Live fast, die young and leave a good-looking corpse.
That’s been the mantra of generations of rockers. But unfortunately (or, perhaps, fortunately) some just don’t achieve this ambition and stick around a lot longer than expected, despite their wayward ways. Here we salute rock’s most unexpected oldsters.
1. Jimmy Page
Led Zeppelin were practically synonymous with rock and roll excess for much of the 1970s. But they approached this legendary hedonism in different ways. Bassist John Paul Jones was the band's best-behaved member, largely avoiding the headlines and remaining married to the same woman since 1967. Robert Plant definitely partook in the cocaine and groupie culture of the 70s, until personal tragedies including a near-fatal car crash in 1975 pulled him back from the brink and shifted his focus away from the band's spiral into harder substances.
Which leaves the two hard partiers. Drummer John Bonham was a serious drinker - indeed, it was a sustained drinking session that cut his life short, and brought the curtain down on Led Zeppelin, in 1980. Guitarist Jimmy Page, meanwhile, was the master of long-term pharmaceutical endurance. In the mid-to-late 70s, Page descended into a heavy heroin addiction that lasted years, leading to what fans often call his 'fumble-fingers' era, where his live playing became famously erratic.
Combined with his interest in occultist Aleister Crowley and a general reputation for the most extreme hotel-room debauchery (often alongside road manager Richard Cole), Page’s lifestyle definitely fitted the 'rock star' cliché. Unlike Bonham, however, Page managed to survive his peak period of excess and is still with us at 81.
2. Gary Rossington
'Hoo-hoo that smell / Can't you smell that smell? / Hoo-hoo that smell / The smell of death around you'
Ronnie Van Zant and Allen Collins’ vituperative swipe at bandmate Gary Rossington and his wayward ways appeared on Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Street Survivors album in 1977. Rossington had recently crashed his Ford Torino into an oak tree in Jacksonville, Florida, after reportedly consuming industrial quantities of alcohol and drugs.
Van Sant was so concerned about the 'smell of death' surrounding the band that he was moved to address it in song. In rock's bitterest irony, just three days after the album was released, Skynyrd’s plane went down in Mississippi, tragically killing 29-year-old Van Zant along with guitarist/vocalist Steve Gaines and his sister Cassie, who was one of the band’s backing singers.
Somewhat defying the prophecy of that lyric, Rossington lived to the (comparatively) grand old age of 71, and continued to play with Skynyrd until his death in 2023. He was the last surviving member of the original band.
3. Jerry Garcia
Yes, Captain Trips himself lived to be a respectable 53 years old. Depending on your own age, you might consider the Grateful Dead’s talismanic guitarist to have been a mere slip of a lad when he passed away in 1995. But he sure packed a lot of living into that half-century or so. Garcia started early, taking acid for the first time in 1964.
But it was the cocaine and heroin that ultimately felled him. Although he cleaned up in 1985, Jerry slipped into a diabetic coma the following year, driven by his weight and unhealthy diet. Relapses ensued and he died in rehab in 1995. The official cause of death was a heart attack, but this is likely to have been caused by this lifestyle.
4. Lemmy
'I don’t want to live forever' sang Lemmy on the iconic Motörhead song ‘Ace of Spades’. Lem was tempting fate when he took to adding the line 'But apparently I will' when performing the song in later years. The man who once achieved the remarkable distinction of being chucked out of legendary trippers Hawkwind for taking too many dugs made no secret of his enthusiasm for alcohol and amphetamines, though he was vehemently opposed to heroin.
I once asked him if there was any truth in the rumour that his doctor had advised him to carry on doing speed because if he stopped his heart would pack up. 'No,' he replied. 'That's obviously a twist on the replacement blood idea that my manager had. He thought that Keith Richards had had his blood changed – I believe it wasn't true, in fact – and we went to Harley Street to investigate.
'This is back in 1975. So we went into the doctors and he took a blood test. We went back a week later and he said, "Listen, if we change your blood it will kill you. Your body will reject pure blood. It's used to this toxic brew you've got going round." So that was out.'
When the end came, on 28 December 2015, it was just two days after Lemmy had been diagnosed with prostate cancer. He was 70 years old.
