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Salut de Herault - Arji
To Amy Winehouse’s family, the singer/songwriter’s death was not unexpected. It was ’only a matter of time,’ her mother, Janis Winehouse, was quoted as saying in the Sunday Mirror. She’d visited her daughter the day before she died, and said, ’She seemed out of it. But her passing still hasn’t hit me.’
She said their final encounter had ended with the weakened Amy saying ’I love you, mum.’ ’Those are the words I will always treasure,’ Janis said. ’I’m glad I saw her when I did.’
Father Mitch Winehouse had been in New York preparing to do a series of showcases for his new jazz album. He canceled the shows and was seen at JFK a few hours after the news hit. ’I’m completely devastated,’ he was reported as saying. ’I’m coming home. I have to be with Amy. I can’t crack up, for her sake. My family needs me.’
Mitch Winehouse had been vocal in the past—too vocal, for Amy’s tastes—about his daughter’s substance abuse. As far back as three years ago, he was raising the specter of her possible demise when he publicly revealed that she was suffering from emphysema. ’Doctors have told her if she goes back to smoking drugs, it won’t just ruin her voice, it will kill her,’ he was quoted as saying in 2008, while issuing an ultimatum to drug dealers to stay away.
If the family had clearly braced themselves for this news at various points over the years, so had the public, which had grown nearly inured to tales of the singer’s inebriated escapades and false promises of new output.
With Amy Winehouse, sadly, drug counselors finally have the all-or-nothing case study in creative stifling they need.
It never helped their cause that other famous members of the so-called ’27 Club’ who’d also died at age 27—including Kurt Cobain, Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, and Janis Joplin—had managed to record great music right up until their deaths. These legends’ romanticized swan songs helped foster the belief among some drug users that, even if the grim reaper looms, artistic genius can coexist with or even be aided by addiction.
But the five fallow years that have passed since Winehouse released her second and final album, the Grammys-sweeping Back to Black, tell a very different cautionary tale about promises unfulfilled...
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