Not Fade Away: Rockers Lost Before Their Time

July 3rd 1969. Sussex England. He drowned in his own swimming pool, described as "death by misadventure" by the coroner.

If Keith Richard and Mick Jagger were the mind and body of the Rolling Stones, Brian Jones, standing most of the time in the shadows, was clearly the soul.

Brian, in with Keith and Mick from the earliest — when the Stones were still largely an R&B discussion group meeting in a Soho pub — was labeled the quietest, the moodiest of the group. But he was in fact the most vocal to the press, angrily and sharply defending the Stones' then-radical style of music, their appearance, their politics, and their whole style of life.

October 4th 1970. Los Angeles, California. Heroin overdose.

Bill Graham: "I don't think Janis tried to be black. I think Janis sang as a young person coming out of Texas and having kicked around San Francisco, and her voice was her voice and that was her interpretation of the songs. She sang blues. And in here own way… you know, when someone is a stylist or the originator of a style and… a particular style of blues, I don't think you can compare here. And I keep coming back to Hendrix. Hendrix was an innovator on the guitar, Janis was an innovator in a certain style… very few tried to play like Hendrix–you couldn't. Well, Janis was that. The mark of great talent, creative talent and original talent is also in its difficulty to copy that talent. And I think that's what Janis has."

September 18th 1970. Kensington, London England. Asphyxiated on his own vomit after mixing wine with sleeping pill

But if Hendrix was a brash dresser, if his stage act was pure mayhem, he also had a distinct ambivalence toward being a rock and roll star. Onstage, he was what every mother feared when she expressed doubts about rock and roll's effect on her daughter. Offstage, he remained the same quiet, boyish, seemingly vulnerable Jimi Hendrix as always.

July 3rd 1971 Paris France. Morrison's body was cremated before an autopsy could be performed, but many believe he died of a heroin overdose.

Morrison's death followed, by two years to the day, the death of the Rolling Stones' guitarist, Brian Jones. And it was nine months ago that Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin died. All three died at 27–as did Morrison. But where Jones', Hendrix' and Joplin's deaths were from accidental overdoses of drugs, Morrison died of "natural causes." No drugs, his associates and friends have emphasized, were connected to the death, and, in fact, Morrison was admittedly heavy on alcohol, but light, since the early days of the Doors on the Strip, on hard drugs.

1967 – 1994

People looked to Kurt Cobain because his songs captured what they felt before they knew they felt it. Even his struggles — with fame, with drugs, with his identity — caught the generational drama of our time. Seeing himself since his boyhood as an outcast, he was stunned — and confused, and frightened, and repulsed, and, truth be told, not entirely disappointed (no one forms a band to remain anonymous) — to find himself a star. If Cobain staggered across the stage of rock stardom, seemed more willing to play the fool than the hero and took drugs more for relief than pleasure, that was fine with his contemporaries. For people who came of age amid the greed, the designer-drug indulgence and the image-driven celebrity of the '80s, anyone who could make an easy peace with success was fatally suspect.

1936 – 1959

1940 – 1980

1979 – 2001