Things That Came Out About Rock Stars After They Died

Wailing away on a microphone, shredding a guitar, or banging away on a drum kit has made a relative handful of people very wealthy and very famous. In the latter half of the 20th century, a new and special breed of human being emerged called the rock star — players of instruments and interpreters of song who wielded their talents, artistic prowess, and charisma to become some of the most famous, beloved, and documented people on the planet.

As they were lauded global celebrities, and usually for years or decades on end, it's hard to imagine that rock stars enjoyed any modicum of privacy, or that they could ever manage to keep significant portions of their lives to themselves. Whether it's important decisions, achievements, health problems, family issues, or creative projects, those are all hard to keep secret, particularly for a rock star. The great equalizer, and the event that triggers a wave of information release, is the death of a rock star. 

With renewed public interest, along come disclosures from friends, associates, relatives, and bandmates that disclose the unknown sides of those once very public, larger-than-life figures. Here are some of the most notable rock stars who died before their time, and what we learned about them after they died, and probably only because they died.

The Beatles, the most successful rock band of all time, effectively broke up in 1970. The Beatles almost reunited on "SNL," but the band never played together again before the tragic murder of John Lennon in 1980. In 1994, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr agreed to participate in "The Beatles Anthology," a series of double albums of rarities produced in tandem with a TV documentary miniseries.

The surviving Beatles wanted to record new material, but thought it impossible or imprudent without Lennon. However, Lennon's widow, Yoko Ono, handed off some little-known homemade cassettes containing demos made by her husband in the late 1970s. Among the tunes were "Free as a Bird," which Lennon had planned to include in a musical he never finished, as well as "Now and Then." The former was rough and scratchy, but the other Beatles added their vocals and instrumentals, and "Free as a Bird" was released as a single in late 1995. The first new Beatles song in 25 years, it hit the Top 6 in the U.S.

"Now and Then" was too degraded to use in 1995, but by 2023 recording technology had advanced to the point where it was usable. One of the last songs that Lennon left behind, it officially became the last Beatles song when McCartney and Starr (Harrison died in 2001) finished it. It reached No. 7 in the U.S. and earned the Beatles a Grammy nomination for Record of the Year.

Between 1967 and 2016, David Bowie released 26 forward-thinking studio albums, with the last, "Blackstar," arriving just days before his death from cancer, the diagnosis of which wasn't publicly known. More than a rock star, David Bowie was an artist who worked in a number of media, including film. He occasionally acted in projects that interested him, including "The Man Who Fell to Earth," "The Hunger," "The Last Temptation of Christ," and "Labyrinth." Bowie could have taken on a lot more roles, but he was rather choosy. After his death in January 2016, another actor revealed that Bowie was considered for a major part in one of the biggest film franchises ever, Peter Jackson's adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien's "The Lord of the Rings."

Dominic Monaghan portrayed Merry the hobbit in the trilogy, and he spotted Bowie in a casting office after one of his auditions. "As I was reading a magazine waiting, David Bowie came in and signed [the casting director's] little list and went in. And I'm assuming he read for Gandalf. I can't think of anything else he would've read for," Monaghan recalled to HuffPost. Jackson later confirmed that he sought out Bowie to play the powerful wizard, but the musician passed on it because his schedule was packed. (Sir Ian McKellen played Gandalf instead.)

In one of Van Halen's many messy breakups, singer Sammy Hagar left in 1996 but returned eight years later. "What happened on that reunion tour in '04 was some of the most miserable, backstabbing, dark crap I've ever been involved with," Hagar told music journalist Sally Steele. Fed up with Eddie Van Halen's heavy drinking and unpredictable behavior, Hagar was contract-bound from leaving the tour early, which ended with the intoxicated guitarist having an onstage emotional breakdown.

Hagar and Eddie Van Halen never worked together or spoke again, with the latter dying of a stroke in October 2020 at the age of 65. Hagar went on "The Howard Stern Show" to reveal that he'd reconciled with his bandmate in the months before his death. "Eddie and I had been texting, and it's been a love fest since we started communicating earlier this year," Hagar said (via Blabbermouth). "We both agreed not to tell anyone, because of all the rumors it would stir up about a reunion."

The same couldn't be said for Michael Anthony. In 2006,  Van Halen fired the bassist from his band and replaced him with his teenage son, Wolfgang. In January 2021, Anthony told the "Talkin' Rock with Meltdown" podcast that he never reconnected with Eddie Van Halen. "We didn't get a chance to. And you know, it kind of bothers me, because we had some issues that were never resolved," he said (via Ultimate Classic Rock).

Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers embarked on their 40th Anniversary Tour in 2017. In all likelihood, it was secretly Petty's last full-scale road jaunt. "He'd had it in mind it was his last tour and he owed it to his long-time crew," his wife, Dana Petty, told Billboard. Before the tour, Petty learned that he'd fractured his hip, leaving him in excruciating pain during every concert, and without treatment and regular use, it had completely broken by the last show. A hip replacement surgery was planned, but Petty needed a rest first. "He was like, 'I just got home. I want some time. I don't want to go to hip replacement surgery. I want to be home with my wife and dog,'" Dana Petty said.

During the tour, Petty quietly coped with the pain with a regular intake of prescription-grade painkillers. On October 17, scarcely a week after his final performance, Petty died at age 66 of multiple organ failure caused by an accidental overdose of several drugs, including fentanyl and oxycodone. Also revealed after Petty's death were a slew of health issues, including knee problems and emphysema, which Petty learned he had days before the start of his tour.

The story of the Foo Fighters began with a 1995 studio project, and when it became a real band, drummer Dave Grohl moved to be the lead singer and eventually hired Taylor Hawkins, best known for his work with Alanis Morissette, as his replacement. In 2022, Foo Fighters headed out on a world tour, which included a stop in Bogota, Colombia, for the Festival Estereo Picnic. One hour before the show, Hawkins was found unresponsive in his hotel room, and attempts by paramedics to revive him proved unsuccessful. Hawkins was 50 years old, and a toxicology report discovered 10 drugs in the musician's body. Authorities determined that Hawkins' heart was twice the normal weight, and it failed due to a heroin overdose that fatally combined with the other drugs in his system.

The other Foo Fighters believed that Hawkins had quit heroin following an early 2000s overdose that placed him into a coma. "He never wanted Dave to worry about that again," Hawkins' drum tech Chad Ward told Rolling Stone. Hawkins had even told reporters that he'd kicked heroin in favor of mountain biking. 

Hawkins' other health issues hadn't previously been a matter of public record. Three months before he died, Hawkins went unconscious during a plane trip and required medical attention. Following the event, Red Hot Chili Peppers drummer Chad Smith says that Hawkins told him, "I can't do it like this anymore," indicating that he was considering a diminished role in Foo Fighters.

A commanding and consistent presence in heavy metal in the 1970s and 1980s, Ronnie James Dio and his powerful, operatic but snarling vocals fueled the rise of headbanging bands like Elf, Rainbow, a post-Ozzy Osbourne version of Black Sabbath, and the eponymous Dio. The singer maintained a public persona characterized by mystery, menace, and darkness, preferring to let his music speak for him; generally imaginative, epic, fantasy-driven songs like "Rainbow in the Dark" and "Holy Diver." He's even credited with introducing the "devil horns" hand gesture so closely linked to metal.

Behind the scenes, Dio was evidently the opposite of the perception of a pillar of heavy metal and, by most accounts, was a sentimental guy. In November 2009, his manager and wife, Wendy Dio, announced that the musician had entered an aggressive treatment program for stomach cancer. Less than six months later, he died at age 67, but during that time he called one of his favorite producers to record a final song. It wound up as just Dio singing and playing piano on a gentle ballad called "This Is Your Life," which closed out a 2014 tribute album made in the singer's honor.

Heroin factors prominently into the story of Alice in Chains. The band's first bass player, Mike Starr, died of a heroin overdose in 2011, and lead singer Layne Staley's issues with addiction were depicted in his songs and evident to those in his inner circle. He was intoxicated during the recording of the band's 1996 episode of "MTV Unplugged," and by 1998, frequent injections had left abscesses on his arms and he'd lost the majority of his teeth.

Only after Staley died was the level of Staley's drug use understood or revealed. In 2017, Staley's mother, Nancy McCallum, revealed that her son had enrolled in drug rehabilitation programs 10 times, and that he'd overdosed to the point where his heart had stopped and had technically died on five separate occasions. His life was saved because those episodes occurred while others were around. The overdose that killed Staley went down when he was alone in his Seattle home, where he'd spent the vast majority of his time since the early 2000s. 

In April 2002, after Staley's accountants discovered that the musicians' banking accounts had gone untouched for weeks, they contacted McCallum, who helped police perform a wellness check. In the home, they found a decomposed body amidst drug paraphernalia. An autopsy identified the body as that of Staley, and that he'd died of an overdose at age 34 about two weeks before the police discovery.

