I just posted a song related to this over on the Song of The Day thread:
Andrew Wood, lead singer of the Seattle band Mother Love Bone. With the release of their first album only weeks away, Wood OD'd on heroin, suffered an aneurism, and was taken to the hospital and put on life support. When it was determined he'd never come out of his coma, they removed him from life support and he died.
Wood was one of those guys that just had that "it" factor, and if he had lived, I think Mother Love Bone would have been f-king huge. It's interesting to contemplate how the Seattle music scene of the early 90's would have been different had Wood survived and Mother Love Bone had continued on. For one thing, there wouldn't have been a Pearl Jam, at least as we know it, as two of its members (Stone Gossard and Jeff Ament) were in Mother Love Bone. I'm also wondering if they would have sucked so much air out of the room that the grunge scene might have not taken off or had less of an impact than it ultimately did. The premature end of Mother Love Bone definitely created a vacuum.
Whatever the case, it's just a tragic shame that Wood couldn't defeat his demons, because his death robbed the world of a great talent and probably robbed us of a significant number of great albums that would have ensued.