[freedumb2003]

How sad he died so young and for such a sad reason!

When I first heard that version, I was absolutely riveted!

It still moves me and if you listen closely, you can hear the wistful sadness that was the life cut so short.

[aruanan]

How sad he died so young and for such a sad reason!

I heard that the first reason given turned out not to be the actual reason or that they later discovered he had something else that would have been fatal but I cannot remember what any of it was.

When I first heard that version, I was absolutely riveted!

Yep. He definitely had IT. Now that I've been going through my Brazilian popular music of the 60s-80s I've been hearing other instances of the same thing. And the funny thing is that you can have two people who may have the same wide vocal range, sing perfectly on pitch, and with the same degree of fluency, but one of them will have IT and the other won't (I'm thinking folks like Justin Bieber, Christine Aguilera, Gloria Estefan, Mariah Carey, all just human instruments with a good vocal apparatus, but nothing at all sublime). On the other hand, you can have folks without anything particularly outstanding in pitch and range (like Chico Buarque, Ellis Regina, Ivan Lins, Wilson Moreira, Nelson Sargento, Tom Ze, Milton Nascimento, Joao Bosco, Beto Guedes, to name a few) but whose music and performance are stunning. Too much pop music now has a "sum of the parts" formula with a list of parts that is so narrow and so niche-targeted (children with no background in music) that it sounds, though bright and colorful and rhythmically busy, as plasticized and composite as a cootie toy.