The British Royal Mail just unveiled a series of ten classic record covers made into stamps. The selection was based on the artwork, not the music, and includes the last record Brian Jones played on with the Rolling Stones, 1969′s Let It Bleed. The cover features the tone arm of a phonograph and a cake baked by the now-famous British cookbook author and TV-host Delia Smith. Brian Jones is credited with playing autoharp on “You Got the Silver” (which also features Keith Richards’ solo vocal debut), and (hardly audible) percussion on “Midnight Rambler.”

Here’s the complete list:
Rolling Stones/Let It Bleed (1969)
Led Zeppelin/’IV’ (1971)
David Bowie/The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars (1972)
Mike Oldfield/Tubular Bells (1973)
The Clash/London Calling (1979)
New Order/Power, Corruption and Lies (1983)
Primal Scream/Screamadelica (1991)
Pink Floyd/The Division Bell (1994)
Blur/Parklife (1994)
Coldplay/A Rush of Blood to the Head (2002)

Now, will the USPS please get on the bandwagon and release stamps along the same lines?

Turning thirty is a big deal. Many experience the last years of their twenties as a transitional phase between youth and maturity. Thirty marks the real entry to adulthood—an age where most people have completed their university degrees, found their vocation, and are comfortably settled in a relationship—or not.

Renowned astrologer Rob Tillett, who spent the seventies as a touring rock & roller in his native Australia and now publishes the popular site Astrology On The Web, says that we spend the end of our twenties “clearing the decks of karmic debris for a clean course for the next cycle.”

“Every twenty-nine years naturally presents us with the challenge to rise to new levels of awareness, or face the consequences of having failed to gain the wisdom required to do so,” Tillett says. It’s a phenomenon known in astrology as Saturn Return.

It takes the planet Saturn twenty-nine and a half years to return to the same position it occupied at the time we were born, a significant event as it marks the end of one cycle and the beginning of another.

Astrologers argue that Saturn Return is one of life’s most important thresholds as it intensifies one’s feelings of sadness, isolation, and purpose. In the words of Rob Hand, author of Planets In Transit, it’s “a time of endings and new beginnings,” a fitting characteristic for Saturnus, the Roman harvest god, the model for the grim reaper.

The Romans celebrated the god at Saturnalia. This festival commenced December 17 during winter solstice, the darkest night of the year. Saturnalia turned society’s laws and customs upside down. Slaves became masters (or at least ate at the same table as their masters), gambling was permitted for all, and, in the words of a Roman commentator from 50 A.D., “loose reigns were given to public dissipation.”

But Saturnalia meant more than a drunken carnival. It was a celebration of Rome’s golden age, an era of peace and harmony that was supposed to have taken place under Saturn’s rule. The Greek poet Hesiod wrote that it was the purest of all ages, a time of balmy weather, leisure, and no fear of death.

Thomas Paine, the American Revolution’s ideological inspirator, wrote, “The supposed reign of Saturn was prior to that which is called the heathen mythology, and was so far a species of theism that it admitted the belief of only one God.” So according to Paine, Saturn is the ur-God, the lone ruler of the vast, ancient universe. Saturn was Ninib to Babylonians and Cronus to the Greek—one of the seven Titans who ruled the world until Zeus kicked them off their galactic thrones.

Saturn is known as the “greater malefic,” or “the killing planet,” and it manifests itself in various ways. “Saturn demands resolution and restructuring,” Tillett says. “Resolution of unfinished business and restructuring of our lives to move forward into the future.”

The changes instigated by Saturn are really fantastic opportunities for those who are ready and capable of making major changes in their lives—harvesting what’s been sown.

“Saturn rules the responsibilities, restrictions and limitations we are apt to encounter, and the lessons we must learn in life. He does not deny or diminish imagination, inspiration, spirituality, or good fortune, but he does demand that these things be given structure and meaning,” Tillett explains.

The 27s died before their Saturn returned, and Tillett postulates that other astrological factors are involved. “The 27^th year is an incredibly hefty one,” he notes. “Astrologically, it’s the building up to Saturn Return, but other key factors are at work too.”

