You may not immediately go to "rock star" when you think of the most dangerous jobs in the world,
but the truth is that anything can happen when rockers hit the road.
Here are some of the rock stars who nearly died on tour.
As both a guitarist extraordinaire and a constant presence on the rock scene since the 1960s,
Eric Clapton has pretty much seen it all. But old Slowhand's success has come with a great
number of personal demons. His appetite for drink and drugs used to be copious to say the least,
and for a long time he refused to even admit that he was an addict.
On his 1981 U.S. tour, things came to a head in a dramatic way. On March 13th of that year,
Clapton had just wrapped up a show in Wisconsin,
when suddenly, a brutal pain hit him. He later wrote in his autobiography:
"I was diagnosed with five bleeding ulcers; one was the size of a small orange.
The doctors told Roger [Forrester], who wanted to fly me back to England, that I could die at
any moment since one of the ulcers was pressing on my pancreas, and could burst imminently."
Clapton ultimately pulled through, and was able to return to work after a quite literally
sobering stint in the hospital. Unfortunately, he soon hit the bottle once more. In fact,
Clapton didn't fully sober up until after his son's death in 1991.
David Bowie's career was filled with great art and even greater music — so maybe it's
unsurprising that even his death in 2016 came with a soundtrack of sorts: his final album,
Blackstar. However, both Bowie's career and life almost had a far more premature ending.
Bowie wasn't one of those artists who toured the globe well into their sixties,
and there was a very good reason for that. During his A Reality Tour in 2004,
a blocked artery gave him a serious health scare after a show in Germany, and although
emergency surgery saved him, the incident caused Bowie to consider ending his career altogether.
Bowie was 57 at the time, and although he appeared as ageless and animated as ever, his band had
started to notice that he wasn't all that well. He'd already started displaying symptoms during an
earlier date in the Czech Republic, but it wasn't until the June 25th gig at the Hurricane Festival
when things really took a dark turn. Bowie's guitar player Gerry Leonard later said:
"We played the entire set and it seemed normal,
not quite as energetic and as charged as the performance before. We finished the show and
then it seemed like David was in a lot of pain, and obviously something was wrong."
Though Bowie survived the ordeal and carried on with his recording career,
his touring days had, at long last, come to an end.
Metallica's singer-guitarist James Hetfield has had two brushes with death on tour.
The first happened on September 26th, 1986, when the thrash metal giants were caught in a bus
accident in Sweden on their European tour. The crash killed Metallica's bassist, Cliff Burton,
although the other band members escaped with just a few injuries.
Hetfield's second close call was in 1992, when Metallica were co-headlining a tour with Guns
N' Roses. In Montreal, a miscommunication with a pyrotechnician led to a situation in
which Hetfield was far too close to a magnesium flame when it went off. Hetfield later recalled:
"So I'm burnt, all my arm, my hand,
completely down to the bone. The side of my face, hair, gone."
"Then I look down, and watch the skin just rising, and things going wrong."
Luckily, Hetfield survived this painful ordeal, and the band resumed touring a
few weeks later — though it was a while before he played guitar again. To put in context just
how close Hetfield came to losing his life, the band's bassist Jason Newstead later pointed out:
"If he had been breathing in, he would have been dead."
For a long time, the Foo Fighters' drummer Taylor Hawkins was at the very top of his game. The band
had released some of the biggest albums of the 1990s, going platinum on multiple occasions,
and were selling out concerts left, right, and centre. Unfortunately,
with great success comes ample opportunity to party — and that's exactly what Hawkins did.
In 2001, Hawkins was hospitalized during a tour of Europe,
causing the Foo Fighters to call it quits on their final four gigs. It soon came to light
that the drummer had overdosed on heroin so severely that he spent two weeks in a coma.
Hawkins has been known to somewhat downplay the incident, often saying that he merely liked to
party a bit too hard and referring to his time in a coma as a, quote, "happy nap." However,
that's not to say Hawkins didn't take that wake-up call to heart. In 2018, Hawkins said:
"There was a year where the partying just got a little too heavy. And thank God,
on some level this guy gave me the wrong line or the wrong thing one night, and I woke up going,
'What the f--k happened?' That was a real changing point for me."
Guns N' Roses are pretty much the poster boys for rock 'n' roll excess,
but even so, guitarist Slash's close call in a San Francisco hotel during one tour in 1992
is almost too strange to believe. Predictably, drugs were involved. Less predictably, however,
this overdose actually did kill him.
Slash's heart reportedly stopped for no fewer than eight minutes until paramedics were able to
revive him. That may sound like an impossible amount of time to go without a heartbeat,
but the length of time that a heart can be stopped before a person is
considered beyond saving depends on a number of variables — so who knows?
Of course, you might expect that temporarily dying in the middle of a tour would be a pretty
daunting experience for somebody, but as Slash tells the tale, being dead for a
considerable period of time didn't faze him all that much. He later told The Guardian:
"They took me to the hospital but I said,
'I'm fine', signed myself out, went back to the hotel and we flew to the next gig."