In May 2017, Soundgarden played a show at Detroit's Fox Theatre. Vocalist Chris Cornell reportedly acted strangely during the concert, appearing unsteady on his feet, lacking energy, and forgetting lyrics. Following the concert, Cornell retreated to his hotel room and placed a phone call to his wife, Vicky, who was so startled by her husband's slurred words that she asked Soundgarden bodyguard Martin Kirsten to see if he was alright. After breaking down the locked room and bathroom doors, Kirsten discovered Cornell unresponsive, with blood emerging from his mouth and materials that suggested Cornell had attempted death by suicide. First responders couldn't revive the singer and he was pronounced dead at age 51, with death by suicide the ruled cause of death.

A toxicology report determined that Cornell had taken therapeutic doses of various commonly prescribed medications. In the year before his death, Cornell had injured his shoulder to the point where the pain disallowed rest, and so he took a powerful sleep aid. Cornell, who earlier in life had substance abuse problems, became addicted to that medicine. "He relapsed," Vicky Cornell told "Good Morning America." 

That medication, when combined with Cornell's other prescriptions, altered his brain chemistry. "What the two drugs did individually and in combination was to really impair his judgment and make him psychically [sic] unable to be responsive in ways that he normally would be responsive," pathologist Dr. Richard Cote told ABC News.

After ditching Black Sabbath for a successful solo career, Ozzy Osbourne didn't really go it alone. He assembled a backing band called Blizzard of Ozz to record the 1980 album "Blizzard of Ozz." The central figure in that collective was Randy Rhoads, who combined the classical techniques and precision he'd been taught with the lightning speed and shredding required to be a heavy metal guitarist in the 1980s. A breakout star and acclaimed musician, Rhoads' brief career and life came to an end in March 1982. He was one of a few members of Osbourne's road contingent who boarded a small plane and attempted to fly up near the tour bus and a nearby house to prank their friends and coworkers. On its third pass, the pilot hit the bus, lost control, and crashed into the house. All three people onboard died, including 25-year-old Rhoads.

The musician died before he could make some ambitious career choices. After he declined an assignment to record an album of Black Sabbath songs, Osbourne fired and rehired Rhoads. "Ultimately, he agreed to do it and do one more tour, but it never happened because he passed away," bandmate Rudy Sarzo told Bass Player. After his obligations were fulfilled, Rhoads planned to quit rock music altogether and study for a Master's degree in classical guitar.

The stark and haunting songs of Joy Division took rock to new, dark places. Ian Curtis wrote and sang vividly and profoundly about pain and death, and songs like "Love Will Tear Us Apart" and "Dead Souls" would influence a generation of alternative rock bands. During his lifetime, Curtis's bandmates didn't fully understand what he was conveying, nor the extent of his mental health issues. "Ian's lyrics were great, you were very lucky to have someone who wrote such fantastic lyrics, but we thought, 'that's really clever, he's writing about somebody else,'" drummer Stephen Morris told CNN in 2022. "And then after his death, you look at it and think, 'oh, it was all about him.'"

Building its popularity around the U.K. with touring and the album "Unknown Pleasures," Joy Division planned to depart for an American tour in May 1980. In the weeks beforehand, the band recorded the LP "Closer" while also beginning to sense that Curtis was spiralling. "We wrote two songs, I think, two weeks before Ian died to try and heal him through music," guitarist Bernard Sumner said, adding that the uplifting "Ceremony" was deployed to demonstrate to Curtis the "great future he had." 

The day before Joy Division was to leave England, Curtis died by suicide at home at age 23. "Ceremony," one of the last songs Curtis worked on, became the first release by New Order, the band created by the surviving members of Joy Division.

In September 2019, Cars frontman Ric Ocasek died at 75 from heart disease and pulmonary emphysema. A year later, Christopher Otcasek, the musician's son born during his marriage to Constance Campbell, posted a photo to Instagram of himself, his father, and brother Adam. "You don't exist. We didn't either," Otcasek wrote in the caption, adding the hashtags "myfatherdiedtwice," "throwawaykids," and "deadbeatbad." Ocasek hadn't had a good relationship, or much of one at all, with his two eldest sons. "My father, in essence, died the day I was born. He was never present, he was never there," Otcasek told Page Six. "I was living a few blocks from him for a year or two and saw him once maybe."

Ocasek filed to divorce Otcasek's mother in 1971, while she was pregnant with their second son, Adam. He quickly moved to marry Suzanne Ocasek, whom he left in 1988 after meeting model Paulina Porizkova during production of the Cars video "Drive." They announced an amicable separation with plans to divorce in May 2018, while continuing to cohabitate in the same New York City home. 

