On the lighter side: Rock stars and death

This is the cover of the February 1970 edition of Circus magazine. For you kids, Circus was a big deal in the 1970s, rivaling Rolling Stone on the I Want To Be On the Cover index. It eventually morphed into People for methadone addicts before eventually expiring in 2006.

I thought it would be fun, for certain very narrow definitions of the term, to see how this cover has held up, epidemiologically speaking. It’s a bit uncanny that three of the twenty musicians here would almost immediately join the 27 Club, which really hurts the group’s eventual life expectancy. That is of this moment 61. I used 2019, i.e., pre-Covid Social Security actuarial tables to estimate the eventual life spans of the eight living members of the group, who are (estimated life span in brackets):

Townshend [88]

McCartney [90]

Slick [92]

Davies [89]

Dylan [90]

Jagger [89]

Starr [91]

Page [89]

The number is also hurt by the effects of one assassination and one assassination attempt (George Harrison’s life was almost certainly cut short by the failed attempt to murder him. ETA: A couple of posters have pointed out that Harrison had metastatic lung cancer, so the impression I had that his weakened health as a result of the attempt on his life played a role in his relatively early death is probably wrong).

Other notes for this morbid exercise:

Cash and Presley were not “approaching 30” in 1970 of course — they were 38 and 35 respectively. Cash in particular seems like a weird inclusion given the basic rock music pedigree of everybody else here.

Jimmy Page had just become extremely famous: A year earlier I doubt one in a hundred American rock music fans could have told you who he was. Based on present knowledge extrapolated back to 1970, I would have made him one of the biggest favorites not to make 30, along with Jimi and Keith Richards, whose omission here seems odd, given the composition of the rest of the list.

The fact that eight of these twenty people have a good shot at making 90, while one already did (John Mayall) says something about something.

My candidate for most unlikely musician of that era to have survived into his 80s is without a doubt George Jones, whose pharmacological habits made Keith Richards and Gram Parsons look like Donnie and Marie Osmond.