D. Boon

Dennes Dale Boon, April 1, 1958 – December 22, 1985.

How not to drive safely (still from Minutemen doco, below)

Career: punk musician. Cause of death: ejection from motor vehicle.

The first post, I think, where membership in the 27 Club was gained by force majeure, rather than drugs, booze, or soul reclamation upon fulfillment of Faustian pact. Thus, a uniquely inflected entry into the always already melancholic 27 club canon.

D. Boon, the guitarist and vocalist for most excellent cowabunga Californian punk trio The Minutemen, took his name from his slang for cannabis, weed, shit, green, trees, sticky icky, dope, D, but also because it sounded like Daniel Boone and E. Bloom, the Blue Öyster Cult's vocalist and guitarist.

Boon, right: munchies. Fattening, but not acutely fatal.

On tour, Boon was suffering from a fever, lying down in the back of the tour van with no seatbelt. Bad idea. In the Arizona Desert, perhaps in a cosmically unlikely patch of black ice or perhaps due to a mirage the van veered off the road. Upon crashing, gravity's rainbow took control of the prone Boon's body, flinging it like a slightly overweight ragdoll out the back van doors. Breaking his neck, he died instantly.

The band, which had formed in the wake of Mike Watt encountering Boon prophetically falling from a tree (see video), immediately dissolved.

The Minutemen - We Jam Econo Trailer