Moving at less than one degree per month, it takes the Moon 27 to 28 years to make it 360 degrees around the zodiac. At that point, the Moon revisits its natal position: “The first progressed Lunar Return at age 27 marks the beginning of the difficult transition from the Phase of Youth to the Phase of Maturity,” Tillett says. “The pace of our lives seems to accelerate, as we hurry to clear the decks of karmic debris, in preparation for the next grand stage of the great journey of life. This transitional phase lasts until the Saturn Return, which usually occurs within a year or two.” (Tillett adds that this process is repeated at age 56 when we experience another transition; from the Phase of Maturity to the Phase of Wisdom.)

Another strong effect occurs when the moon’s pathway crosses the sun’s course. These sensitive points are known as the moon’s nodes (also called the dragon’s head and tail). “A collision between the north and south nodes occur during the 27^th year, which often generates intense insecurities that lead to major transformations of the life-path,” Tillett adds.

A fourth cause of difficulties is completing the 27-year cycle around the Pythagorean Triangle, a numerical and astrological concept that we’ll explore later on.

For The 27s, Tillett theorizes, “Their energy is so heavily pushed into a particular channel [i.e. music] and when that channel dries up, they don’t know how to move through the pathway.”

With Tillett’s perspective in mind, it’s easy to see that their creativity waned, replaced with distractions (bad relationships, drugs, dwelling on missed opportunities, or fumbling for a “real” or “new” purpose) and a sense of out-of-focusness towards the end of their lives. At least that’s the case for most of them.

Robert Johnson stuck his tongue in the honey pot and got stung; Jesse Belvin was caught up in things he couldn’t control—be it hiring a party driver or becoming a victim to American apartheidists; Brian Jones was a medicated mess for the latter part of his life; and as we shall see, Jimi Hendrix fumbled for a purpose; Janis Joplin chose to walk alone; Jim Morrison turned to destructive disgust. Ad nauseum.

Could it be that The 27s were too caught up in their youth and therefore unwilling, unable, or simply not ready to move across that threshold and face the responsibilities and expectations (theirs and/or others’) that come with adulthood?

Excerpt from The 27s: The Greatest Myth of Rock & Roll

Richey James Edwards

Born: December 22, 1967, in Blackwood, Wales, UK
Disappeared: February 1, 1995, in Wales, UK
Band: Manic Street Preachers

Richey James Edwards of the Welsh Manic Street Preachers was a huge fan of Cobain and thought of him as a kindred soul who was also suffering from existential depression. After a post-gig interview in 1991 with New Musical Express’s Steve Lamacq—who inferred that the band’s image was an artistic mask and that the music alone should say enough—Richey took him aside and said, “Believe me, we are for real.” He carved “4real” into his left forearm using a razor blade. “I was really fucked off,” Richey explained later. “I didn’t know what I could possibly say to him to make understand.”

Edwards suffered from vicious bouts of depression, anorexia, alcoholism, and self-mutilation. The latter started when a fan handed Richey a cutlery set before a gig in Thailand with a note that urged him to cut himself on stage that night. He did.

“I’m on my own, I’m very selfish,” Richey said in an interview. “Self disgust is self-obsession—that’s the truest line on there, probably.” Richey referred to “Faster,” a song he wrote for Manic’s monumental The Holy Bible from 1994. The lyricist (and second guitarist) cut his wrists on the eve of the record’s release, but he convinced his bandmates that it wasn’t a suicide attempt. “In terms of the S word, that does not enter my mind. And it never has,” Richey insisted in an interview, but few outside of his closest circle believed him.

The Holy Bible is one of the top three records of the 1990s. 4real.

It’s a creative collaboration, a defining masterpiece with a fat sound, hard flanging hooks, and sinewy leads accentuated by drummer Sean Moore. The stark lyrics about religion, eating disorders (“4st 7lb”), and iconoclasms were emancipated from Richey’s troubled head, while bassist Nicky Wire filled in the last quarter. Guitarist James Dean Bradfield says he struggled to set music to the dire stanzas, but the result is astonishing.

