Behind almost every larger-than-life rockstar, there’s a very real human who was once an aspiring musician juggling their craft and day jobs all at once. From digging graves to carting hotel guests’ luggage and lots in between, these future rockstars found ways to hustle and make ends meet while writing, rehearsing, recording, and touring in their limited free time.
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We’ve rounded up five of the most surprising jobs rockstars had before (or, in David Lee Roth’s case, after) they made it big.
Tony Iommi: Sheet Metal Factory Worker
To be fair, if you’re reasonably familiar with the lore of British heavy metal band Black Sabbath, this first pre-fame job likely won’t be much of a surprise. Before Tony Iommi became the man behind iconic riffs like “Iron Man” and “Into the Void,” he was a teenager scrounging up money by working at a sheet metal factory. On his last day on the job, the future rockstar tried to operate a metal flattening machine for the first time and cut off his fingertips.
Although the accident devastated him at first (he was planning on going on tour shortly after the incident occurred), Iommi found new ways to play the guitar using less complex chord shapes and a more manageable speed. The end result was the doomy, sludgy, heavy metal goodness that came to define Black Sabbath’s sound, inspiring countless bands ever since.
Keith Richards: Tennis Ball Boy
Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards looks like a far cry from the preppy, clean-cut tennis club crowd. But before he became one of the most famous axe-slingers of all time, Richards served as a volunteer tennis ball boy for his parents. As he explained during an installment of his “Ask Keith” series, Richards revealed that his parents were big tennis fans. “I was dragged every weekend to the court as their ball boy, so I got to know the ins and outs.”
The rockstar expanded on this odd job in his memoir Life. “Their big thing, my parents, was Saturday and Sunday at the Bexley tennis club. Unless it was p***ing with rain, every weekend that was in—straight to the tennis club. My job was to pick up the balls that went over the railway line at the cost of nearly getting electrocuted.” (Maybe that’s where he got his training to survive his near-death experience with electricity on stage years later.)
David Lee Roth: EMT
For some rockstars, once they get their big break that pulls them from their boring, old day jobs, that’s it. They only want to be a rockstar from there on out. But for Van Halen singer David Lee Roth, he developed a professional passion decades after his rock band’s heyday. In the early 2000s, Roth trained as a state-licensed emergency medical technician or EMT in New York. “I probably have over 200 911 calls on my ticket in the last six years alone,” he told The Guardian in 2012.
“I’ve always used my celebrity as a passport for travel and ‘let’s go get into it,’” Roth told CBS Sunday Morning. And while the then-48-year-old might’ve used his fame to get him in the door of his new professional gig, his persona on stage was nothing compared to his duty as an EMT. “I wasn’t someone until I put on that 5.11 uniform and went on my first call,” Roth said.
Stevie Nicks: House Cleaner and Waitress
Before folk-rock duo Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks joined Fleetwood Mac, they were two aspiring musicians struggling to cut through the noise of the 1970s California music scene. While Buckingham stayed at home practicing to become a rockstar, Nicks went out and got day jobs to make ends meet. Nicks often juggled multiple jobs at a time, working one or two restaurants at a time as a waitress and cleaning houses on the side.
“I didn’t want to be a waitress,” Nicks said in a 1997 interview. “But I believed that Lindsey shouldn’t have to work, that he should just lay on the floor and practice his guitar and become more brilliant every day. And as I watched him become more brilliant every day, I felt very gratified. When you really feel that way about somebody, it’s very easy to take your own personality and quiet it way down.”
Jack White: Furniture Upholsterer
White Stripes co-founder and prolific solo musician Jack White started working as an upholstery apprentice in Detroit in the early 1990s. By 1996, he established his own studio that helped support his musical endeavors after hours. He named his studio Third Man Upholstery after the 1949 Carol Reed film The Third Man and because he was the third upholsterer to set up shop in that specific area of Detroit (a moniker he continued when he established his Nashville record label, Third Man Records).
While in Detroit, White formed a band with his upholstery mentor, Brian Muldoon, appropriately called the Upholsters. On the 25th anniversary of Muldoon’s shop, they pressed 100 vinyl records and slid them into the foam of various pieces of furniture. They even made the vinyls clear so that it wouldn’t appear in an x-ray. “We really went to great lengths to make sure possibly no one would ever hear our record, but it’s there,” White told NPR.
Photo by Richard Corkery/NY Daily News Archive via Getty Images
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