Both had become enormous influences on popular music and culture as teenagers; both had amassed enormous wealth; both were eccentric; both staged numerous comebacks to revive their foundering careers; and both battled drug addictions that contributed to their early deaths.
Certainly, there were just as many differences in the two pop icons as similarities, but the course each followed through life was the same. The rise to greatness and the long fall were tragic, in the true, dramatic sense of the word.
How different it might have been if both had drifted into old age. But their passing, so early and shocking, endowed their lives with amplified significance, and assured them of celebrity for many generations to come.