Even though the record climbed to number six on the UK album charts, it took a few years for critics and listeners to wrap their heads around it. The Manics are virtually unknown in the US (partly because their US distributor insisted on censoring songs and album designs in the name of morals and decency), but the Brits revered them as the hippest in Brit pop. In a way the Manics filled the same role on Britain’s musical landscape as the Bunnymen had before them. Not coincidentally, the quartet sported military fatigues and draped their amps with camouflage nettings a la Echo & the Bunnymen anno 1980.

The controversy surrounding Richey and death continued with the Bible track “Die In the Summertime,” but Richey spun that one too, claiming it was written before he experienced self-destructive tendencies: “Die In the Summertime was basically an old man looking back over his life, over his favorite period of youth, his childhood, basically. Everybody’s got a perfect mental time of their life and that’s what that song is about. And it was written last summer.”

Sure, that’s one interpretation. Although mentally ill, Richey commanded an incredible intellect. He was drawn to very heavy stuff such as the Holocaust, Albert Camus, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Van Gogh, Sylvia Plath, and Joy Division’s Ian Curtis. His artistic, literary, and musical heroes lived short, depressed, yet productive lives.

“He’s just a mess. Fucking nutter, the boy is,” Nicky Wire said after Richey was interred at the Priory, the same mental institution that Brian Jones had stayed at in 1967.

In 1995, the day before a promotional visit to the US, Richey disappeared from the hotel where he was staying. A note addressed to his sometime girlfriend read, “I love you.” His passport and wallet were found at his apartment in Cardiff Bay, which proved he had stopped by there after he left the hotel. But no more clues were discovered until two weeks later when Richey’s abandoned car was found near the Severn Bridge. The battery was flat, and it looked like someone had spent several nights in the vehicle. Could he have jumped from the bridge, his body dragged from the Severn into the Bristol Channel and from there to the Atlantic Ocean? “That’s the only time that I genuinely ever thought that, you know, he’s dead,” Moore said.

Despite no confirmed sightings since February ’95, the remaining band members still deposit Richey’s royalty shares into an escrow account in case he resurfaces. Richey’s heroes fall into two categories: they either staged their own disappearance or they committed suicide. More than a decade has passed since he vanished, but The Manics, Richey’s family, and innumerable fans still believe he’s alive. Is he peaced out in a monastery somewhere, or was that Richey James Edwards someone spotted on the beach in the Canary Islands or Goa, in Mexico or Iceland? “He was a very intelligent guy,” says Simon Price, who wrote Everything (A Book About The Manic Street Preachers). “If he wanted to disappear, he could’ve done it.” At the end of 2007 New Musical Express, Britain’s leading music mag, named the Manic Street Preachers recipient of the 2008 God Like Geniuses Award in honor of their outstanding, unique, and innovative career. Prior recipients include The Clash, New Order, and Primal Scream.

Robert Johnson

Born: May 8, 1911, in Hazlehurst, Mississippi
Died: August 16, 1938, in Greenwood, Mississippi

Robert Johnson lived and died in relative obscurity. He was a rootless, restless, sly, street-smart, womanizing, whiskey-drinking hobo with a guitar and a gifted ability to pick up and synthesize the music he heard in juke joints and from records and radio. He played mills and barrooms and is only known to have recorded 29 tracks over two recording sessions, yet his music helped father rock & roll.

A 1961 release titled King of The Delta Blues Singers bore the painting of a faceless man hunched over his guitar—none of the two known photographs of Robert Johnson had surfaced (not until 1986 and 1989). Robert Johnson sounded primal, sang with lived passion about dark meetings at crossroads, love in vain and hellhounds on his trail, and died from poisoning under strange circumstances. Robert Johnson is an enigma and an amalgam elevated by white rockers to the pantheon as a mysterious folkloric hero. When alive, Robert Johnson was never the King of The Delta—just a talented minstrel—but his influence makes him the grandfather of rock.

