The 32 Club Is the Better Long Strange Trip
The 27 Club gets the poster. But the 32 Club, Moon and Bonham and Karen Carpenter and the players nobody writes about, tells the truer story about what music asks of you.
"The extra verse is where the music actually gets good."
Come on in. Sit down, tune low, let the low E ring out until it goes soft at the edges. We are not in a hurry tonight. The best things never are. I want to talk to you about two clubs nobody ever asked to join, and about why, after all the miles and all the goodbyes, I have come around to loving the quieter one.
Everybody knows the 27 Club. It is the famous one. It has the poster, the documentary, the airbrushed faces on the dorm wall, the candle the kids light every year. Robert Johnson, Brian Jones, Jimi, Janis, Jim, Kurt, Amy. Beautiful people, all of them. Comets, every single one. I am not here to say a word against them. You do not speak ill of the bright ones. But I am going to walk you down the hall to the smaller room, the one with the lower ceiling and the warmer light, the 32 Club, because I think it tells the truer story about what music is and what it asks of the people who give their whole lives to it.
Here is the thing about twenty-seven. Twenty-seven is the age of the comet. You burn so hot the whole sky stops what it is doing to watch, and then you are gone before the second verse even lands. There is a romance to it. The world loves a comet, because a comet never has to grow old, never has to put out the difficult fourth record, never has to learn how to lose gracefully. But romance is the easy part, friends. A comet is a promise nobody got to keep. It is the bridge you can hear coming and then the tape runs out.
Thirty-two is a different animal. Thirty-two has road miles on it. Thirty-two means you played the empty rooms and the screaming ones, you broke down on the highway and got back up, you found out what your hands could actually do at three in the morning when nobody was clapping. The people in that second room had been around the wheel a couple of times. They had lived enough to have regrets, and to have grace, which is what you get when you outlast a few of your regrets. They did not die before the journey started. They died with the journey already in them, already in the grooves.
So let us go around the room.
Start with the heartbeat, because that is where a band starts whether the guitar player wants to admit it or not. The 32 Club took three of the greatest drummers who ever lived. Keith Moon, who played the kit like the kit owed him money, who turned timekeeping into a controlled explosion and somehow always landed back on the one. John Bonham, Bonzo, the man who made four bars of a drum break sound like the side of a mountain coming loose, a sound so big they are still sampling it half a century on. And Keith Godchaux, our Keith, who slid onto the piano bench and found the spaces inside our songs that even we did not know were there.
Now here is a secret every guitar player learns eventually, and most of us learn it the hard way. The drummer is the soul of the band. I know, I know. We get the solos and the spotlights and the fancy tone talk. We are the ones they ask about pickups and pedals. But the drummer is the floor you are standing on, the thing that makes the whole conversation possible. The 32 Club pulled the floor out from under three of the best bands in the world. The Who were never the same. Led Zeppelin simply stopped, laid the whole thing down, because they understood that you do not replace a heartbeat, you just learn to live quieter without it. That is not a footnote. That is the foundation walking out the door.
I can speak to this one without reaching for a metaphor. We lost Pigpen young, at twenty-seven, the same number as all the comets, our blues heart, the guy who could make a Hammond organ testify. And then a few years on we lost Keith at thirty-two. So you see, our little family touches both rooms. We are in both clubs. And when the wheel takes two from the same band, you stop holding any of it at arm's length like a fact in a magazine. You feel both ages from the inside. You feel the comet and you feel the traveler. And you go play the next show anyway, because that is the deal you signed, but you carry them up there onto the stage with you, both of them, and the music gets a little heavier and a little holier for it.
And here is the part that really turned me, the part that made me love that second room more than the famous one. It is not all guitars and drums and hard living. It has range. It has the whole spread of what music can be.
Karen Carpenter is in that room. A voice like warm light coming through a kitchen window on a Sunday, the kind of voice that could break your heart over a tea kettle. And get this, she was a drummer too, a real one, a good one, before the world decided it only wanted the voice. So the 32 Club took four drummers, if you are counting honest. Cass Elliot is in there, big-hearted Mama Cass, harmonizing with the angels she always sounded like she had already met for coffee. Florence Ballard is in there, a founding Supreme, Motown royalty before she was thirty, who got pushed out of the group she helped build and died with almost nothing, which is its own kind of song, the saddest kind, the kind that should make every one of us hold the people in our band a little tighter.
That is a fuller picture of what music actually is than the 27 Club ever got around to painting. That is pop and soul and folk and thunder, all living at the same address, passing the salt at the same table.
And because this is a guitar house, let me point you to the players in that room, the ones the headlines skip. Ricky Wilson of the B-52s, who tuned his guitar like nobody before him, who took strings off and made a stripped-down instrument sound like a whole strange beautiful ocean, who built Rock Lobster out of surf and static and pure joy. He was twenty-seven when he made some of that and gone at thirty-two, and the band kept his sound alive because they did not know how to play it any other way. And Doug Hopkins of the Gin Blossoms, who wrote Hey Jealousy and Found Out About You, wrote the songs that paid for the bus, and got let go from his own band before those songs ever got famous. He did not get to stand in the light his own hands built. That one stings, friends. If you have ever written something good and watched somebody else play it, you know exactly where Doug lives in that room.
Even the joke in there is a person. Rob Pilatus of Milli Vanilli, the lip-sync king, the punchline of a whole era. But pull back and it is just a kid who wanted to be on the stage so bad he agreed to stand in front of somebody else's voice, and the world laughed, and he never got out from under it. Thirty-two. The 32 Club does not let you keep anybody at a distance. It makes you see the human inside the headline, even the funny ones, especially the funny ones.
Now some clever folks with white coats once ran the numbers, and they found out that twenty-seven is not actually a cursed age at all. Turns out a musician is just about as likely to go at twenty-five, or thirty-two, as at twenty-seven. The club was always a story we told because the story was beautiful, not because the math said so. And I love that, because it means thirty-two was never the lesser room by accident. It was just quieter. The good stuff usually is.
Here is what I think it all comes down to, and why this matters on a page full of people learning chords and chasing tone. Music is not a comet. Music is a long relationship with an instrument that does not love you back at first and then, one day, after enough mornings, finally does. Tone does not come in a pedal. Tone comes in the years. The bend you have been trying to nail since you were sixteen finally sits right at thirty-two, because by then your hand has forgotten how to try and just plays. That is the whole secret. The extra verse is where the music actually gets good.
So pour one out for the comets. They earned it, every one. But me, I will take the long strange trip every single time. I will take the travelers, the road-worn, the ones who got a few more miles to make it on, the ones who learned the difference between fast and true and then went and showed us. I will take the extra verse.
The wheel turns. Nobody beats the wheel. But the funny thing about a song is that it does not actually stop when the player does. It just hangs there in the air, in the room, in your hands the next time you pick the thing up.
So pick it up. Tune low. Play on.
We will all be in one of those rooms eventually. Make the verses count.
Keep playing
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