One of these things is not like the other

Let's parse, because this list makes no sense to me except for that everyone on it played in an influential rock band and is dead:

What creative frontiers would Jimi Hendrix have explored if he lived beyond the age of 27? Where would Janis Joplin’s music have taken her if she didn’t pass away at 26? Exactly how would we have been entertained if Jim Morrison, Jeff and Tim Buckley, John Lennon, Freddie Mercury, John Bonham, Sid Vicious, Keith Moon, Stevie Ray Vaughn, Otis Redding, Berry Oakley, Kurt Cobain, Bob Marley, Gram Parsons and Frank Zappa, as well as many others, had been allowed to hang around a little while longer?

Now, these questions do seem legitimate for a number of these artists who were cut down in their creative prime: Duane Allman (who the article is primarily about), Jimi, Janice Joplin, etc. But some of the others don't make much sense to me.

First of all, Keith Moon and John Bonham both occupy the same rock-star stereotype for me: they played loud and had prodigious appetites for intoxicants. I'm not quite so sure that they were ever creative forces in their respective outfits. Indispensible to the band's sound I'll give you, but not creative propellants in their own rights.

And then there are those who were past their primes when fate snatched them from us. While John Lennon was certainly making comeback of sorts with Double Fantasy when he was murdered in 1980, no one puts it on a par with his work in the Beatles or even his early solo career. Where his older works display a certain rawness, Double Fantasy wallows in an over-produced sentimentality. In a similar vein, I'm not inclined to speculate about Zappa "what-ifs." I mean, the man was so prodigious that some of his newly produced materials were bound to be good, but there was a steadily increasing crap-to-not-crap ratio, a sort of diminishing returns to wading through his work. It's far more gratifying to just pop in Apostrophe.

And then there's Sid Vicious, who seems like he should fit in with Moon and Bonham, but has the distinction of not actually knowing anything about musicianship. Not that it wasn't ground-breaking at the time, but I doubt there would have been continued speculation surrounding Sid Vicious' latest creative endeavor. No, Sid's place in the pantheon of rock 'n roll tragedy resides in the category of "I'm surprised it didn't happen sooner (the platonic ideal being, of course, G.G. Allin)."

This is all just to say that I've never entertained this thought: "Man, if only John Bonham hadn't drowned in a puddle of his own vomit sleeping off an all-day bender, the Zep would still be rockin' it today." That thought does not bring me joy.