Of all modern performance artists –opera singers, instrumentalists, dancers, actors, acrobats, and even athletes and politicians -- the rock star is the most electrifying. Others may get ovations, bravos, tears, gasps, or even awe from an audience, but the only artist who can dependably incite mass hysteria is the rock star. 

Witness the mobbing, the fainting, the stampedes, the rioting that surrounded Elvis and the Beatles. 

The rock star’s performance reconnects us with our primal, ceremonial roots. His spell over a crowd is like the shaman’s – a tribe’s link to supernatural powers. The ecstatic energy in the shaman’s dance and song drives believers out of their minds, turning them into a single hypnotized organism which channels and boosts the energy of the performance itself.

Jim Morrison called himself “the Lizard King,” a “shaman” and a “conjurer of dark forces.” He was obsessed with “breaking through to the other side” both on stage and in life. Similarly, his one time lover, Janis, lived and performed on what she called “the outer limits of probability.” When warned by friends that she would soon kill herself if she didn’t rein it in, she said, “Oh man, I can’t live that way. I want to burn. I want to smolder.”

That flame consumed her just as surely as it did Morrison and most of the others. It was their proverbial burning-the-candle-at-both-ends, larger-than-life lives that made them stars. To them, life unplugged was no life at all. They cranked their amps to the max and still blew the circuitry. As if watching a slo-mo car crash and an epiphany, fans were transfixed and transported by the sound and the fury. 

This is the profound irony of the deaths of these rock stars: it wasn’t really self-destructiveness that killed them, it was their insatiable lust for life. More than that, as other extremists will admit – skydivers, race car drivers, matadors – some men never feel so alive as when they are playing with death, working the bull close with a velvet cape. And there is no spectacle like it.

This is why I focus on the falls of these stars – because they were modern day Icaruses who, driven by the crowds’ deafening cheers, flew too close to the sun. “In a sense,” Sting once confirmed, “we’re living the myth of the 'Dying God,' the Icarus myth. The Elvis Presley thing, the Sid Vicious thing. Society wants it and craves it.”

The stars’ deaths were the inevitable but tragic climax of lives and ambitions lived beyond limits. Something that both fascinates and terrifies us all because it goes to the heart of mortality and the insatiable but frail human condition.