5 Rock Legends Who Should Be Dead

Five of rock's biggest legends overdosed, drank, bled, and fell their way right up to the edge of the grave — and every single one of them is still alive today. By every reasonable measure, none of these men should still be here. This is the story of how each of them cheated a death that, by all rights, should have caught them years ago.

On December 23rd, 1987, Mötley Crüe's Nikki Sixx — the bassist who wrote most of the band's biggest songs — overdosed on heroin and, by the most widely reported account, was pronounced clinically dead for about two minutes. The way Sixx has long told it, a paramedic who happened to be a fan revived him with two shots of adrenaline to the chest, and he came to in the back of the ambulance with two syringes still sticking out of him. Then he did the unthinkable: he climbed out, talked a fan into driving him home, and used again that same night. He later turned those two minutes with no pulse into the Mötley Crüe anthem "Kickstart My Heart."

Shock-rock pioneer Alice Cooper built a career miming his own execution on stage every single night — the guillotine, the electric chair, the fake blood. Off stage, the real danger was the bottle. A severe alcoholic, he woke up one morning and threw up blood. His wife and his longtime manager forced an intervention, and in 1977 he checked into a sanitarium to dry out. The sobriety didn't hold; he relapsed, and around 1983 he was hospitalized again, this time with cirrhosis of the liver. The man behind the makeup, Vincent Furnier, finally got sober for good — and has stayed that way for decades.

Aerosmith's Steven Tyler — one half of the band's so-called "Toxic Twins" alongside Joe Perry — spent years and a fortune feeding an addiction to heroin, cocaine, and nearly everything else. By his own wildly varying estimates, the drugs cost him millions of dollars, and his own line about the cocaine became legend: "You could say I snorted half of Peru." Rehab failed him twice before a 1988 intervention by the band's management finally pulled him back from what amounted to a slow-motion overdose stretched across an entire decade.

Guitar legend Eric Clapton sank first into heroin — reportedly spending around sixteen thousand dollars a week at the height of it — and then into a near-fatal alcoholism that very nearly finished the job the needle started. In his own autobiography he wrote that, in his lowest moments, the only reason he didn't take his own life was that he wouldn't be able to drink if he were dead. He got sober in 1987, and later founded the Crossroads Centre, a rehabilitation clinic on the Caribbean island of Antigua, to pull other addicts back from the same edge.

And Keith Richards — who sat at the top of a published list of the rock stars "most likely to die" for about a decade, and later joked that he was disappointed when he finally fell off it — outlived years of heroin, a 1977 drug bust that could have put him in prison, and a 2006 fall from a tree in Fiji that left him with a serious head injury and bleeding on the brain, requiring emergency surgery. He's still here too.

Five legends. Five death sentences handed out early. And five men who, against every reasonable odd, are still standing today.

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