Worth the dying for...?

April 25th – Apologies due once more for my ineptitude; just have days of feeling a bit shit. I’m sure once the dregs of the anaesthetic wear off I’ll feel a little more positive. OK, on with it:

 It has become more and more obvious, as I've written these daily jottings that probably the world’s worst occupation, certainly as far as risks to self are concerned, is the music industry. It’s the one sure-fire way of attracting death and severe injury to your side that I can think of.
Now I know that, because they’re high profile, their near-death brushes and eventual, fully expected demise is given greater prominence in the press than us other mere mortals, but, even so…

There’s often a sort of group dynamic apparent in stupid people or the use of illicit substances; let’s take touring. When you’re an up and coming band (I’m talking about the 60’s-70’s now) you have to tread the circuit, get about…there was no social media or YouTube to help get your message out. You did that by building a reputation and through that, getting as many gigs as you could in as many places in the country as you could on the back of your local successes; and we’re talking about a time when a word processor was a pencil and rubber here, so…  But despite this seeming difficulty, gigs were, in a way, easier to come by.

Discotheques had yet to be invented (the thought of someone actually being paid to play records at a dance hall would have caused a great deal of merriment back then). 95% of music was live (the 5% not so was out of a jukebox) and most places would be having live music five sometimes six days a week, and on a Thurs/Fri/Sat/Sun night would have at least two bands performing in their halls, sometime three or four in the bigger places, the Locarno’s and Plaza’s of the day if they wanted to survive. As a band, to do this sort of gigging took stamina because we hadn't learnt the wonders of ‘logistics’ back then, so one night you were in Manchester, the next in Marlow, the next Bristol, the next in Leeds and so on. Keeping awake was a daily challenge and so pick-me-ups were much in demand in order to be alert enough to perform; the downside being it was but a small step from requirement to dependence.
As one band member did it so did another and, well, you are all mates, so… However I think there were limits to the spread…or echo effect if you will and in the case of his long-time partner, Pamela Courson, it was a mighty long reverb. She was the lucky lady to find Jim Morrison dead in the bath in his hotel. Mr. Morrison’s (that’s as in ‘Jim’ not as in ‘Morrisons – every penny matters’) use of booze is well documented, as was his use of suspicious additives, and Ms. Courson regularly changed her story about what Mr. Morrison had died of and who had killed him, stating on many an occasion that it was the heroin what dunnit. Sad to say, the echo effect caught up with her on this day in 1974; she died of a heroin o/d so we’ll never know whether Mr. Morrison scrubbed himself to an early demise with a loofah or whether heroin did play a major part in his death. Sam Bennett seems to think so, but that's another story...