Just got home after listening to Radio 2 all morning loads of old songs on it .
Made me think about all the great musicians / stars who died so young before they realised their potential

made me think about who would be on my list of they died too young

Riche Valens
Buddy Holly
Eddie cochran
Randy Rhoads
Phil Lynott
Jimi Hendri
James Dean

The only problem with this theory is that musicians who dominate the popular music genre ("chart music" in other words) is that generally their genius is short lived - this is especially so for the ones who are mere performers and do not contribute to their output by writing, but even those who do write much of their output tend to have a few golden years of brilliant writing before failing to produce anything worth listening to, its almost as if they can only write to a specific audience which has a lifespan of only a few years and by the time they have hit the downward slope its too late to attract the newcomers to their target age group for they already have their own heroes.

In evidence I present Lennon & McCartney, for a decade they could not put a foot wrong when writing as a pair, for (most of) another decade afterwards they continued as individual writers and still produced stuff that sold well, sounded good, and charted, then the wheels fell off - Lennon was killed and he lives on in memory as some sort of idol, McCartney hasn't produced an album worth listening to since Lennon died (in my opinion), this may be a coincidence.

In summary, your heroes were your heroes in a limited time frame and there is no written guarantee that they would have gone on to even greater levels of genius.


Caveat - there are exceptions to my theory

I think as time passed it became clear that Lennon was the most talented of the two Beatles. I've never been a big Beatles fan but I have begun to appreciate their music more as I've gotten older. Lennon's solo work is far superior than the shallow, bland 5hite McCartney has released since 1970.
Regarding the original post, I think because of the music they were making some of the artists there were very mush of their time. Buddy Holly and Eddie Cochran in particular were very much of their time, they would've have probably gone the same way as Elvis, and became fat and bloated.
Hendrix and Jim Morrison are the two people I think would've gone to bigger and better things, they both died not long after releasing their best work up to that point and I think both would have gone on to surpass what they did.

Cocaine use was a major part of some of these artists lives. I'm not talking about the bashed stuff that today's weekend users are on but real high quality stuff that they were taking every day. Some dealt with it and used the drug to expand their minds where others got hooked too quick and started to use other drugs. Many have died young.

Gram Parsons a musician who revolutionised his genre

My wife's orchids.

Add Janis Joplin to the list.

and Sandy Denny: especially with the eruption of folk again, her evolving ideas would be part of how we evaluate the newer artists.

You could add Robert Johnson, Daune Allman, Kurt Cobain, Woody Guthrie... There's too many to name.

Sadly there are far too "musicians" who didn't "die too young" and are still torturing our ears.

Add Ian Curtis to the list...

Ian Curtis