Phil Anselmo's heyday as the frontman of groove metal titans Pantera
had no shortage of drama. Notably, Anselmo almost died of a heroin overdose in 1996,
during the band's Great Southern Trendkill tour.
According to Anselmo himself, his heroin use was a natural extension
from the various painkillers he'd used to manage a serious and painful
back condition called degenerative disc disease. The singer's own eventual statement about the
incident made it clear just how close he'd been to death's door. Anselmo said:
"I, Philip H. Anselmo, immediately after a very successful show in Dallas,
injected a lethal dose of heroin into my arm, and died for four to five minutes."
In his statement,
Anselmo promised to keep Pantera's tour going — and keep himself in the land of the living.
December 1971 was a bad month for Frank Zappa. On December 4th, the artist and his Mothers of
Invention band inadvertently inspired Deep Purple's hit song "Smoke on the Water'' when
a fan decided to whip out a flare gun during their show at the Montreaux Casino in Geneva,
Switzerland. The ensuing fire quickly became an inferno that burned the whole building down.
Fortunately, there were no casualties or even serious injuries,
thanks in part to the heroics of concert organizer Claude Nobs and, reportedly,
Zappa himself, who smashed a window with his guitar to help people escape.
Then, just six days later, the band was playing the Rainbow Theatre in London when a fan rushed
the stage — reportedly in a fit of jealousy over his girlfriend's Zappa infatuation — and
pushed the singer off. Zappa's fall into the orchestra pit crushed his larynx and gave him
chronic back pain, along with an assortment of grievous injuries. He later wrote:
"The band thought I was dead. My head was over on my shoulder,
and my neck was bent like it was broken. I had a gash in my chin,
a hole in the back of my head, a broken rib, and a fractured leg. One arm was paralyzed."
Zappa ended up spending the next year in a wheelchair.
In 1978, The Who's buck-wild drummer Keith Moon died after an accidental overdose at
only 32 years old. But that was far from his first OD. On November 20th, 1973,
The Who played the first gig of their U.S. tour in San Francisco. In the end,
however, the band was forced to enlist a crowd member named Scott Halpin to finish the show,
as Moon had taken a pretty big dose of ketamine to help calm his nerves. He stopped playing and
then passed out part-way through "Won't Get Fooled Again," before being helped off stage
by the band's roadies. Halpin played three songs with The Who while Moon was revived backstage.
Unfortunately, Halpin wasn't around to rescue the band on March 9th, 1976, when Moon was once again
unable to play a gig, this time at the Boston Garden. The concert had to be stopped and
rescheduled, and although Moon's troubles were initially explained away as a debilitating case
of flu, it was later revealed that he had ingested a near-lethal amount of brandy and barbiturates.
Lead singer Roger Daltrey told Howard Stern,
"A lot of the stuff that he did that people laugh about, they think 'oh,
that was really funny' — when you were there, at the time, some of it wasn't funny at all."
In 1995, alt-rock superstars R.E.M. toured the globe in support of their album Monster — but the
tour turned out to be a deeply unpleasant experience for several band members.
Bassist Mike Mills had a tumor scare, for example,
while Michael Stipe had to have surgery for a hernia. But the first and worst of the
tour's many problems came for drummer Bill Berry, who almost died of a brain aneurysm.
A March show in Lausanne, Switzerland, proved difficult for Berry, who started to feel
a nasty pain in his head, and eventually had to leave the stage when it pretty much
knocked him out. He later described the experience to the L.A. Times, saying:
"It felt like a bowling ball hit me in the head. There wasn't any warning.
I was just singing the falsetto part on 'Tongue' when it happened."
Berry was later diagnosed with not just one but two brain aneurysms — one of which had already
ruptured. Fortunately, this daunting situation had a happy ending. Berry was rushed intro surgery,
which proved successful, and R.E.M. was able to resume touring by May of that year.
Still, although the drummer reportedly made a full recovery,
the experience might have caused him to reevaluate his life and career.
Berry left the band on good terms in 1997, saying that his priorities had simply shifted.
Headbanging onstage might be a fairly significant part of Korn vocalist Jonathan
Davis' job description, but in 2006, a strange blood condition turned this routine metal move
into a potential tragedy. Several of the band's tour dates in Europe that year went down the drain
when Davis started to notice strange marks on his skin that left his body
looking literally beat up. Describing the symptoms, the singer later recalled:
"We had just done a show in Hamburg, Germany. I was on the bus and noticed all this bruising
all over my body. It wasn't bad, just here and there, but I was like, what the hell?
This ain't right. I don't remember hitting myself or anything, and I never bruise."
The bruises eventually turned out to be a full-on blood infection, brought on by a blood
disorder called thrombocytopenic purpura, or ITP for short. This condition can kick
in when your blood platelets are too low, and it stops your blood from clotting normally — causing
internal bleeding and bruising, as well as potential hemorrhages. As a result, if Davis
had been too cavalier with his headbanging, he may well have wound up in a very bad way indeed.
