Well, here's a shocker of a study: Rock stars more likely to die prematurely.
A study of more than 1,000 mainly British and North American artists, spanning the era from Elvis Presley to rapper Eminem, found they were two to three times more likely to suffer a premature death than the general population.
Between 1956 and 2005 there were 100 deaths among the 1,064 musicians examined by researchers at the Centre for Public Health at Liverpool John Moores University.
As well as Presley, the toll of those dying before their time included Doors singer Jim Morrison, guitar hero Jimi Hendrix, T Rex star Marc Bolan and Nirvana's Kurt Cobain.
More than a quarter of all the deaths were related to drugs or alcohol abuse, said the study in the Journal of Epidemial Community Health.
"The paper clearly describes a population of rock and pop stars who are at a disproportionate risk of alcohol and drug related deaths," said Mark Bellis, lead author of the study.
One wonders how much money was wasted spent on developing these stupid shocking results. First of all, if you select rock stars knowing that some are already dead, is there really any purpose to the study? You've already got an obvious skew in the data right out of the gate. About the only useful bit of the study is the conclusion that using rock stars as spokesmen in public health campaigns is not a good idea. And that conclusion could be reached without doing any study at all, couldn't it? The single silliest conclusion:
Bellis suggested that the high death rate among older American musicians could be related to the continent's greater appetite for reunion tours, exposing the artists for more years to an unhealthy "rock'n'roll" lifestyle.
It could also be due to the poor medical outlook for impoverished American ex-pop stars who have no health insurance, he said.
Horse hockey. There's insurance available for musicians. Meanwhile our recently concluded study indicates that any study that is based on epidemiological methods is three times more likely to produce lurid headlines. Well, it does.
Well, she’s not dead, but Grace Slick of Jefferson Airplane and Jefferson Starship wrote her biography a few years back, and she showed the toll that the rock and roll lifestyle had taken on her. There’s a picture from a year ago, that I’ve just seen, and she looks much better.