Hippies vs. Punks: The Jimi-Janis Die-Off Event

Theodore Roszak warned against the Hippies' obsession with drug use in The Making of a Counter Culture; he devoted an entire chapter to it at the very heart of the book, "The Counterfeit Infinity: The Use and Abuse of Psychedelic Experience."

In 1970 the Hippies lost two of their leading lights within a month. Jimi Hendrix loaded on sleeping pills drowned in his own puke in September; Janis Joplin overdosed on heroin in October. I remember when my mother announced the news to the family. We were in the kitchen and it was early morning. I can't differentiate the two announcements. I know she made a separate one for each, but in my memory they are fused as a single moment. The great Jimi-Janis extinction event. It rocked the Hippies to their core.

The die-off due to overdose and burnout has to be considered as a factor in the rapid ascension of the Punks in the late 1970's. Any avant-garde wedded, as most are, to alcohol and drug use has a limited lifespan. If we date the Hippies from the summer of 1964, as we did earlier, that means by the end of 1970 they had been partying hard for seven years. Jimi and Janis certainly had. And they both gave up the ghost at 27 years of age. The body can only take so much. (Twenty-seven is when I first felt the lasting effects of regular, heavy drinking. I got a pair of black eyes that never left.)

You can see from this listless almost self-parodying performance at the Isle of Wight Festival three weeks before his death that Hendrix was spent:

For Hippies who kept at it for another five years, if death didn't result then mental and physical impairment often did. Did George Harrison ever recover creatively from his coked-out Dark Horse tour? One can argue that he did not. By the time the Punks arrive on the scene the Hippies are reeling from the effects of 11 years of drinking, smoking and drugging; they're easy pickings for a pack of "no future" nihilists.

Ten years ago I read Victor Bockris' Patti Smith: An Unauthorized Biography. I had picked it up off a remainder table. In the 1990's Patti Smith's husband, Fred "Sonic" Smith; her original Patti Smith Group keyboard player, Richard Sohl; and her brother, Todd, all died, depending on where you read it, of heart attacks (some sources refer to Todd's cause of death as stroke). The oldest, at 45, was Fred "Sonic" Smith.

The rocker, whether Punk or Hippie, rockin' it true doesn't last long. The proto-Punk avatar poet Arthur Rimbaud is the Romantic model; he only made it to 37.