Call me an idiot but I never heard of Kurt Cobain before his death. I DID hear of his group Nirvana, but not him personally.
Only because he had a brand-new baby, a young wife, a lot of talent, and a HUGE repetoire of material. He was a very prolific songwriter. Sublime combined ska (which was really becoming popular in the late '90s), Southern California-style punk rock, reggae, dub, and hip-hop, and they would have appealed to all those diverse fanbases… they ended up being big anyway, but he never lived to see it. The heroin took care of that.
Okay, yeah, that’s world of stupid right there. I thought perhaps it was a deliberate OD, doesn’t sound like it, though. Does Sublime still tour and record?
Hard to say with Johnson. He was well-known among musicians, but blues were not widely distributed, and he probably had total sales of a few thousand per record at most.
As far as the Beatles were concerned, I believe when they recorded that album with Tony Sheriden, Sutcliffe was with the group.
This is more of a “band whose member died”, and definitely Wendell Wagner’s first category of how-well-known-before-death, but I’d think that Bon Scott of AC/DC is still a good example.
AC/DC was already quite popular in Australia and were on the verge of hitting it big in the U.S. when Bon Scott suddenly got a bit too drunk and passed out in the wrong position. When they released Back in Black with a new singer, AC/DC sold millions of records. Nowadays, you’re as likely to hear a Bon Scott tune on “Classic Rock” radio as you are to hear any of AC/DC’s later glories.
D
No, Brad was pretty much the “brains” of the operation, or at least the driving creative force. The other two guys went on to form the Long Beach Dub All-Stars (not a bad band either), but several Sublime albums were released posthumously: an acoustic album, the “Second Hand Smoke” compilation (quite good), and a Greatest Hits compilation. Personally, I’d give my highest recommendations to the self-titled Sublime album and “40 Ounces To Freedom.”
Jim Croce is close. He had a number of albums before he died, but to the best of my knowledge not a lot of people know of him. He was on the verge of becoming big when he was killed in a plane accident. I know that even while he recorded he had odd jobs to keep himself afloat.
Croce already had hits with “Operator,” “You don’t Mess Around with Jim” and “Big Bad Leroy Brown” (which hit #1 a couple of months before he died). His death, though, did lead to more interest and greater success.
Robert Johnson was not a big star during his lifetime, even by the standards of pre-war blues. His biggest selling song (‘Terraplane Blues’) sold a few thousand, and it was the first one released, so it was sort of all downhill from there. Contemporary audiences considered him brooding and introspective. When I’ve talked to Delta people who were alive in that era, they often wonder why people today make such a big fuss over Robert Johnson.
While he was a very accomplished guitarist, and very prescient in adapting the pianolike boogie to the guitar, much of his mega-popularity today is due to the huge audience for blues and its descendent styles, compared with the small, segregated (an impoverished) minority who bought blues records in the 1930s.
It’s also due to some myth-making: his semi-obscurity (41 recordings, two photographs) and early death provide just enough information to stimulate demand for more. His stereotypical bluesman’s death – posioned by a jealous husband – is ready-made legend. Lots of his lyrics seem prophetic as a result. E.g., the last line in ‘Drunken Hearted Man’ is, “When you get weak for no-good women, that’s the day you’re bound to fall”.
Had he lived long enough to share the stage with fellow pre-war bluesmen like Booker White, Skip James and Son House, he would have been considered (like them) a treasure from the past, as opposed to a demigod.
I think now that there are three categories of musicians being discussed here:
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Early blues musicians like Robert Johnson, Leadbelly, Boy Blue, Willie Jones and Joe Lee. Arguably, all blues musicians before at least the 1950’s and maybe the 1960’s didn’t get the recognition they deserved because of racial prejudice. When that prejudice decreased enough to allow them to become more generally known, blues music became more popular and many musicians, some of them already dead, became better known than before.
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Musicians who died just as their career was taking off like Selena, Elliot Smith, Nick Drake, Jeff Buckley, Israel Kamakawiwo’Ole, Brad Newell, Bon Scott, and Jim Croce. These people all had modest popularity before they died. They may be more popular now, but it’s not a case of going from obscurity to fame after their death.
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Eva Cassidy, who is the only musician mentioned so far who truly went from obscurity to fame.
Otis Redding
Yes he had some success particularly in the R&B charts. He performed at the Monterey Pop Festival in June 1967. By late 1967, he was definitely slated for the “Big Time” (upcoming TV appearances, tours, etc).
He died in a plane crash in Wisconsin in December 1967. He had an enormously successful posthumous hit - “Dock Of The Bay” - recorded 1 week before his death.
Just before entering my last post, Redding’s name occurred to me and I wondered why no one had mentioned him before.
In Wendell Wagner’s #2 category (maybe #3, since he probably wasn’t ever going to take off), there’s Hide (pronounced hee-day), who was a run-of-the-mill Japanese hair-band pop singer of middling-to-poor popularity who, had he not died, would probably today be an anonymous assistant bartender at a small club somewhere. Around '97 or so, he committed suicide (shortly after, and in exactly the same fashion as, Michael Hutchence of INXS, which led more than a few to comment that he wasn’t even capable of dying with originality). Suddenly, and for a good five years after that, his albums were #1 hits, millions of screaming teens went to see bands that had performed with him play “tribute concerts”, ‘lost works’ popped up periodically and immediately hit the top of the charts, and DVD’s of his concerts were on the front rack of every video store and were behind the counters at every 7-11. Today, the albums of his released after his death outnumber those released before his death by at least 2:1, probably a good deal more.
Where, then, would Ritchie Valens fit in? Had ‘La Bamba’ already hit big when he won the Coin Toss of Death?
As God is my witness, I thought Jim Croce had died in a VW from an overdose of cliffside, a la James Dean.