Blender's 50 Most Awesomely Dead Rock Stars

If You Gotta Go: If he had merely invented country rock and guest-starred at the early-'70s court of the Rolling Stones, Parsons would be a cult figure. But the circumstances surrounding his death-ODing at the Joshua Tree Inn, his body "stolen" from LAX by his road manager and set alight in the desert in a bungled attempt at open-air cremation-elevated him immediately into rock legend.

It's Better to Burn Out: Commercial failures at the time, Parsons's two solo albums, GP and Grievous Angel, are now considered classics. His estate is controlled jointly by his ex-wife and daughter Polly Parsons, whose proactive celebration includes two tribute albums, two legend-heavy 2004 concerts that featured Keith Richards and Norah Jones and recent "visual scrapbook"/biography, Grievous Angel.

Peer Plaudits: Parsons's stock has risen rapidly in the past decade, thanks to a new generation of alt-country-influenced rock acts such as Wilco. He was also the subject of an acclaimed documentary, Fallen Angel, and the rather less successful 2004 Johnny Knoxville movie Grand Theft Parsons.

Wearing White: After 40 years of lushly orchestrated come-ons, White remains the alpha and omega of low-register seduction. Upon his demise, the mammoth loverman immediately entered the textile pantheon reserved for hip-hop's fallen heroes, receiving his place on T-shirts alongside Tupac, Biggie and Tony Montana. Puffy kicked this off by taking the stage at MTV's 2003 Video Music Awards in a T-shirt emblazoned with White's name.

Mo' Money, Mo' Problems: With nine children, an estranged wife and a longtime girlfriend, White's estate was destined for a legal quagmire. Soon after his death, White's girlfriend of seven years filed a child-support claim against his estate, alleging that the singer had sired her month-old daughter; a year later she offered to drop the case in exchange for a house. Glodean, White's estranged wife, retained control of the estate and musical catalogue. Peer Plaudits: Always a favorite source for samplers, White remains an ironclad musical cue for everyone from G-Unit songstress Olivia to Polish MC Kosman. Even the Pillsbury Doughboy shilled to the strains of Barry in a 2005 television spot.

When I Recycle My Masterpiece: Dylan's legendary former backing outfit have been well served since their 1976 breakup was marked by Martin Scorsese's concert movie The Last Waltz: Their back catalogue has been milked steadily via reissues and compilations, including the recent The Band: A Musical History, they have been the subject of several biographies and they have influenced countless bands, from the Eagles to Broken Social Scene.

Always Read the Fine Print: The Band's songs have been used in numerous film soundtracks and covered widely: There are at least 27 versions of "This Wheel's On Fire," 42 of "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down" and 50 of "The Weight." Unfortunately for the remaining members of the band and the individual estates of Danko and Manuel, singer-guitarist Robbie Robertson took almost all of the songwriting credit and convinced all but drummer Levon Helm to sell him their publishing rights. Nowadays Robertson pals around with computer billionaire Paul Allen, while multi-instrumentalist Garth Hudson has declared personal bankruptcy three times.

Live Fast, Die Young, Leave a Pantsless Corpse? Hutchence died while still young and good-looking, but the circumstances of his end—found hanging naked on the back of a hotel-room door, having inadvertently strangled himself while masturbating—hardly burnished his Dionysian sex-god image. Later still, more sordid details of his demise were provided in a TV documentary by his girlfriend Paula Yates.

Life After Death: INXS's polished dance-pop aged poorly in the post-grunge years, and Hutchence’s death didn’t help. His self-titled solo debut was posthumously released in 1999, to little fanfare.

Mystify: His family will never see any of his money, as most of the $14 million fortune he left at his death was irretrievably lost in a collection of secret companies and trust funds set up to protect it.

Harsh reality: Hutchence’s bandmates carried on as INXS without him, enlisting a series of replacements culminating in last year’s reality show Rock Star: INXS, selecting J.D. Fortune, a 32-year-old Canadian former Elvis impersonator, as permanent vocalist.

Ice Age: Curtis checked out after watching Werner Herzog's extra-depressing movie Stroszek, immediately dignifying his group's statuesque dirges with a scary seal of authenticity. A month later, posthumous single "Love Will Tear Us Apart" became Joy Division's biggest-ever U.K. hit, but his bereft bandmates (by then trading as New Order) resisted Curtis’s transformation into tortured postpunk poster boy, painting the epileptic singer as a "silly bastard" who dug beer and girls.

New Dawn: Joy Division's 45 recorded songs didn't make anyone rich: not the surviving band members—whose royalties were funneled into the unsuccessful Haçienda nightclub until it went bust in 1997 -- nor the Curtis estate (widow Deborah and daughter Natalie). But the ’90s saw a resurgence of the group as an influence on the Smashing Pumpkins, Hole, Nine Inch Nails and Moby. Deborah's weepy '95 memoir, Touching From a Distance, provides the basis for a Curtis biopic (provisionally titled Control) to be directed by Anton Corbijn this spring, while in the U.K. last year, "Love Will Tear Us Apart" was topped for the title of Best Song of the Last 25 Years only by British pop star Robbie Williams’s "Angels."

