10 musicians who had unusual jobs outside of entertainment
Being a musician is probably most people’s idea of ‘living the dream’, but it turns out that being on stage every night and having fans screaming your name isn’t what everyone wants. Many artists have turned to being reclusive and would spend very little time performing due to a fear of being in the public eye, and it does make you wonder how artists like Nick Drake ever became successful when they were so reluctant to be noticed by others.
Some, on the other hand, were born to be on stage, and when you think about the endless charisma that artists such as Prince had when performing stadium shows, you know that there was no chance he’d ever hang up his purple jacket to retrain as a dentist. Even at the age of 90 and appearing to be frail, Frankie Valli claims he is still having the time of his life when performing, and knowing he’s made millions from doing it his whole life, you can hardly blame him for not wanting to retire from the business.
And then there are a handful of people who sit somewhere in the middle, who have enjoyed immense success as musicians but wish to try their hand at other professions. Many musicians have turned to other arts, such as painting or acting, but some have opted for more traditional vocations on the side and seen themselves shedding spandex for suits.
Below is a list of ten musicians who, at some point in their lives, have had unusual jobs outside of the music industry.
10 musicians who had unusual jobs:
Art Garfunkel
Best known as Paul Simon’s opposite, Art Garfunkel was quite frankly one of the greatest and most powerful voices of a generation, with his distinctive tenor gracing many of the duo’s finest works such as ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’, ‘The Boxer’ and ‘The Sound of Silence’. His harmony work to back up Simon’s lower register was also remarkable, making the two of them incredibly popular as a vocal group throughout the 1960s and beyond as they entered their solo careers.
However, Garfunkel didn’t immediately launch himself into performing as a solo artist when the duo separated, and he decided to take a number of years away from the music industry in order to pursue being a maths teacher, specialising in teaching geometry classes to high school students. Prior to becoming a successful musician, Garfunkel studied architecture at Columbia University, a subject for which he expressed his love by asking Simon to write ‘So Long, Frank Lloyd Wright’.
He returned to his former passion to teach some of the discipline’s most essential elements in 1971, working as a teacher for two years before returning to music.
Jeff ‘Skunk’ Baxter
If you were writing a job application for a high-profile position dealing in missile defence, you’d probably want to leave out the fact that your friends call you ‘Skunk’ and that you’ve played in a band called ‘The Doobie Brothers’ if you want to avoid having your CV thrown in the bin immediately. Jeff Baxter can claim both of those things to be true and can also add being a founding member of Steely Dan to his portfolio, but rather remarkably, he has also managed to land himself a role as a defence consultant.
Having developed an interest in music technology throughout his career, his curiosity was piqued in the mid-1980s when he began to consider how some of the same technologies with regard to data processing and creating algorithms might be used for military purposes. After discussing his interests with his former engineer neighbour, things began to spiral into more than just a hobby, and soon Baxter found himself publishing papers about ballistic missiles and being used as a consultant for the US Department of Defense, where he would suggest making modifications to existing technologies and repurposing them as suitable for defence programmes.
Dean Ween
Of all the hobbies that musicians and other celebrities find themselves gaining an interest in, the one that feels the most understandable is becoming engrossed in fishing. A notoriously peaceful pastime that allows you to be at one with nature, spending a whole day out on the lake, is an excellent way to distract yourself from the madness of showbiz and allow yourself to simply unwind – and wind back in again if you’re lucky enough.
Ween guitarist Mickey Melchiondo, AKA Dean Ween, has taken this one step further and spends most of his time out at sea as a chartered fisherman. While the band were known for their eccentric kitchen sink approach to making experimental rock, ‘Deaner’ seemingly applies much more patience and equilibrium when out on his trawler and has been running regular fishing trips in New Jersey for 15 years.
David Lovering
One might argue that there’s an element of magic to being able to get all four of your limbs to be able to act independently from one another in order to play the drums competently, but unlike being in the Magic Circle, no drummer is sworn to secrecy as to how their work is done. It’s also not surprising that a drummer would be good at magic, especially anything involving sleight-of-hand trickery, and Pixies’ very own David Lovering is proof the two go hand in hand.
After the band first broke up in 1993, Lovering turned his hand to magic and became known as the Scientific Phenomenalist. While his tricks were not of the usual kind, he would perform physics experiments for his audience and took a largely scientific approach to the craft, and he would tour as the support act for his former bandmate Frank Black during the ‘90s. Listening to the opening drum beat of ‘Bone Machine’ and marvelling at its backwards-sounding rhythmic illusion, it’s not out of this world to imagine him being able to pull off trickery of other kinds, but he has since returned to his original profession with the band, releasing five albums with Pixies since 2014.
