Rock ‘n’ R.I.P.
Dead is the new sexy,” leers Moriarty, played by Andrew Scott in BBC’s Sherlock, which begins its fourth season on a high camp note.
Death has always been a secret career option for rock stars, whose shelf life may not always sustain the inevitable roller-coaster highs and lows of stardom.
You have your 27 Club — Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin, Kurt Cobain, Amy Winehouse and others — who for one reason or another dropped out before confronting the myriad choices required to actually live a long life. Psychologists say rock stars are tempted by short-term choices to defy the long-term haul: we think we can cheat death when we’re young, basically. Or maybe it just comes down to youthful rebellion: who wants to be told they’re not actually a Golden God when they’re 27?
Last year brought us a trio of rock documentaries that charted such death tempters: Amy, a private look at British singer Amy Winehouse through home movies, mobile phone clips and such; Jaco, a glimpse at the torrid bass-playing genius Jaco Pastorius who died at age 35 after being savagely beaten by a bouncer outside a Miami club; and Montage of Heck, a mishmash of interviews, drawings and animated reimaginings set around Kurt Cobain’s private stash of recordings.
To say that each is a depressing examination of rock’s pitfalls is an understatement. Kurt and Amy didn’t make it past 27, and their documentaries show us a fractured timeline of disintegration: there’s the phone video of bright-eyed Winehouse, age 14, capering about with friends at a birthday party, as normal as any other group of girls until Amy uncorks a voice and talent that shines right through the camera lens. Fast-forward to video-captured moments with bad-choice boyfriend Blake Fielder a few years later, and the smell of death is already haunting the camera: tattoos start to speckle a body that is becoming death camp thin, accentuated by a towering beehive hairdo, slurred speech, deadened eyes and an unsteady gait on high heels. Winehouse was prone to very bad taste in men, apparently compelled by the absence of a father whose approval she wanted desperately. (When daddy Mitchell Winehouse does turn up on camera in Asif Kapadia’s documentary, it’s to give bad advice — “Amy doesn’t need to go to rehab” — or else to use his daughter as an on-camera prop for a documentary about himself when she starts to become paparazzi shark bait.)
Winehouse possessed a deep appreciation for jazz craft, but this shifted to pop — specifically, doo-wop and girl groups of the ‘60s — when she met up with producer Mark Ronson. When the Grammies and MTV Music Awards started to shower down, it was too late: Winehouse had adopted the scummy habits of now-husband Blake, caught freebasing on camera for the tabloids, and the rest of the documentary shows Amy in public amid a nonstop blur of flashing cameras. It was enough to push Winehouse into addiction, bulimia and canceling concerts, and though Amy doesn’t really spell out what went wrong with this 27 Clubber, it’s almost tattooed across the screen in lethal lines: nobody thinks they can’t cheat death when they’re young.
Somehow, you can’t escape the name of Jaco Pastorius when it comes to bass players. Every player who heard him, it seems, was changed. In Paul Marchand and Stephen Kijak’s film Jaco, we get plenty of testimony from outside the world of jazz: Sting, Flea, Carlos Santana, Bootsy Collins and Metallica bassist Robert Trujillo. They all applaud Jaco, who began playing Miami gigs in funk bands at age 14, for coloring outside the lines. And hand in hand with this compliment is an acknowledgment that his ego was in proportion to his talent. “I’m Jaco Pastorius,” he would announce when introduced to Joe Zawinul of Weather Report. “The best mother****ing bass player in the world.”
Jaco only took up bass by accident — he liked percussion, piano and anything he could tap — but when he started playing it he knew he had to do something unique. Prying the frets off his instrument’s neck with a knife, he became the king of slurred, percolating bass lines and ringing harmonics, taking, say, the Charlie Parker solo in Donna Lee and recreating each note.
His pride made him reckless (or was he simply prone to violent encounters?), and epic onstage duels with keyboardist Zawinul in Weather Report made him, possibly, the first rock star jazz fusion bassist.
But despite key associations — Joni Mitchell, Pat Metheny, John McLaughlin and Tony Williams in the Trio of Doom — that could have kept Jaco’s trajectory traveling even higher, he started to fall apart. The documentary shows heartbreaking footage of Jaco, apparently drunk or stoned, trashing other fusion players on camera (“Chuck Mangione wears a f***in’ hat!”) and slipping away into a lifestyle that goes hand in hand with rock decline. Add to that a diagnosed bipolar condition, and you begin to see how Jaco’s prophecy that he would die by age 34 was only off by one year. Despite the heights scaled by Weather Report — probably the hottest fusion band in the world in the ‘70s, playing to rock concert crowds — Pastorius didn’t seem to want to be part of a club that would have him as a member. He battled with Zawinul, stubbornly worked on non-commercial material that his record label refused to release, like a steel drum album, and generally flipped a middle finger at the notion of commercial fame.
By the end, Jaco was sleeping in Miami parks, playing acoustic guitar for spare change, and occasionally trying to barge his way onto local club stages, as he did on the night he apparently tried to join Santana onstage and was rudely ejected by a bouncer. The beating he received resulted in a coma from which Jaco never recovered. He was 35. Was rock ‘n’ roll to blame for his death? Jaco Pastorius, composer of the Weather Report song Punk Jazz, and possibly a punk at heart, might have only shrugged at the question, half-agreeing, half not giving a crap.
Montage of Heck meanwhile charts the life and death of Kurt Cobain through a weird lens: the singer/songwriter’s own recorded voice, mumbling pseudo-poetry, sonic collages and imagined reminiscences about lying on railroad tracks in his hometown of Aberdeen, Washington. Filmmaker Brett Morgan apparently persuaded friends of Kurt and family to surrender huge caches of private material, thus the film is colorfully narrated, in part, by Cobain himself, who seemed to view his life as an ongoing art project before Nirvana made all of that superfluous. His creative breakthroughs seem to come while living with a Seattle girlfriend who pretty much allowed him to sit around all day while she was at work, strumming his guitar, getting wasted and committing every fleeting thought to 4-track recording or notebook. This material is golden, offering animators Stefan Nadelman and Hisko Hulsing vivid background upon which to conjure Rotoscoped images of Kurt puttering around the homestead in his bathrobe, making “art.” The highlight is an almost unlistenable 14-minute sonic collage — Montage of Heck — which pretty much captures where Cobain was, mentally.
Critics may snipe that all this stuff is being pried out of Cobain’s coffin to fill various coffers — an accompanying CD soundtrack and a book have been released, to cash in on all the new Kurt interest — but the family members interviewed, including wife Courtney and daughter Frances Bean, seem to put a seal of approval on the whole deal.
Was Cobain simply another rock star who courted death? We get familiar regurgitations of Cobain’s suicide attempts, the high-speed gravy train of Nirvana apparently too fast-moving to quit or get off of; the cries for help from a husband who was possibly more co-dependent on Courtney than he should’ve been; Nirvana member Krist Novoselic sheds a respectful, thoughtful light on his former bandmate, though drummer Dave Grohl apparently wanted no part in the project.
Cobain, we learn, had a chronic stomach ailment that may have pushed him into narcotic self-medication; he felt dissatisfaction with his music, as indicated in a note found near his body (“I haven’t felt the excitement of listening to as well as creating music, along with really writing... for too many years now”); and perhaps it was one too many glimpses into a future of addiction and decline that led the 27-year-old to one day acquaint himself with a shotgun in his Seattle home. His body wasn’t found until three days later. Death can’t be cheated, apparently, but life can be drastically rewritten by its rock star players.
