Joey Ramone

popular name: Jerry Nolan

date_of_death: January 14, 1992

age: 45

cause_of_death: Bacterial meningitis, bacterial pneumonia and a stroke

claim_to_fame: Music

best_know_for: One cannot talk about the origins of punk rock without mentioning the New York Dolls lead guitarist Johnny Thunders and Jerry Nolan on drums. This underrated American glam band played an important role in influencing bands as diverse as the Sex Pistols to Motley Crue. Unfortunately the Dolls were never able to translate the energy of their live shows into their records, thus fame and fortune were elusive.

popular name: Arnold Schoenberg

date_of_death: July 13, 1951

age: 76

cause_of_death: Myocardial infarction

claim_to_fame: Music

best_know_for: Arnold Schoenberg was an Austrian-American composer, music theorist, teacher, writer, and painter. He is widely considered one of the most influential composers of the 20th century. He was associated with the expressionist movement in German poetry and art, and leader of the Second Viennese School. Schoenberg's approach, both in terms of harmony and development, has shaped much of 20th-century musical thought. Many composers from at least three generations have consciously extended his thinking, whereas others have passionately reacted against it. Schoenberg was known early in his career for simultaneously extending the traditionally opposed German Romantic styles of Brahms and Wagner. Later, his name would come to personify innovations in atonality (although Schoenberg himself detested that term) that would become the most polemical feature of 20th-century classical music. In the 1920s, Schoenberg developed the twelve-tone technique, an influential compositional method of manipulating an ordered series of all twelve notes in the chromatic scale. He also coined the term developing variation and was the first modern composer to embrace ways of developing motifs without resorting to the dominance of a centralized melodic idea. Schoenberg's archival legacy is held at the Arnold Schönberg Center in Vienna.

popular name: Guitar Slim

date_of_death: February 7, 1959

age: 32

cause_of_death: Bronchial pneumonia

claim_to_fame: Music

best_know_for: In the 1950s, no blues guitarist even came close to equaling the flamboyant Guitar Slim on stage. A masterful guitarist who pioneered the use of the distorted guitar solo, Slim would appear on stage resplendent in a blue suit, blue shoes, blue hair and about 350 feet of microphone cord that allowed his valet to carry him on his shoulders and out into the street during a performance. His greatest hit came with the million-selling song "The Things That I Used to Do", produced by Johnny Vincent for Specialty Records. It is listed in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame's 500 Songs That Shaped Rock and Roll. He was inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame in 2007.