7 Rock Legends Who Really Have No Business Still Being Alive

4. Brian Wilson

Born: 20 June 1942; Inglewood, California Career Highlights: A founding member of The Beach Boys, later one of rock's most gifted and visionary composers, later still its first and most famous insane drug-addled recluse, Brian Wilson singlehandedly constructed many of the archetypes we now take for granted in terms of rockstar eccentricity and excess. Brian, along with his brothers Carl and Dennis, their cousin Mike Love and friend Al Jardine, formed The Beach Boys in late 1961. The band scored a succession of hit singles and established themselves as America's most popular rock group, while Brian displayed prodigious talents as a songwriter, arranger, and producer. But he also began dabbling in drugs; soon he had suffered a nervous breakdown and stopped touring with the band, opting instead to work only in the studio. Notable Addictions: LSD, Cocaine, Downers, Quack Psychiatrists, Electroshock Therapy Why He Should Be Dead: At the dawn of his eighth decade, Brian Wilson is a happy, healthy, well-adjusted, self-aware human being, as well as being a prolific, popular, critically acclaimed artist and producer. No one who witnessed, either up close or from afar, the train-wreck that was his life between 1966 and 1990 would ever have bet a nickel on Wilson surviving past age 70, much less on his story having a happy ending. The links between substance abuse and mental illness were not well understood in the 1960s, the result of which was that people like Brian Wilson were subjected to "therapies" that either made their problems worse or replaced their drugs of abuse with drugs that were just as harmful. As the saying goes, sometimes the cure is worse than the disease.