fevered brain somehow decided that if 3 was ominous and bad, that 3 to the third power -- 27 -- must be pretty much the ultimate.

 

I dunno... I think I'm vamping to keep the awfulness of this from sinking in.

 

Mind you, it wasn't that I really bonded with all that much of her work -- but the potential just seemed so vivid, so tangible...

 

... and now forever out of reach.

 

 

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Yup. A {censored}ing drag is right. If she wasn't so talented, no one would give a {censored}.

 

On a side note, when I was I my teens and early 20s, I had what you would probably call "drug and drinking issues". I managed to get past it, but had I continued on the path I was on at the time, I might have been another member of the "27 Club". It's hard, therefore, for me to criticize others who didn't find some reason to stop their self destruction. I'm so glad that I made it through that stuff, because so many of the best events in my life happened after that time frame and continued through my 20s, 30s, and early 40s. I probably couldn't have understood that at the time. So, like Blue said: it's a {censored}ing drag.

 

RIP.

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Believe it or not, thiis old geezer actually liked much of the music that she did, but is not surprised, and, in fact, expected her to die from drug use. It hasn't officially been announced that that is the cause, but I wouldn't be at all surprised. Very sad.

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Believe it or not, thiis old geezer actually liked much of the music that she did, but is not surprised, and, in fact, expected her to die from drug use. It hasn't officially been announced that that is the cause, but I wouldn't be at all surprised. Very sad.

Yeah... I normally don't pay much attention to the pop flavor of the moment. But I thought I'd check out what the noise was about rehab, so I looked up the vid. I just fell out. Great song. Hilarious vid. So much edge, so much dark humor. And so much soul. That kind of soul -- or stark, darkly humorous honesty -- doesn't seem to get through the wall of auto-tune and big pop production from other divas of the moment.

 

As I watched the often sorry spectacle of her life, all the bad business that seemed all too familiar from the troubled lives of so many I knew in the 3D world, I worried in distant frustration -- but what can you do when the sirens call someone to the rocks?

 

 

I'm reminded of a friend from the 80s (and so many friends, sadly enough). My pal, Brian was a painter, a wild-eyed, hard-drinking, hard drugging neo-fauvist whose huge canvases were aflame with light and dark and brilliant, violent color. I remember the last time I saw him, more than 20 years ago. It was that nether-time between 3 and 4 in the morning and I was up coding a long, involved database project when I heard a knock on my door. Brian was there, his mountain bike over his shoulder at the top of my stairs in Seal Beach. His eyes were wide and wild and he was sweating. Turned out he had a head full of what most folks would surely have thought was too much acid. Brian was a big guy, a sweet guy, but a wild guy.

 

He left his bike on my porch and came into my flat. As he paced back and forth in what little pacing room I had, I wondered abstractly if maybe I shouldn't be afraid -- he was clearly about as loaded as someone can be and hook up a couple of sentences. He'd apparently dropped sometime around midnight, chased it with a few more tabs and then spent the next few hours riding his bike around (his driver's license was long gone at that point, IIRC) looking for someone to talk to.

 

I had a lot of work to do, but I also had some insight into where he was coming from (maybe a little too much insight) and I tried to accommodate him -- or at least keep him from climbing the walls. He wanted me to go out bike riding with him. It was now about 4am. Finally, when it became clear to him that I was a bit of a dud that night, he bid me farewell and rode off into the night.

 

I had my head in my work at that point and the months went by.

 

One day one of my best pals -- who'd introduced me to Brian -- called me up. Brian's dead, he said. He'd driven his car off a freeway someplace in the industrial stretches between LA and Long Beach, sometime in the middle of the night, gone down an embankment and wasn't found for many hours. He was in a deep coma and, since he didn't have a license on him and his car was borrowed or unregistered -- or both -- his identity wasn't known for some time. He remained in the coma for months.