An assorted collection of artists who have covered the songs of Robert Johnson include (in no particular order) The Rolling Stones, Canned Heat, Cream, the Blues Brothers Band, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Ry Cooder, Eric Clapton, Cowboy Junkies, John Hammond, Peter Green, Cassandra Wilson, the Radiators, Fleetwood Mac, ZZ Top, Freddie King, Elmore James, Asylum Street Spankers, George Thorogood & the Destroyers, Keb ‘Mo’, Walter Trout Band, Lucinda Williams, Rocky Lawrence, Rory Block, Pyeng Threadgill, John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers, Chris Thomas King, the Jeff Healy Band, Pussy Galore, White Stripes, Foghat, Status Quo, Johnny Shines, Roy Rogers, Led Zeppelin, Muddy Waters, Bonnie Raitt, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Grateful Dead, and Widespread Panic.

Jimi Hendrix

Born: November 27, 1942, in Seattle, Washington
Died: September 18, 1970, in a London hotel room
Bands: The Jimi Hendrix Experience, Band of Gypsys

The guitar was an extension of Jimi, a fifth limb he relied on as much as others would a leg or an arm. He played during set breaks or on the bus, recorded or jammed after shows, played along to Bob Dylan records during interviews and slept with the guitar at the edge of the bed.

Hendrix was born in Seattle by a teenage mom while his much older dad was stationed in the south. Jimi’s parents were both poor and alcoholic and they moved around a lot, living out of flop houses, cheap hotels and with friends and relatives, never staying too long in any place. With an upbringing marked by uncertainty, hunger, the death of his mother and belt whippings by his dad, Jimi became shy and introverted. One of his few joys was playing guitar on a broom along to old blues records. Somebody talked his dad into buying him a guitar and he spent his teenage years playing in a band around Seattle, including the premier club in the Northwest, the Spanish Castle. It didn’t take “half a day to get there,” as he later sang in “Spanish Castle Magic,” but traveling in beat-up cars sometimes led to unpleasant delays.

After a brief stint as a parachuter with 101st Airborne Jimi left the army guitarless, wearing issued clothes and $300 in his pocket. He walked into a jazz joint and spent all but $16. Unable to afford the Greyhound back to Seattle, he snuck back on the base and begged to get his guitar back from the guy he’d pawned it to. After recovering the axe, he spent the next three years priming his chops as a hired gun on the Chitlin’ Circuit—juke joints, cafes, dances and parties from Virginia to Florida, in the Delta and over to Texas—not unlike Robert Johnson had before him. Jimi’s knowledge of R&B, soul and rock hits of the day led to backing jobs for the stars of the day—Little Richard, Ike and Tina Turner and many others—but he kept getting fired for being too flashy. Otis Burke traded Jimi like a baseball card on the tour bus to Otis Redding for two horn players. He was fired a week later and left on the side of the road, but the penniless guitarist simply waited till another tour rolled through town for job.

Jimi eventually made it to New York City, playing with Curtis Knight—a pimp with a band—and his own, Jimmy James and the Blue Flames. Hendrix was finally in the spotlight, but his guitar reverberated nightly across an empty room at the Cheetah Club. Luckily, his dexterity caught the attention of Keith Richards’ girlfriend, Linda Keith, who kept bringing musicians and producers into the club until Chas Chandler of the Animals decided to fly Jimi to London. Finally, his career picked up speed. The day of Hendrix’ arrival, his guitantics wowed members of Britain’s musical cognoscenti and he found himself a girlfriend who had previously dated Brian Jones of The Rolling Stones and Keith Moon of the Who. Eric Burdon of the Animals who was present that night recalled later that, “It was haunting how good he was.” A week later Chandler brought Jimi to a Cream show so he could meet Clapton. Armed with his guitar he asked if he could jam—a request so ballsy that the guys were caught off guard. Nobody had ever asked to sit in with Cream before. Grafitti around London at the time proclaimed Clapton was God and here was this unknown, wild haired dude clutching a Fender Stratocaster. Jimi plugged in and played Howlin’ Wolf’s “Killing Floor” in triple speed. Eric’s jaw dropped. “I thought, ‘My god, this is like Buddy Guy on acid,’ ” he recalled later.

The years on the Chitlin’ Circuit finally paid off. Hendrix had learned how to entertain audiences from watching Little Richards, how to bend strings from Albert King, sat by the feet of B.B. and picked up techniques from an apt student of T-Bone Walker and Freddie King. The analytical musical cannibal had finally transformed into a virtuoso anxious to take on the world.