5. Arthur Brown
The god of hellfire hadn’t actually touched any mind-altering substances until his second tour of the USA. Then he took acid for the first time and the floodgates opened. In Houston, Texas, naughty Arthur gave a naked performance of his signature song, ‘Fire’, from his hotel balcony, complete with flaming helmet. Naturally, traffic came to a standstill as Texans stopped to watch this acid-fried Limey giving it the full psychedelic freak-out. But Crazy Arthur ended up in jail.
Remarkably, he’s still out there doing it at the age of 83 – although, perhaps mercifully, Little Arthur remains trousered onstage these days.
6. Pete Townshend
Talk about making a rod for your own back. Rarely can one predict the headline that will appear above every obituary, but in 1965 20-year-old Pete Townshend wrote the line 'Hope I die before I get old' for The Who’s iconic ‘My Generation’.
At the age of 80, Pete has rather missed the boat when it comes to making his legendary lyric a self-fulfilling prophecy. Not that he hasn’t tried, with drug and alcohol addiction followed, more recently, by addiction to prescription painkillers after undergoing knee surgery.
7. Keith Richards
If, back in those hard-livin' Seventies, you had run a sweep on which member of The Stones would depart this earth first, nobody would have chosen the clean-living, elegantly besuited Charlie Watts. Indeed, the safe money would have been on 'human chemistry set' Keith Richards. But, remarkably, Keef is still with us at the grand old age of 81, while many of his former drug buddies (and lovely Charlie) have fallen by the wayside.
Keef's longevity remains one of rock’s great mysteries, defying all known laws of pharmacology, biology, and gravity. Keith has often described his body as being so durable that it’s essentially an industrial-strength container for toxic substances. He did, however, admit to finally giving up heroin in 1978 and drastically cutting back on the cigarettes in the 21st century.
8. Steven Tyler
As half of the legendary 'Toxic Twins' (with guitarist Joe Perry), singer Steven Tyler ensured that Aerosmith’s Seventies output was fuelled by an incredible, sustained amount of pharmaceutical experimentation.
Unlike many of his peers, Tyler managed to survive his first colossal wave of addiction only to repeatedly relapse, often due to prescription painkillers following various onstage acrobatics and assorted injuries. The so-called 'Demon of Screamin’ has had four major trips to rehab, cementing his status not just as a rock legend, but as a long-term, card-carrying member of the recovery club.
He is a testament to the fact that you can spend decades fuelled by illicit substances, fall off multiple stages, get Hep C, and still emerge in your late 70s with perfectly enviable hair and the tireless energy needed to judge reality television.
9. Glenn Hughes
As they age, some singers (such as Robert Plant) adjust their songs to suit their changing voices. Others, such as David Coverdale (who recently announced his retirement), continue to aim for the high notes, with occasionally screeching results. A lucky minority seem completely unaffected by age and sing just as well as they did in their youth.
This category includes Free's Paul Rodgers... and the great Glenn Hughes. The latter is particularly remarkable given the amount of punishment he has given his body over the yeas. He became addicted to cocaine during his time with Deep Purple in the 1970s, but still managed to make an excellent album with Pat Thrall, formerly of the Pat Travers band.
Glenn also became one of the many singers to front Black Sabbath during their Ozzy Osbourne-less years, recording the under-appreciated Seventh Star album, which was originally intended as a Tony Iommi solo set. Hughes eventually cleaned up at the end of the 1980s, and recorded 'America: What Time Is Love?’ with the KLF before rebuilding his solo career with a string of mostly excellent albums, the latest of which is 2025’s Chosen. He also joined hard rock supergroup Black Country Communion. Remarkably, at the age of 74 his voice is still incredible – and he has revealed that he has no plans to retire.
10. Slash and Duff McKagan
Supporting the Rolling Stones is a dream gig for young most rock bands, but it proved to be a nightmare in the great Guns N’ Roses soap opera. The year was 1989, and the Gunners were invited to open for the Stones at four shows at the Memorial Coliseum in Los Angeles.
But they’d been away from the stage for eight months, nursing their various addictions, and Axl Rose was in a particularly foul mood on the first night. 'Unless certain people in this band get their shit together, these will be the last Guns N’ Roses shows you’ll f***ing ever see,' Rose announced during the intro to ‘Mr. Brownstone’ – a song about heroin addiction.
