December is that most wonderful time of the year, when the music industry noisily gloats over its biggest-selling albums and shamelessly implores music journalists to include these artists in their “Best of the Year” lists.

All but lost in this gratuitous showcase of auto-fellatio is the music industry’s most depressing story of 2014, which was that playing music can dramatically reduce your lifespan, at least according to one Australian researcher.

In October, Dianna Kenny, a professor of psychology and music at the University of Sydney published "Stairway to hell: life and death in the pop music industry" (sic), an examination of musician mortality that laid out a jaw-dropping statistic: musicians live an average of twenty-five years less than the average U.S. population.

Surprised? Perhaps not. In fact, by the time you’re reading these words, odds are that you’ve already conjured the images of one or more notorious rockers who perished long before their time. Many are familiar with the fabled “27 Club”—that statistically enigmatic phenomenon that, in a span of just two years, saw Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison all die at age 27.

If this club was seen as an anomaly fixed in time, it re-entered pop culture with renewed momentum with the more recent deaths of Kurt Cobain and Amy Winehouse, two high-profile artists whose deaths at age 27 were shocking, although not entirely unexpected due to their public battles with addiction.

In 2013, author Howard Sounes published an absorbing consideration of this phenomenon—27: A History of the 27 Club. Rolling Stones founder Brian Jones also died at age 27, and his drowning death in his own swimming pool—originally ruled an accident—was recently exposed as a murder in a deathbed confession. Also, in a fascinating new Doors biography, British author Mick Wall has eviscerated any lingering beliefs that Morrison died of a heart attack in his own bathtub, arguing that in fact the singer died of a heroin overdose in a Paris nightclub.

Sounes looked at nearly 3500 musician deaths and grouped them according to age, ranging from ages 15 to 105. Sure enough, the author confronted an unmistakable spike in the number of deaths at age 27. The same research revealed a similar spike at age 80, although “80 Club” just doesn’t have the same ring to it. Nonetheless, Sounes’ research established a sobering and unimpeachable reality: half of the musicians failed to reach age 60.

While many others have looked at the inflated rates of pop star mortality, Kenny claims to have gathered the largest sample group yet, stating, “I’ve undertaken the first population study of performing pop musicians (n=12,665) from all popular genres who died between 1950 and June 2014, of whom 90.6% (11,478 musicians) were male.” Frustratingly for many of us, Kenny’s research is silent regarding mortality rates of kids who played in shitty weekend cover bands for a few years after college.

Kenny’s numbers aren't the other evidence to back up this disheartening trend. A 2007 study looked at pop stars who had at least one entry in a list of the 1000 best pop albums and followed those musicians for the next twenty-five years. Sure enough, these musicians were two to three times more likely to die than the general population. Think about that before you buy your kid those piano lessons for Christmas.

Another detailed evaluation of rock star mortality found that musicians whose fame occurred after 1980 fared better than older rockers. What's more, Americans musicians tended to outlive their European counterparts, with the median age of U.S. deaths at 45, while the European median was just below 40. Interestingly, North American solo artists had the worst survival rates of them all. Consider yourself warned, Burt Bacharach.

Certainly the knee-jerk reaction to these staggering rock star mortality rates is that it all goes back to that libertine ethos of sex, drugs and rock and roll. Whether it’s Bon Scott choking on his own vomit after a prodigious night of boozing or Whitney Houston’s drugged-out drowning in her hotel bathtub, substance abuse is anecdotally the most well-known cause of death for musicians, although statistically drugs and alcohol account for approximately one-third of those deaths, according to the 2007 study.

Another thirty percent of musician deaths are travel-related. Metallica’s Cliff Burton was killed at age 24 when the band’s tour bus ran off the road in Sweden. More recently, Black Tusk’s 32 year-old bassist Jonathan Athon died in a motorcycle accident in Georgia just last month. Many travel-related accidents are ultimately tied back to drug or alcohol abuse at some level however, such as 25 year-old Randy Rhoads’ death in a plane crash in 1982. The deceased pilot tested positive for cocaine in the autopsy’s toxicology report.

Homicides also claim a significant percentage of musician deaths (including Pantera’s “Dimebag” Darrell Abbott, Tupac Shakur, and Christopher Wallace, aka “The Notorious B.I.G.”), as do random, legitimate accidents. Bringing up the rear is death via natural circumstances. While these causes of death are not peculiar to musicians, they do seem to occur with considerably higher frequency in that world. What gives?

Weezer bassist Scott Shriner has been gigging professionally for over thirty years, with decades of touring the globe under his belt. Is he surprised to learn the rather dire prognosis for him and his colleagues?

“I am and I’m not,” he tells us, “because I see a lot of the musicians who have been touring and working for a long time and a lot of them look like shit. All the flying and the traveling could be part of it, and obviously the lifestyle might have something to do with it.”

Yet while he agrees that the prevalence of drugs and all-around reckless living supports these studies, other factors might also apply.

“I think it’s a lot harder than people realize. I think the constant flow of adrenaline and endorphins creates highs and lows that are extremely drastic.

"I’ll have the greatest night of my life," he continues, "like total euphoria, and then suddenly I’m back in my hotel room by myself, trying not to eat everything in the minibar at midnight. I’m feeling depressed and alone and it’s because the comedown from the adrenaline is so drastic. So that could also be a part of it.”

Nobody should be viewing these numbers as a cry to give up their slot at the weekly open mic night. For every rock star who dies prematurely, there is another who lives a full, rich life, playing music well into their advanced years.

In fact, this year’s musician deaths span a typically broad range of ages, genders and genres. 2014 presided over the premature deaths of a number of musicians including Wayne Static (48), Gwar’s Dave Brockie (50), American Idol contestant Michael Johns (35) and singer Simone Battle (25). At the same time, this year’s mortality roster additionally included Pete Seeger (94), Johnny Winter (70), Jack Bruce (71), Ian McLagan (69) and Phil Everly (74).

While professional sports leagues generally offer education and resources to players who are suddenly thrust into the world of fame and fortune, no such paradigm exists in the music world, which is inherently wild and unorganized, even in the highest tiers of the industry.

The establishment of MusiCares, the Grammy-sponsored group for supporting musicians in financial, medical or emotional distress, represents a step forward, but we’re still light years away from managing the underlying problems.

Fortunately, the next generation of pop stars have no shortage of examples of successful musicians who have steered clear of or survived the perils of rock and roll decadence. Like them or loathe them, icons like Gene Simmons and Madonna are proof that successful careers don’t have to end before age 30.

Shriner sees the tides already turning. “I feel like I’m in the best shape of my life, coming up on fifty. I also see a lot of other musicians who have changed their lives, who are healthy, who are regularly exercising and who have figured out how to avoid that paradigm of eating in truck stops or worse, not eat and just drink and smoke until you die. I think that model is changing.”

Still, these depressing mortality trends show no signs of abating in our lifetimes. Does this mean that buying your kid a guitar is an early death sentence? Perhaps not, but still, these studies certainly cast a new light on Neil Young’s defiant, oft-quoted lyric from his 1979 hit, "Hey Hey, My My (Into the Black)": "It’s better to burn out than to fade away."

For many rock musicians, this might not be a choice so much as a fact of life.

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