It's not all too uncommon for a hard-living musician to die young, but sometimes, stars
who leave us early don't even get to become stars until after they're gone.
Here are a few musicians who became world famous, just a little too late.
Bradley Nowell was the frontman for 1990s ska punk band Sublime.
He seemed pretty sure the band was going somewhere, as he dropped out of college just one semester
before he obtained his degree.
At that point, Sublime had already achieved modest success, and by 1994 they were negotiating
with MCA for an album deal.
For most of that time, Nowell was using stuff, which had started as experimentation and turned
into a full-blown addiction.
"His excuse for taking the stuff was that he felt like he had to be larger than life."
He tried to get clean in 1996 during the recording sessions for Sublime's self-titled third album.
Then he tried to get clean again for the birth of his child, but then he decided he deserved
"a reward", and within a week he was addicted again.
Nowell died of an overdose in a hotel room on May 25th, 1996, seven days after he got
married, 11 months after the birth of his child, and a little less than a year before
Sublime's first No. 1 single.
"She was painfully shy, not at all glamorous, and, much to the frustration of record company
executives, impossible to pigeonhole."
Eva Cassidy's 1998 album Songbird has sold 5 million copies worldwide, and it was certified
platinum in the United States in 2008.
By the time that happened, however, Cassidy had been dead for 12 years.
Much of her music was released posthumously to great acclaim.
But it was too late, of course, to be enjoyed by Cassidy while she was struggling to get
by.
Cassidy passed away at the age of 33 without a record contract.
Her cause of passing was a malignant melanoma that spread through her body.
She had the melanoma removed in 1993, but she failed to follow up with her doctor in
the months afterward.
By 1996, doctors discovered that the cancer had spread.
Cassidy immediately started on aggressive therapy, but it was too late.
She died just two months later.
Cassidy gave her last performance, a rendition of "What a Wonderful World," less than a month
before she died.
Israel Kamakawiwo'ole, also known as "Iz," was a sensation in his native Hawaii.
But he didn't start to achieve worldwide recognition until the year of his death, when his album
N Dis Life made it onto the Top World Music chart and stayed there for 39 weeks.
Iz is probably most famous for his hauntingly beautiful rendition of "Somewhere Over the
Rainbow," which was featured in several movies and TV shows after his death in 1997.
Several posthumously released albums continued to grow his fan base further.
Like so many other musicians before him, Iz's vices ultimately led to his demise.
He was morbidly obese for his entire life, weighing more than 750 pounds at one point.
He ultimately died at the age of 38 from respiratory failure.
Many musicians who passed young succumbed to drugs or inner demons, but occasionally
there are artists who die due to risky behavior.
That was the case for Jeff Buckley, who drowned in the Mississippi River.
Buckley is probably best known for his cover of Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah", from his
first studio album, Grace, released in the summer of 1994.
He and his band toured for three years after that, and as a result the album had some moderate
success with fans and critics.
By 1996 he was working on his second album.
En route to the recording studio one evening, he and his friend took a detour to the Wolf
River channel of the Mississippi River.
Buckley got out of the car and jumped into the water, fully clothed.
Buckley's dip turned out to be fatal: a passing boat sucked him into its wake and he never
resurfaced.
His body was found six days later by a passenger on a riverboat.
Six years after that, Rolling Stone named Grace one of the "500 Greatest Albums of All
Time."
Robert Johnson was such a brilliant blues performer that some people literally accused
him of making a deal with the devil.
If that was true, though, it really wasn't a very good deal because he died at the age
of 27 without seeing any real success.
Before that happened, he was making a living as a traveling performer, booking any gig
he could find, mostly playing the same 29 songs he had written and recorded between
1936 and 1937.
Johnson passed in 1938, and although there's never been a definitive cause of passing,
it's likely he was poisoned.
It wasn't until a couple of decades later, when his work was reissued, that he finally
achieved the fame he'd supposedly sold his soul for.
So he was probably pretty annoyed with the devil when it came time to pay up.
Folk singer Nick Drake is well remembered for his stage performances, but not in a good
way.
Those who saw him perform recall an awkward, nervous guy who mumbled his way through his
sets like someone who would rather be anywhere but the stage.
If there was ever someone born before his time, Nick Drake was it.
Take him off that stage, give him a trip forward in time and a YouTube channel, and he'd have
been a star.
Drake was made for the internet, but he was born four decades too soon.
He was a creative mind without an outlet, desperate to share his work but too shy to
do it.
In his lifetime he had a small following, and critics generally acknowledged his talent.
Fellow musicians fell in love with his work, but he failed to reach a larger audience.
After he overdosed on antidepressants in 1974, and in 1999, his work was rediscovered by
Volkswagen marketers.
The car company used the song "Pink Moon" in a commercial, people who saw the ad liked
the song, and pretty soon Nick Drake was on the Billboard charts 40 years after his death.
19th Century French composer Georges Bizet was successful enough to marry his mentor's
daughter, but not successful enough to avoid living in poverty.
In 1873 Bizet was working on an opera called Carmen, which was based on an 1845 novel of
the same name.
It had an initial run of 45 performances, and it was hated by critics and audiences
alike.
All the seduction and thievery it depicted scandalized polite society ladies.
By the end of that first run, the theater had to give tickets away because they couldn't
convince anyone to buy them.
Just after opening night, Bizet became ill.
By the 33rd performance he had had two heart attacks and died.
Five months later, Carmen moved to Vienna, where the the critics felt differently about
seduction and thievery.
The show was a hit there, and it went on to become one of the most-performed operas in
the world.
No one today would dare say that Johann Sebastian Bach was anything but a musical genius, but
there was a time when he was merely respected.
He had a long career with plenty of ups and downs.
At one point he was actually thrown in jail because Duke Wilhelm was annoyed at him for
finding a new job, and later in life he began to lose his eyesight, probably as a result
of diabetes.
He died from a stroke in 1750 at the age of 65, and his manuscripts were divided between
his sons.
It wasn't until a century later that anyone started to remember him.
In 1850 there was a society dedicated to publishing his lost works, and musicians like Felix Mendelssohn
and Robert Schumann were instrumental in bringing his music back to the public's attention.
It's hard to believe there was ever a time when Bach's music was considered obscure.
Even Albert Einstein allegedly had something to say about him:
"Listen, play, love, revere, and keep your trap shut."
Can't argue with the words of a genius.
Sometimes the death of an artist marks not just the end of a creative mind but the beginning
of a morbid legend.
After Joy Division's Ian Curtis hanged himself in his kitchen, he became a sort of idol.
The Independent described public perception of his death as an elevation "into some sort
of philosophical victory of life through death."
The fact that he was the frontman of a popular band probably contributed somewhat to this
idea, but the sad truth is that Ian Curtis' death was not a story of triumph over adversity,
but a tragedy of a suffering young man who wasn't getting the help he needed, and a young
daughter who was left without a father.
Curtis had epilepsy, and in the months after his death, bandmates remembered the profound
negative impact the illness had on his state of mind and on his ability to perform.
He ended his life just two days before Joy Division was supposed to embark on a U.S.
tour.
The band's second album was released two months later, and the song "Love Will Tear Us Apart"
reached number 13 on the UK Singles charts.
If you or anyone you know is having suicidal thoughts, please call or chat online with
the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK (8255).