One of the Delta blues’ most celebrated and singular talents, Robert Johnson recorded chilling, folkloric songs about hellhounds, the Devil and general despair amid swinging, dissonant, sometimes off-kilter guitar lines – the likes of which have reverberated through rock & roll for decades. He recorded less than 50 songs – including ones later covered by Cream (“Cross Road Blues”), Captain Beefheart (“Terraplane Blues”) and the Rolling Stones (“Love in Vain,” “Stop Breaking Down”) – and performed alongside the likes of Howlin’ Wolf, Elmore James and Memphis Slim as he rose to fame. “You want to know how good the blues can get?” Keith Richards once said. “Well, this is it.” In August 1938, just a few months after his 27th birthday, Johnson made moves on the wife of the owner of a roadhouse where he was playing, drank from an open bottle of whiskey he was offered, and died three days later of strychnine poisoning and pneumonia. He is buried in an unmarked grave in Mississippi.

Jones’ death at his country home in England in 1969 seems to be the result of his foolish behavior. To mix alcohol and drugs and then dive into the swimming pool was to swim directly into the arms of death. As clear as this seems, the death of Brian Jones has become one of the most persistent mysteries of rock & roll, with many people questioning the official version of what happened. Even members of the Rolling Stones have expressed doubts. “And still the mystery of his death hasn’t been solved,” Keith Richards has said. “I don’t know what happened, but there was some nasty business going on.”

Canned Heat enjoyed considerable artistic and commercial success, crowned by an appearance at Woodstock in 1969. But guitarist Al “Blind Owl” Wilson was a troubled man. Like many in the 27 Club, he was estranged from his family; he lacked confidence and suffered from depression. One of his eccentric habits was sleeping outdoors, as he did at vocalist Bob Hite’s house in Los Angeles on the last night of his life. Wilson’s body was found in Hite’s yard on September 3rd, 1970. His hands were crossed over his chest and there was a bottle of the barbiturate Seconal by his side. Cause of death was officially given as an accidental overdose of barbiturates, but drummer Fito de la Parra has said he believes Wilson committed suicide.

In the early hours of Friday, September 18th, 1970, while staying with a girlfriend in London, Jimi took some sleeping pills. Nobody knows for sure how many pills he swallowed, or whether he understood what he was taking. The drug was Vesparax, a strong barbiturate. Half a tablet was enough to put a man to sleep for eight hours – Jimi may have swallowed as many as nine. He had also been drinking. This was foolish and reckless but it was in character. During his years on the road Jimi had got into the habit of using drugs indiscriminately. “Jimi would take a handful of shit, not even knowing what it was,” his friend Deering Howe has said.

It is certainly easy to imagine Janis feeling lonely as she returned to her hotel room in Hollywood after her last recording session. As she sang in “A Woman Left Lonely,” one of the last songs she sang, she knew that her boyfriend was taking her for granted. At around one a.m. on October 4th, 1970, she got her heroin kit out and injected a vein in her left arm. Then she went to the cigarette machine in the hotel lobby, returning to her room with a pack. She closed the door, started to undress and reached to put her packet on the nightstand. As she did so she keeled over, hitting her face on the table as she fell to the floor, where she was found dead the next day.

The cult of Jim Morrison grew posthumously, taking off in 1979 when Francis Ford Coppola used “The End” in the soundtrack for Apocalypse Now. Part of the cult of Jim was the coincidence of him dying at the same age as Brian, Jimi and Janis. The 27 link helped reinforce the idea that Jim had been special; that his death was fated; that there was somethingweird going on. The fact that Jim’s girlfriend had died at the same age underlined the weirdness of the coincidence. This legend was familiar to everybody with an interest in popular music by 1994 when Kurt Cobain decided to join the club.

Ron “Pigpen” McKernan was a sensitive, somewhat unsightly character with a drinking problem. He got together with Jerry Garcia and Bob Weir in 1964 to form a jug band thatdeveloped into the Grateful Dead. Pigpen started drinking when he was twelve and, by his mid-twenties, had cirrhosis of the liver, ulcers and other health problems. Pigpen was on his own at his apartment in Corte Madera, overlooking San Francisco Bay, when the end came on March 8th, 1973. He had been dead for up to two days when his landlady found him.

After Kurt Cobain, the most notable confirmed suicide is Peter Ham of Badfinger, one of the bands the Beatles signed to their Apple label in the 1960s. As is the case with suicides, Ham reached a point where death seemed to be the only solution to his problems. He met bandmate Tom Evans in a pub near his home in England on the evening of April 24th, 1975, three days before his 28th birthday, and told him: “Don’t worry, I know a way out.” Fortified with drink, Ham went back to his home, wrote a note in which he expressed his bitterness towards his manager and hanged himself in his garage. Evans hanged himself seven years later.

Kurt Cobain’s body was discovered by an electrician on Friday, April 8th, 1994. The answer to the question posed by the authors of Who Killed Kurt Cobain? is simple: Kurt Cobain killed himself. He did so with sudden, self-inflicted violence, leaving written evidence of his state of mind. Kurt’s substance abuse counselor remembered how worried the musician had been about losing his home in a lawsuit: “Suicidal people tend to want to make a statement,” Nial Stimson said. “I just kind of felt he killed himself in his house [as if to say], “You’re not going to take my house, no matter what. . .'”

The year Jean-Michel Basquiat turned 20, he became an art-world celebrity on the path to a pop-culture turning point. After dropping out of high school, the self-taught, Brooklyn-born, neo-expressionist artist spent the late Seventies painting graffiti around SoHo, tagged “SAMO,” and in 1980, he allowed his paintings – which featured colorful, jagged renditions of people often juxtaposed with words – to be featured in a group show. In the years that followed, he collaborated with Andy Warhol on a series of paintings, dated Madonna, appeared in Blondie’s “Rapture” video and cultivated the myth of the temperamental artist, destroying some paintings and pouring dried fruit and nuts on the head of an art dealer. Along the way, he developed a serious drug problem. In the months leading up to his death in 1988 of “acute mixed drug intoxication” – namely opioids and cocaine – he claimed to be shooting a hundred bags of heroin a day. He’s since become one of the most celebrated artists of the past three decades, having been the subject of a biopic and uncountable references in Jay Z songs.