Rock Stars Who Fell Into Tragedy After Getting Fired From The Band

Roger Keith "Syd" Barrett was one of the key members of Pink Floyd, having joined the band early in their careers in the mid-1960s (via Biography). Acting as the band's guitarist, Barrett defined their sound, also becoming the main writer for their 1967 debut album, "The Piper at the Gates of Dawn." According to Biography, as brilliant and as innovative as Barrett was, the sounds he was creating were coming to him by way of taking LSD, and he "was already losing his tenuous grasp on reality through his incessant drug use."

As UCR explains, in January 1968, Pink Floyd began avoiding Barrett, playing concerts behind his back, and by April, they officially announced he was out of the band. Barrett tried going the solo route, yet heartbreakingly told Rolling Stone in 1971, "I'm disappearing." He added, "I'm sorry I can't speak very coherently. It's rather difficult to think of anybody being really interested in me. But you know ... I am totally together." As another piece by Rolling Stone reveals, it was shortly after that interview that the creative genius truly disappeared from the music world.

Barrett wound up back in Cambridge, England, where he was originally from, and chose to go by his birth name again. He took on painting but mostly remained out of the public's eye before dying from pancreatic cancer in 2006. As Rolling Stone sadly notes, however, "Syd Barrett, the rock icon, died long before" then.

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