 

None of his (long-suffering but nonetheless loving) friends knew any of this -- because Brian's extremely religious, fundamentalist parents didn't try to contact any of his friends (an art-damaged intellectual crowd who they strongly disapproved of). They did contact his art teacher at a local community college -- but he didn't know any of Brian's friends -- but he went to visit Brian in the hospital, lying there in his coma. (I heard about all this from the teacher, who it turned out I knew through a whole different circle of people, basically through one of the teacher's high school friends who was married to the lead guitarist in one of my old bands.)

 

Finally, Brian died.

 

His parents still apparently didn't try to find his friends. They burned all his paintings -- all that are left are those he'd given to friends.

 

But he was a hell of a painter. Probably one of my very favorites among my painter-heavy circle of friends.

 

May all our fallen brothers and sisters rest in peace.

 

I gotta go.

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Yup. A {censored}ing drag is right. If she wasn't so talented, no one would give a {censored}.


 

 

Yeah, if it happened to, say, Lindsay Lohan, who really means absolutely nothing to me, I wouldn't even bother talking about it.

 

(BTW, LL turns 27 in two years. Just sayin'...)

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Yeah, if it happened to, say, Lindsay Lohan, who really means absolutely nothing to me, I wouldn't even bother talking about it.


(BTW, LL turns 27 in two years. Just sayin'...)

I'd hate to have to judge anyone by their first 27 years...

 

... all the more reason to stick around until you've sorted things out.

 

 

As I was reminded in a similar RIP thread over at GS just now, Kurt Cobain and Brian Jones were also among that sad elite who've died at 27, along with Jimi, Janis, and Morrison. Along with a long list of others.

 

We're not the first to remark on the phenomenon: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/27_Club

 

Here' their list:

 

Louis Chauvin

Robert Johnson

Nat Jaffe

Jesse Belvin

Rudy Lewis

Malcolm Hale

Dickie Pride

Alan "Blind Owl" Wilson

Arlester "Dyke" Christian

Linda Jones

Les Harvey

Ron "Pigpen" McKernan

Roger Lee Durham

Wallace Yohn

Dave Alexander

Pete Ham

Gary Thain

Cecilia

Helmut K

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This is the first thing I saw logging in today and it gave me a jolt. Tremendous talent, total tragedy. She had the poor health choices/personal problems combo that caved in on her. Some people love the drugs, alcohol and ciggies a little too much, sort of a musician's cliche that can have dire consequences.

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They tried ta make her go ta REHAB... she se-ed "No! No! No!"

I had to watch that vid again today, of course. It's such a great video.

 

 

One of my 3DW my friends was set to replace one of the unfortunate members of the 27 Club listed above. (I'm going to preserve his privacy since he didn't end up with the gig; in fact, the band in question apparently decided after some thought, to just fly "missing man" formation from there out.)

 

I haven't talked to him yet today, but I know he was a fan of Winehouse, too -- although not shy in criticism of her lifestyle, even when she was alive. In fact, I think it was from him (immediately after the unfortunate passing of the artist in question, who was also a friend of his) that I first heard the term, 27 Club.

 

 

Another of the unfortunate members of that club, D. Boon from the Minutemen was from across the bay in San Pedro, and so, of course, a lot of of folks in Long Beach knew him. I remember meeting him and Mike Watt outside the old Suburban Lawns practice studio and de facto 'concert' venue on the west side of Long Beach in 1980. Me and the guitar player in my band (you never heard of them) ended up sitting on a curb outside during a break in a show at the 'underground' club and we talked with them for a while. That's how it was in the early days of punk. Just the fact you weren't like everyone else drew strangers together. (But it was already starting to change. In fact, the "HB's" [head bangers], mostly surfer kids in their teens with long hair started hanging out [when they'd try to get into shows at places like the Lawns studio, they'd be told it was a private party -- since the HBs were convinced that punk was all about "slamming" (aka moshing, but probably other stuff, too, ahem :( ) and getting in fights. Eventually they cut their hair and formed the violent slam pits of the early 80s, favoring bands like Black Flag and the Circle Jerks (who were actually pretty nice guys).