The singer's ITP reportedly stemmed from an allergic reaction, and was itself nearly
fatal. Fortunately, he was quickly seen by a doctor and made it to a hospital just in time.
The year was 1977, and poet-turned-punk rock trailblazer Patti Smith's band was touring
as a support act for a far more traditional rocker, Bob Seger. But this tour would have
drastic and long-lasting consequences for Smith. During a concert in Tampa, Florida,
she fell off the stage and suffered a number of horrific spinal injuries. Impeded by a broken
neck vertebrae and a fractured spine, her fall sidelined Smith's career for a long time, and
recovery required both a large amount of physical therapy and a lengthy stint with a neck brace.
The accident reportedly happened when Smith spun on the stage and lost her footing.
Though she and her career ultimately recovered, in 2012, Smith told Uncut that her back was still
bothering her even decades later, and that she felt Seger's crew was to blame. She said:
"I was being careful on the stage because there wasn't as much room or light. I didn't
whirl around as much as usual, but when I hit the monitor with my foot, it was half hanging over the
lip of the stage. We needed more space and light, and we didn't get it, and I had an accident."
Keith Richards is so notorious for cheating death that there's a somewhat well-known
saying in the world of rock and roll: that he and cockroaches would be the
only living things to survive a nuclear war. As the late, great Robin Williams put it,
"He's the only man on the planet who can go; anthrax. Alright."
The Rolling Stones guitarist had one of his earlier near-death experiences way back in 1965,
when the Stones were bringing their music to America. A December 3rd concert in Sacramento,
California, was business as usual,
right up until the point at which the guitarist's instrument connected with a microphone stand.
A large number of sparks and one stunned guitarist flew as a surge of electricity
knocked Richards out in the most dramatic way possible. The mic stand had been ungrounded,
and the ensuing electrical shock nearly killed Richards.
One audience member later described the events, saying:
"I saw the blue light. I literally saw Keith fly into the air backward. I thought he was dead.
I was horrified. We all were. Silence fell over the crowd."
Fortunately, Richards had been wearing a pair of rubber-soled boots that day,
which may have been instrumental in saving his life. In a textbook example of his ability to
survive basically anything, Richards was back onstage the very next day.
In 1993, Radiohead was a very different band from the arty and experimental outfit they are today.
Riding high on the wave of their grunge-influenced album, Pablo Honey, they spent the summer of that
year touring the U.S. and, on Independence Day, performed for the show MTV Beach House. But this
holiday nearly ended in tragedy after Thom Yorke took a dip in a nearby swimming pool.
As the band performed the song "Anyone Can Play Guitar," Yorke gave a wild
performance that culminated with him diving headfirst into the pool. He then climbed
out again and immediately reached for a live microphone — whilst soaking wet. Fortunately,
someone had the presence of mind to quickly take the mic out of the singer's reach.
The incident doesn't show up on the aired version of the show, in which you can only
briefly see Yorke urgently conferring with a crew member after climbing out of the water.
But if the story is true, it's probably fair to say that Yorke owes that person his life.
Charlie Puth's musical output may not be the heaviest in the world,
but during his career he has worked with a number of rock icons,
including Ozzy Osbourne and Slash. And, if nothing else, Puth's touring schedule alone
seems to be far more metal than most — considering that it has reportedly almost killed him twice.
Puth got his start as a YouTube star in 2009 and eventually hit the mainstream
both as a songwriter for other artists and as a singer-songwriter in his own right. Unfortunately,
hitting the road didn't come quite so easily for Puth. In 2019, he recalled:
"I used to get sick a lot on tour. I almost died twice, like literally. It was really tough.
I kept getting sick. I was sick for like a year with a cold
and I just wasn't really taking care of myself."
Puth didn't go into specifics about precisely what kind of health problems he had faced,
but he did say that he eventually came to understand how you can live life on
the road without having to suffer. He said:
"Now, I know how to tour. I figured it out."
Sometimes a rock star doesn't even need to be on tour to be thrown into peril;
all it takes is one bad day. Few know this better than Travis Barker of Blink-182 fame.
In September 2008, the duo project of Barker and his friend
Adam "DJ AM" Goldstein performed a one-off free concert in South Carolina. Afterward,
they were set to fly back to California, but unfortunately, their Learjet's takeoff
ended in a crash that killed four people on board. Only the two musicians survived.
Barker told Joe Rogan just how terrible it was.
"I was in such a hurry to get out of the plane, and exit the plane,
I jumped right into the jet, which is full of fuel. So my whole body lit up."
Barker was left in critical condition by the crash,
with over 65 percent of his body badly burned. The drummer's road to recovery included 27 surgeries
and was so arduous that at one point, he openly offered $1 million to any
friend who would be willing to end his pain. Barker eventually regained the will to live,
but — rather understandably — has preferred to avoid flying ever since.
If you or anyone you know is having suicidal thoughts,
please call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline​ at​ 1-800-273-TALK (8255)​.