Tom Scholz
Given that he built his own studio and all of the recording equipment within it in order to record Boston’s self-titled debut album in 1976, it’s not really a secret that Tom Scholz was something of a technical wizard. Having studied engineering at MIT in the late ‘60s, the guitarist is a remarkable individual with bags of talent that go far beyond his abilities as a musician, and right up until the band achieved breakout success, he was holding a pretty lucrative job that he was initially reluctant to give up for a career in rock.
Scholz was working as a senior product design engineer for Polaroid in the early ‘70s. He used his salary to fund the ambitious construction of his studio and used his expertise from the job to build an understanding of how tape recording worked from a technical perspective. His work as an engineer wouldn’t stop after his years of success with the band, and he has gone on in more recent years to continue to patent new inventions, founding the music technology company Rockman.
David Lee Roth
When you’ve been in a hugely successful rock group and decided to walk away from it all, provided you’ve been sensible enough with your finances up until that point, you’ll have the opportunity to do absolutely anything with your life. As exciting as the world of being a touring musician might be, getting to travel across the globe and perform for hordes of adoring fans every night, sometimes people might want to take up a regular job contributing back to society in a different way.
Van Halen’s original frontman, David Lee Roth, decided that in a period where he wasn’t pursuing any new musical projects, he would become a fully-trained emergency medical technician in New York, responding to 911 calls and maintaining a relative sense of anonymity while on the job – something he largely enjoyed. Proving himself to be a caring and compassionate first responder, one of his tutors during his training said that “his commitment really is touching” and that “he wants to help people”.
Bill Berry
While most of these artists have started other professions in response to a band they were in coming to an end, REM’s original drummer, Bill Berry, left the group when they were arguably at their peak of success. Berry suffered an aneurysm on stage in 1995 and was forced to take time away from the group, but following his recovery, he decided that the return to music wasn’t working out for him, and he decided that in 1997, it was the perfect time to change careers.
Since then, he has spent much of his time working on his own hay farm outside the band’s hometown of Athens, Georgia, and only rarely speaks to the media about his life outside of having been in the group. Berry appears to be at his happiest when isolated from the lifestyle that comes with music and has even said that he never really enjoyed being a drummer in the first place.
Billy Joel
You would think that piano players would avoid curling their hands into fists all that often, always being told to keep their fingers as unrestrained as possible. You’d think it would be even worse for pianists to be battering the living daylights out of somebody, causing all sorts of damage to their joints in the process. For ‘Piano Man’ Billy Joel, this was not the case during his teenage years, as he enjoyed a reasonable degree of success as a boxer.
While he only ever competed on the amateur Golden Glove circuit, he was very decorated in the ring, having won 22 out of 24 bouts and only choosing to throw in the towel for good after breaking his nose in his final fight. His second career would prove to be the finer choice, with Joel having won multiple Grammy Awards since taking the gloves off and pursuing music in 1973.
Cindy Birdsong
A lot of the time, those who end up being musicians had always dreamed of being musicians, and it was as a result of constant graft that they finally achieved their lifelong ambitions. It’s rare that things work out the other way around and that after years of training for one profession, you’ve always wanted to work in, you end up being a professional singer. For the Supremes’ Cindy Birdsong, however, this was absolutely the case.
Having attended college to study nursing, it was only upon returning home that she would join the Ordettes, followed by a stint with the Bluebelles, and finally ending up having her greatest success as a member of the Supremes alongside Mary Wilson and Diana Ross. It wasn’t until the Supremes dismissed her from the group in 1976 that she would end up pursuing her true dream, before returning to singing 11 years later.
Kim Wilde
Perhaps leaving the best-known example until last, the ‘Kids in America’ singer may have had the greatest successes of her musical career early on in the 1980s, but while she was still active in the music business, she decided to branch out and rediscover her passion for gardening, which would relaunch her career in the most unexpected way.
Having hosted television shows on BBC and Channel 4 about the topic of gardening, Wilde is also adept at landscape gardening herself, and has demonstrated her green fingered abilities at the Chelsea Flower Show where she won Gold in 2005. Wilde has also published two books on the topic of gardening and was previously part of a world record for the largest tree transplantation ever.