Wicked Stepmother: Days before his death, Eazy (born Eric Wright) married girlfriend Tomica Woods in a bedside ceremony at Los Angeles's Cedars-Sinai Medical Center and made her CEO of his Ruthless Records and co-trustee of his estimated $35 million estate. Less than 24 hours after Eazy's death, a Ruthless employee sued Woods for claiming wrongful ownership of Ruthless. Other women (E had nine children by seven mothers) retained lawyers to make sure E's children were taken care of after his death.

Gone but Not Forgotten: Despite Eazy's pivotal role in the late-'80s rise of Cali hip-hop, his passing didn't spark the obsessive national media remembrance that Tupac's later did. However, his hospitalization occasioned more calls to the Cedars-Sinai switchboard than any other celebrity patient, including George Burns and Lucille Ball. Legac-E: More than 10 years after Eazy's death, there has been little in the way of new material; Ruthless released one posthumous album, a 1995 greatest-hits collection and a 2002 album/DVD. However, his oldest son, Lil Eazy-E, is prepared to carry the torch with his own album, Prince of Compton.

Peer Plaudits: Vandross sold 25 million records in his lifetime, and he certainly didn't want for celebrity tributes after his death in July last year: "No one heard anyone that brought that much soul," said Mary J. Blige. His name was invoked onstage everywhere from the Live 8 concert to a New York show swiftly organized by radio station KISS-FM featuring Jaheim, Erykah Badu and Jill Scott, to the American Idol live tour. After a two-day wake, his funeral featured live performances from Aretha Franklin and Stevie Wonder; Usher and Patti LaBelle sang his greatest hits on Oprah, while an all-star tribute album, So Amazing, featuring Beyoncé, John Legend, Elton John and Jamie Foxx went straight into the charts at No. 4 in September 2004, selling more than 100,000 copies in its first week. Never Too Much: Whether more Vandross-related product will be released remains to be seen, although his elevation into the pantheon of classic soul singers means his back catalogue may prove irresistible to samplers: Even before his death, his work had been utilized on tracks by Kanye West, Young Gunz and Janet Jackson.

Bad Timing: Strummer expired in the middle of a comeback-his new band, the Mescaleros, had great buzz, and with a Hall of Fame induction and the 25th-anniversary reissue of the Clash's London Calling on the calendar, a reunion was rumored. Since his death, his reputation has only grown.

Rebel Sell: By 2005, three Strummer documentaries and four biographies had joined the tide of Clash homages (Julien Temple is reportedly making another doc now). Astralwerks also reissued two obscurities-the soundtrack to the 1987 film Walker, and Elgin Avenue Breakdown, from Strummer's pre-Clash band the 101'ers-which were both well-received.

Still a Do-Gooder: Strummer still kicks ass as a social activist. His commitment to "carbon neutral" living (planting trees to compensate for greenhouse gases) inspired the memorial Rebel's Wood, a fan-funded seedling forest on the Isle of Skye. Meanwhile, his widow Lucinda established a memorial foundation to build affordable workspaces for musicians, although its first hoped-for renovation lost out to a Georgian mansion on the BBC's home-makeover show Restoration.

All Things Must Pass: Never the most fiscally prudent Beatle—his mismanaged film company, HandMade Films, once left him $23 million in debt—Harrison was still worth $245 million at his death; despite reports that half his fortune was left to the Hare Krishnas, it all went to wife Olivia and son Dhani.

Life After Death: While less aggressively marketed than John Lennon, there has been a steady stream of posthumous Harrison product: a release for his final album, Brainwashed, his late-’70s back catalogue digitally remastered and, most recently, a digital sprucing-up for the 1971 Concert for Bangladesh.

In the Vault: In death as in life, Harrison’s solo achievements are dwarfed by the Beatles’. Their company, Apple, prides itself on being a model of English good taste—eschewing talk of the Beatles "brand"—but still has a packed release schedule. Since Harrison died, there have been DVD issues of the Anthology, A Hard Day’s Night, The First U.S. Visit, Let It Be...Naked and the box set The Capitol Albums. While Harrison’s solo vault may be empty, there are plenty of Beatles projects on the way.

Rusty's Wild Years: Ol' Dirty Bastard remains one of hip-hop's most original—and best-loved—talents, both for his music and for his outlaw lifestyle. Yet his death came just as he was starting to piece his career back together after years lost to drugs and prison. Work on a TV reality show and a new album had begun, but most of the material is now in limbo. Even the Wu-Tang Clan’s much-anticipated tribute to Dirty, "I Go Through Life," has yet to be released, while there’s an ongoing dispute over control of his estate between his mother and his widow, Icelene Jones.

Peer Plaudits: Aware the world is a less vivid place without him, hundreds attended ODB's funeral in Brooklyn, including a black-clad Mariah Carey. But efforts to turn public affection into album sales have stalled, with Damon Dash not only bungling the release of A Son Unique, the record ODB was working on at the time of his death, but also provoking the ire of his widow with plans to put ODB’s initials on a new line of sneakers.