Potential reached vs. potential unrealized

[sharksfan2000]

People have been discussing a lot of guitarists in recent threads here and on the Pre-Rumours boards - Bloomfield, Clapton, Hendrix, SRV, and others, as well as Green and Kirwan. It got me thinking...so many of these great players had their careers sidelined or ended altogether by drugs, illness, or an early death. Who among these guitarists do you feel probably reached their full potential before things went bad for them? Which ones do you think never did reach the heights they were capable of?

It's a big "what if" game of course. What about Green for starters...I wonder if he'd taken his playing style about as far as he could when he started to go downhill in 1970. To be sure, it's wonderful that he's still with us and still playing, but few would argue that his post-1970 work is anywhere near what he was doing prior to that. He certainly was searching for something new once he left Fleetwood Mac, but it never seemed like he found it, and perhaps he never would have even had his health remained good. So maybe we're already hearing the best he could have given us.

And what about the other players mentioned above (and others besides them too). It's sad, and even tragic, how things ended up for many of these guitarists, but I often think most of them would not have given us anything better than they already had. Hendrix could be the big exception, but I'm not even sure about him sometimes. I think Clapton hit his peak early...his Derek & the Dominoes work is fine, but to me it's not nearly as groundbreaking or exciting as his playing with Mayall and much of his work with Cream.

Many great musicians did their groundbreaking work early in their careers and then spent lots of time trying to live up to that early acclaim. Some pushed farther and acheived even greater things but many did not.

What do other people think about all this?

PS - sorry for getting into comparisons, Vinnie