 

D and Mike told us their old band (The Reactionaries) had broken up but they were starting a new band without the lead singer and they were only going to do one minute songs and call themselves The Minutemen. It all made sense. That framework didn't survive to the first record -- though the songs were pretty short when I saw them not all that long after. They were a pair of really low key, funny, and friendly guys. When I saw the band, I was pretty knocked out because they were funky and sharp in a decidedly abstract way. D died in a car accident coming back from Arizona two days before Christmas, 1985... when he was 27.

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Yup. A {censored}ing drag is right. If she wasn't so talented, no one would give a {censored}.


On a side note, when I was I my teens and early 20s, I had what you would probably call "drug and drinking issues". I managed to get past it, but had I continued on the path I was on at the time, I might have been another member of the "27 Club".

 

 

Yeah, but think of all the albums you would have sold afterwards!

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My "lucky break" happened on June 25, 1989, when my friends dragged me, semi-conscious, into a hospital. I was 20 years old. That was the end of my old ways, and gradually, I began to lose the appeal for any kind of intoxication. It got much easier in my early 30s, when I developed an allergic reaction to the slightest amount of alcohol. So, for ten years or so, I've been a boring mother{censored}er, but one who is alive and well.

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My "lucky break" happened on June 25, 1989, when my friends dragged me, semi-conscious, into a hospital. I was 20 years old. That was the end of my old ways, and gradually, I began to lose the appeal for any kind of intoxication. It got much easier in my early 30s, when I developed an allergic reaction to the slightest amount of alcohol. So, for ten years or so, I've been a boring mother{censored}er, but one who is alive and well.

 

 

Yeah, heads up bro, i've spent many years playing to drunks, their ALWAYS the boring ones.

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, mostly surfer kids in their teens with long hair started hanging out [when they'd try to get into shows at places like the Lawns studio, they'd be told it was a private party -- since the HBs were convinced that punk was all about "slamming" (aka moshing, but probably other stuff, too, ahem
:(
) and getting in fights. Eventually they cut their hair and formed the violent slam pits of the early 80s, favoring bands like Black Flag and the Circle Jerks (who were actually pretty nice guys).


D and Mike told us their old band (The Reactionaries) had broken up but they were starting a new band without the lead singer and they were only going to do one minute songs and call themselves The Minutemen. It all made sense. That framework didn't survive to the first record -- though the songs were pretty short when I saw them not all that long after. They were a pair of really low key, funny, and friendly guys. When I saw the band, I was pretty knocked out because they were funky and sharp in a decidedly abstract way. D died in a car accident coming back from Arizona two days before Christmas, 1985... when he was 27.

 

Speaking of the LBC, Sublime's Bradley Nowell could be considered another...but he missed the club by 3 months, passing at 28.

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My "lucky break" happened on June 25, 1989, when my friends dragged me, semi-conscious, into a hospital. I was 20 years old. That was the end of my old ways, and gradually, I began to lose the appeal for any kind of intoxication. It got much easier in my early 30s, when I developed an allergic reaction to the slightest amount of alcohol. So, for ten years or so, I've been a boring mother{censored}er, but one who is alive and well.

 

Congrats on doing a good job. I am sure that everyone else here is glad it worked out for you too. I knew two musicians who were in my two favorite Minneapolis based bands, Gypsy and Doug Maynard Band, when I lived there who died of 1 drugs and 1 alcohol. Both were older than the 27 age, but still too young for this to happen, and both were incredibly talented at singing and song writing, a real shame. I really hate to see this happen.

 

Here's Doug in 1981. Enjoy

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Congrats on doing a good job. I am sure that everyone else here is glad it worked out for you too. I knew two musicians who were in my two favorite Minneapolis based bands, Gypsy and Doug Maynard Band, when I lived there who died of 1 drugs and 1 alcohol. Both were older than the 27 age, but still too young for this to happen, and both were incredibly talented at singing and song writing, a real shame. I really hate to see this happen.


Here's Doug in 1981. Enjoy

 

 

The Dougster sounds like a very talented fellow. And the backup singers look like what good looking women looked like before the age of boob jobs. Else, we forget.

 

RIP Doug and Amy. She certainly was talent and certainly, it is not unexpected. Such a pity.

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