Bad heroes

Recently I have a lot of time to browse the web and look at the biographies and life stories of my heroes, especially musical ones. A worrying set of key phrases has started to emerge: alcoholism, cocaine / heroin addiction , psychosis (usually LSD induced), rehab. One or more of these phrases applies to most , if not all of the artists in my CD / record collection. The list of premature y demised rock stars is too long to even recount here. It goes well beyond the usual celebrated casualties who died too young and those who almost did. Think Syd Barrett, Nick Drake, Marianne Faithful,Peter Green and, and, and... The same holds true for ''my'' writers: Hemmingway, Miller, Brautigan, Kerouac, Hunter Thompson, and artists (Toulouse Latrec, Van Gogh). So many of these creative and inspirational artists had, if not serious personality defects, then at least, an seemingly inexistinguishable death wish.
Seeing this pattern raises questions for me about creativity, "normality" and my judgement about choice of heroes. The most creative people seem to live on the edge of mortality, playing with the angels. Should we be grateful that Keef Richards, Leonard Cohen and Lou Reed are still with us? Or should we castigate them as bad role models? Sometime it feels like they are singing or playing from "the other side". They have diced with death so often that their very survival makes them seem blessed.
I don't want to draw any moral conclusions here (though am sure that others might) but I am wondering whether it is possible to burn brilliantly like a million suns without destroying oneself, and what the consequences are for people who want to burn brilliantl ybut don't have the talent to leave a legacy like Jimi Hendrix or Janis Joplin. Most musicians I listen to did not live past fifty, an age that I am rapidly approaching. Quite a few of them managed it more by luck than anything else (I recently saw interviews with Pete Townsend and David Bowie in which they looked distinctly faded). Would my life have been happier and less tormented if at the age of 12 I hadn't intuitively recognised that Abba did not own an ounce of originality between them? If I could have shuffled my feet to Waterloo without feeling a twinge of embarassment or desire to find real music, where people suffer and die too young, could I have pursued an uneventful and normal life?