The Jimi Hendrix Experience shook the world with its innovative sounds and fierce electric assaults. He used amps and electronic effects as instruments as much as the guitar, creating dive-bombs, haunting feedback, wah-wah modulated melodies, the sound of a rapid-fire machine gun and Delta blues soaked with dripping washes from the uni-vibe. Jimi suddenly found himself as the celestial center of the psychedelic 60’s, embracing road sex and alterations from acid to speed. Although some women were more important to Jimi than others, he shied away from intimacy and commitment, perhaps ingrained from watching his parents. Off stage, Jimi remained polite, but shy and reserved. He kept few close friends and rarely ventured outside the realm of music, socializing almost exclusively with musicians, producers, groupies and hangers-on. That and an incessant tour schedule and recording dates taxed him.

Jimi Hendrix’ performances became erratic during the last two years of his life. He complained that fans came to hear his early hits and watch him play guitar with his teeth. One night he collapsed on stage. While vacationing in Morocco, most likely the only vacation of his life, an old fortune-teller with a Tarot deck drew the Death card. The card could also mean rebirth, but Jimi freaked out. A few weeks before his death, he told a Danish journalist, “I’m not sure I will live to be 28 years old. I mean, the moment I feel I have nothing more to give musically, I will not be around on this planet anymore.”

Before Hendrix went to bed for the last time, he gobbled nine sleeping pills that belonged to a girlfriend. The German pills were stronger than he was used to and sometime in the early morning hours he puked, suffocating himself in deep sleep. Before Jimi went out that last night of his life he had worked on a new lyric: “The story of life is quicker than the wink of an eye.” Jimi’s ended at 27.

Brian Jones

Born: February 28, 1942, in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, England
Died: July 3, 1969, Hartfield, Sussex, England
Band: The Rolling Stones. Also recorded the Master Musicians of Joujouka

Brian was true rock royalty and in the early days, the only bad Rolling Stone. He basked with blonde babes and fathered enough offspring to fill a soccer team. But his thirst for the limelight quickly overshadowed his art, which led to his demise.

Brian Jones was born into a respectable family in Cheltenham, England, during a time when such families reprimanded their offspring using corporal punishment, even in public. His parents, Lewis and Louise, were more concerned about their family’s image than instilling happiness in Brian and his four-years-younger sister Barbara. Louise told her son that Pamela, another sister who had died of leukemia at the age of two, had been sent away for being naughty. They weren’t unusually cruel compared to other families, but years of verbal and physical abuse scarred Brian’s psyche for life.

Brian Jones’ boyhood was filled with altar service, depression, school pranks, chronic asthma and various nervous disorders. Despite of his nervousness he was capable of coaxing other boys in the schoolyard to do or believe things they’d regret later. The few who came back with clenched fists were met with meekness in Brian’s green eyes.

His mother taught him piano and he could practice clarinet at home, but listening to jazz and swing or practicing other instruments was done covertly and away from the house. Jones picked up an acoustic guitar and became infatuated with rural bluesmen such as Blind Lemon Jefferson, Lightning Hopkins, Ledbelly Leadbetter—and the mysterious Robert Johnson. In his teens, Brian became one of a handful young, amateur blues musicians playing on a scene dominated by scholarly trad. jazzers. He often sat in with various outfits and was capable of laying down decent jazz strums, but he was known to wander off stage if the band started playing numbers he felt were a bit too trad. The behavior garnered him off-stage attention, which he seemed to enjoy. Band members would often try to make him come back because his musical abilities helped the overall cohesiveness. Around this time, Brian became a father for the second time. His first, when he was 16, had been put up for adoption. This time was different. He took odd jobs to pay for his son and the mother, who eventually followed him to London after he moved there.

Brian Jones founded the Rolling Stones as a skiffle group in 1962. The band’s repertoire in the early days consisted of Chuck Berry numbers, Bo Diddley covers and a selection of other blues songs. Brian assumed leadership and his initial fortitude facilitated the band’s sudden success. He chose cover songs, hustled gigs, signed contracts and distributed proceeds (always skimming a little extra before disbursing the others). Women found the broad-shouldered sparkplug adorable. Brian was often nasty on stage and was known to egg on patches of the crowd for the sheer hell of it, but in between he’d turn those green beams in the direction of a special girl watching from the side of the stage and she’d melt. His charm lingered latently and he could be funny, jovial and cordial, his husked voice softly lisping underneath a blond mop top.