It was Porizkova who discovered Ocasek dead, and when the musician's will was unsealed, she learned she'd been left out. "I have made no provision for my wife Paulina Porizkova ("Paulina") as we are in the process of divorcing," Ocasek stated (via Page Six). "She has abandoned me." Also not included in the disbursement were Christopher and Adam Otcasek.

Formed in 1981, the very heavy metal band Pantera hit its stride and found its sound in 1986 with a solidified lineup of singer Phil Anselmo, bassist Rex Brown, drummer Vinnie Paul, and guitarist "Dimebag" Darrell Abbott. Pantera made an unlikely move into the mainstream in the early 1990s with the No. 1 album "Far Beyond Driven," but personal issues led to a divide between Anselmo and the rest of the group. The band slowly broke up in the 2000s, and it only ever lasted that long because of the magnetism and social skills of Dimebag Darrell. "The strongest one of us all was Dime, and he kept the peace between all of us," Brown told the Dallas Observer in 2016. "He lit people up just by being nice to them."

Brothers Dimebag Darrell and Paul started a new band, Damageplan, and the group performed at the Alrosa Villa venue in Columbus, Ohio, on December 8, 2004. As the band played, a man attacked the assembly, opening fire and killing four people, including the 38-year-old Dimebag Darrell. Estranged bandmate Anselmo attempted to attend the funeral, but was rebuffed by the deceased guitarist's partner, Rita Haney, because the singer hadn't accepted Dimebag Darrell's many overtures toward reconciliation and reunion. 

"I instantly just said, 'Why are you calling now?'" Haney recalled telling Anselmo in an episode of "Behind the Music." "'Why didn't you return the nine phone calls when Darrell called you?'"

Frank Zappa, frontman of the Mothers of Invention turned solo artist who always followed his own muse, made more than 60 albums. While Zappa was once nearly murdered, he ended up dying from prostate cancer in December 1993 at age 52, and by then was one of the most respected figures in rock history. Zappa was also very protective of, but conflicted about, his work. The musician's family hired archivist Joe Travers to catalog and oversee his materials, which Zappa packed into a sprawling underground complex full of thousands of hours' worth of physical recordings of concerts, rehearsals, videos, outtakes, and unreleased albums. After Zappa's death in 1993, more than 40 projects bearing his name have been shared publicly.

But, however much he treasured and painstakingly preserved his creations, Zappa didn't want them to be an overbearing presence in the life of his widow. "Frank wanted to sell the catalogue as part of his estate planning," Jill Christiansen, a manager with music label Rykodisc, told Zappa fanzine "T'Mershi Duween" in 1995. "He wanted his wife Gail, who had run the business all these years, to have a nice life, and not have to deal with all this business." 

Instead, Gail Zappa created The Zappa Family Trust and became an aggressive protector of her husband's music. In addition to suing Rykodisc for its handling of post-mortem Zappa recordings, she also threatened legal action against Zappa cover bands and Zappa festivals.

The tragic real-life story of George Michael ended on Christmas Day in 2016. His partner, Fadi Fawaz, discovered the singer deceased in his bed. An autopsy showed that Michael died at the age of 53 from natural causes, specifically issues with his heart and liver.

In the final years of his life, Michael didn't make as much music as he once did, and had retreated into private life. He was so outside of the public eye that he managed to keep quiet his substantial donations and charitable outreach. Within hours of the news of Michael's death spreading around the world, various individuals and organizations came forward to praise Michael for the help he'd provided.

Michael had secretly funneled all royalties generated from his smash hit 1991 Elton John duet "Don't Let the Sun Go Down On Me" to the HIV-fighting charity Terrence Higgins, and the proceeds from 1996's "Jesus to a Child" to Childline, part of the millions he'd given the organization. Michael made other large, unpublicized donations. U.K. disc jockey Mick Brown revealed that Michael participated in an annual Easter charity push, sending in £100,000 each time. When he was watching a "Deal or No Deal" episode and heard a contestant say she wanted to use her winnings for IVF treatments, Michael paid the bill in advance, and after overhearing a woman lamenting her mounting debt in a restaurant, Michael left behind a check for £25,000.

In 1995, four months after the death of iconic frontman Jerry Garcia at age 53, the surviving members of the Grateful Dead decided to break up. The band that influenced the jam band subgenre and spawned a fan subculture of Deadheads had spent more than 30 years together, but the rest of the Dead didn't exactly go their separate ways. Bassist Phil Lesh was a frequent participant in acts that were the Grateful Dead in everything but the full name and lacking Garcia, including the Other Ones, the Dead, and Dead and Company.