Duff and Slash both subsequently left Guns N’ Roses. The latter was then diagnosed with cardiomyopathy while the former’s pancreas 'exploded'. Now clean and sober, they both rejoined Guns N’ Roses in 2016 and continued to rock merrily into their sixties.
11. Ozzy Osbourne
Ozzy Osbourne once bit the head off a dove during a record label meeting and later a bat onstage, proving that his appetite for chaos was matched only by his questionable dietary choices. For decades, the Prince of Darkness maintained a lifestyle that seemed specifically designed to induce an immediate, fatal liver failure, prompting legions of fans and doctors to take a morbid interest in his impending demise.
Yet, despite being a human clinical trial for every substance known to man, he managed to survive the 80s, the 90s, and even his own reality TV show. In fact, he only left us recently, at the very respectable age of 76. The official explanation for his long survival is simple: a 2010 study found that he possessed several genetic mutations, including a novel variant that helped detoxify alcohol. Seems like nature was a Black Sabbath fan.
12. Stevie Nicks
The reigning Queen of Rock and Roll Witchery, Stevie Nicks proved that you could simultaneously maintain a mystical, gossamer-draped aesthetic and an industrial-strength dependency on stimulants. Throughout the peak Fleetwood Mac era, she famously spent so much time high on cocaine that she now claims she can barely remember the 1980s.
Her habit was so severe that doctors warned her the next line could trigger a cerebral hemorrhage. In a delightful twist of fate, Nicks, now in her late 70s, stopped snorting cocaine but developed an addiction to the tranquilizer Klonopin, which she called her 'dark side'. She finally got clean after a lengthy struggle, but she remains convinced her health and success are largely thanks to the fact that she’s never not worn platform boots, which she credits for providing excellent ankle support.
13. David Bowie
A chameleon, a pioneer, and a man whose diet in the mid-70s allegedly consisted solely of milk, cocaine, and red peppers, David Bowie perfected the art of living fast and long. During his legendary Berlin period, Bowie was so thin and pale that he looked less like a rock god and more like a mysterious creature you accidentally unearthed in a crypt.
His incredible productivity during this period proves that a highly specialized, vitamin-deficient, powder-heavy diet can actually be conducive to making era-defining albums. Bowie eventually cleaned up, trading the Thin White Duke for a more stable life focused on art and family.
He achieved the ultimate rock star move by keeping his final illness a complete secret, dropping a final, brilliant album, Blackstar, just two days before his death in January 2016 at the age of 69, and thereby mastering the art of the dramatic exit.
14. Iggy Pop
The undisputed 'Godfather of Punk', Iggy Pop has spent his entire career in a state of perpetually shirtless, writhing, self-destructive fury. Famous for cutting himself with glass, rolling in broken furniture, and generally subjecting his body to the type of abuse usually reserved for stunt crash test dummies, the fact that Iggy is still standing at 78 is a miracle.
After his heroin addiction reached its peak in the mid-70s, Mr Pop (real name James Newell Osterberg Jr.) relocated to Germany with Bowie, where the two shared a famously strange (and ultimately therapeutic) flat. Having burned off every calorie and destroyed every piece of furniture in sight, the now-clean Iggy has settled into the role of elder statesman.
He is living proof that a dedicated regimen of stage-diving and extreme stage athleticism may, in fact, be the key to a long and healthy life.
15. Nikki Sixx
If you were trying to find a rock star who actually succeeded in dying young only to be rudely brought back to life, Nikki Sixx would be your man. The Mötley Crüe bassist’s 1987 heroin overdose was so spectacular it became the stuff of legend (and a centrepiece of his band's memoir). He was declared legally dead for two minutes before a medic famously revived him with two shots of adrenaline—right into the heart, naturally.
Not one to learn a lesson, Sixx then proceeded to go right back to his self-destructive ways, but somehow, his body kept accepting the punishment. Now in his late 60s, Sixx is clean, sober, and remarkably well-preserved for a man who spent twenty years attempting to pickle his own organs. His continued existence proves that if you overdose hard enough, your body might just develop a stubborn, life-affirming rage against the dying of the light.
Pics Getty Images