The Rolling Stones’s Cavern was a London club called Craw Daddy. Within months, Rolling Stones’ reputation made people stand in line for hours for an opportunity to sweat and shake in immobility. Girls with bouncing tops up front, gawking guys in the back. When the Beatles, who had already garnered reputation beyond Liverpool’s Cavern, listened in they were impressed enough to invite the band to one of their concerts as well as talking them up to potential producers and the press.

Brian Jones was never a songwriter, but what and how he played refined the overall sound. He doesn’t have a song to his name because he was constantly paranoid about letting others hear what he was working on. He wanted to stick with variations of the blues, while Keith and Mick were rockers. Ultimately, his failure to produce material made him irrelevant, so Mick and Keith moved into position as principal architects of the Stones’ direction. But that was in the studio and backstage. In public, Brian clung to the role as co-leader and bad-boy partier. His choices indicated that being a star was more important than playing music—he adored the spotlight. Skipping out on duties with the Stones, he flew to Monterey with Nico on his arm, so he could introduce Jimi’s Experience to the American audience.

In 1968, Brian spent time in Morocco recording tribal music, posthumously released as The Pipes of Pan at Joujouka. Brian’s leadership had already slipped, but his frequent escapades and propensity to avoid recording dates (he failed to show up during the recording of “Satisfaction”) rendered him persona non grata by his band mates. He would typically show up after Keith had recorded all the guitar tracks, leaving him to add other instruments. The trajectory of figuring out an arsenal of instruments led to a marked disinterest in the guitar, but Brian’s colorations added zest. “Paint it Black,” Rolling Stones’ third British number one single, sounded strangely haunted thanks to his sitar. Jones reached the apex of multi-instrumentation in 1966 on Aftermath and Between the Buttons. He played marimba on “Under My Thumb,” “Yesterday’s Papers” and “Out of Time;” dulcimer on “Lady Jane;” sitar on “Cool, Calm and Collected” and “Mother’s Little Helper;” trombone on “Something Happened To Me Yesterday” and flute on “All Sold Out.”

For fifteen months, Anita Pallenberg was his girlfriend, and she made him laugh and forget about his deficiencies. His persona became increasingly mysterious and some have talked about the couple’s kinkiness: sado-masochism and even coprophagy. But the bliss ended after he had to fly back to London from a road trip on the continent due to a bad case of asthma. With Anita alone in the backseat, it didn’t take long for Keith to win her over.

The Stones’ founder turned into an emotional train wreck and two drug busts from the police with subsequent court appearances furthered his condition. A psychoanalysis ordered by the court found him to have an IQ of 133, but “losing his grip on reality. He vacillates between a passive, dependent child with a confused image of an adult on one hand and an idol of pop culture on the other.” He was put on a diet of tranquillizers and moved out of London to Cotchford Farm, an estate previously owned by Winnie the Pooh author A.A. Milne. Brian looked pale, grew tubbier and was generally zonked from a combination of medicine, booze, depression, asthma and frail nerves. In early June, Mick, Keith and Charlie drove out to sever the ties between Brian and the band. It was a sense of relief for both parties and Brian was promised a golden handshake equivalent of $1.7 million.

July 3, 1969, was a hot day at Cotchford, the air filled with pollen, but news about the check from the Stones organization lifted Brian’s spirits. He drank heavily, sucked on his inhalator and popped tranquilizers. Although he was hardly fit for stable movement on land, he decided to take a dip in the deep blue swimming pool that night. Anna, the latest of his string of nursing girlfriends, and Frank, a brute of a foreman that was living in an annex while supervising a posse of cowboy builders employed by Mr. Jones, eventually got out to fetch cigarettes, leaving Brian alone. He must’ve felt a drowsy calmness while splashing alone in his pool, eventually sinking to the tile-covered bottom. Brian Jones was 27 years old.