In 2025, the Grateful Dead would've celebrated the 60th anniversary of its formation. Secret plans were underway by the group's four main original members — Bob Weir, Bill Kreutzmann, Mickey Hart, and Phil Lesh — to fully reunite for a series of shows. "We were kicking it around. In fact, we were going to get together and kick some songs around," Weir told "CBS Mornings." "I was hoping that we could play with him again one more time," Kreutzmann added, referring to Lesh. Sadly, the bassist died at the age of 84, just a few days before that group interview, and before the Grateful Dead reunion could happen.

A soul singer, gifted dancer, songwriter, producer, and rock guitarist, Prince had a sound all his own, and he topped the charts over and over in the 1980s and 1990s with classics like "Let's Go Crazy," "When Doves Cry," and "The Most Beautiful Girl in the World." In April 2016, just after completing the totally solo "Piano and a Microphone Tour," Prince was discovered dead in an elevator at his Paisley Park complex in Minneapolis. The 57-year-old musician had died from an accidental overdose of fentanyl, a powerful, pain-killing opiate estimated to be about 50 times as strong as heroin. Prince's body registered a fentanyl level of 450 micrograms per kilogram, and 69 micrograms is thought to be a deadly amount.

The world at large hadn't been made privy to the level of Prince's profound dependency on painkillers, nor the underlying causes. For decades, Prince put on lively performances full of difficult dance moves, which put such a strain on his body and inflicted so much pain that in 2010 he underwent joint replacement surgery for his hip. Prince used prescription painkillers to self-medicate, and he developed an addiction. 

A week before his death, Prince's plane made an emergency landing for medical treatment because of a mid-flight accidental overdose. At the time, the media was told that Prince had become severely dehydrated.

"Michael Jackson: 30th Anniversary Special" was one of the last big, exclusive show business events to take place in New York City before the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, would tragically upend life in the metropolis. Held at Madison Square Garden across two nights — September 7 and September 10 — it commemorated three decades of the solo career of the former Jackson 5 singer turned genre-blending King of Pop. Major acts of rock and pop feted Jackson with performances of his biggest hits.

On the morning after the second concert, Jackson had to see to some business affairs and had a meeting scheduled in an office in the World Trade Center. That morning, terrorists ran a passenger plane into that building, destroying it, but Jackson wasn't there. He skipped the appointment to sleep in, having been awake until 3 a.m. chatting with his mother and sister, Rebbie. "Thankfully, none of us had a clue that Michael was due at a meeting that morning at the top of one of the Twin Towers," brother Jermaine Jackson wrote in his 2012 book "You Are Not Alone," published three years after the death of Michael Jackson. "We only discovered this when Mother phoned his hotel to make sure he was okay."

When Freddie Mercury died of complications of AIDS in November 1991 at the age of 45, the general public had learned that the frontman of Queen was sick only one day before his death. Not widely known at the time to anyone not closely associated with Queen was that Mercury had spent a lot of his time in his final few years toiling hard — as his health allowed — on new material for his band. After production on the 1991 album "Innuendo" was finished, Mercury retreated to a home and Queen's nearby studio in the Lake Geneva area of Switzerland to write and record vocal tracks for songs, to which the rest of Queen could add their instrumental parts. 

Among Mercury's final works was "A Winter's Tale," a solo composition and a nostalgic, bittersweet tune about a man looking back on his life as he faces death. Mercury wrote "Mother Love" with Queen guitarist Brian May. Featuring Mercury's final vocal work captured in May 1991, he was too sick to record the last verse, so May stepped in. In 1995, the posthumous-to-Mercury Queen album "Made in Heaven" was finally released. Fans ready to experience the quietly produced last songs of Mercury sent "A Winter's Tale" into the Top 10 of the U.K. pop chart.

The idea of a rock star representing the subversive and dangerous world of the arts, while rejecting the notion of traditional relationships in favor of romancing as many women as often as possible, is something of a cliché. Yet, Jimi Hendrix fell squarely into this category, as the preternaturally skilled guitarist was romantically and carnally linked with many women, often carrying on multiple dalliances simultaneously. Such activities can often lead to procreation, and only after Hendrix died at age 27 in 1970, did the news emerge that Hendrix was likely a father.

In 1966, 23-year-old Hendrix lived with 16-year-old Diane Carpenter, and she gave birth to a daughter in February 1967. Hendrix refused to confirm or deny paternity, and was in the process of arranging a blood test in 1970, but he died before it could take place. And in October 1969, James Sundquist, who later changed his name to Jimi Hendrix Jr., was born, reportedly after an affair between the guitarist and his mother in Sweden. Hendrix Jr. sued to be included in the musician's estate in 1994.