Image: Slipknot [Official Press Photo]
For most musicians, the path from school to the big stage isn’t direct. It takes patience, hard work, and sometimes very creative side jobs before a full-fledged music career takes off. Here’s a look at how Corey Taylor, Ozzy Osbourne, and Chester Bennington earned their living during those early days.
Corey Taylor
At one of his early jobs, Corey Taylor even contributed to the later success of Slipknot. He first tried roofing, but that wasn’t his thing. Then he worked in restaurants, but his favorite job was as a sales associate at The Adult Emporium, an adult store in Iowa — where, according to an interview, he wrote all the lyrics for Slipknot’s debut album.
"From the moment I started that gig until the day I left… I wrote all the lyrics for the first Slipknot album in there. Because I worked from midnight to eight, which is the best time to work. Crazy shit."
Chester Bennington
A classic job, especially in the U.S.; Chester Bennington told Rolling Stone that he worked at Burger King before breaking through with Linkin Park.
Gerard Way
Not really a surprise for My Chemical Romance fans: singer Gerard Way was deeply involved in comics before his band career and earned a Bachelor’s degree at the School of Visual Arts in New York. Even during and after his time with MCR, he continued working in this field. His comic series "The Umbrella Academy" was later adapted into a Netflix show.
Kurt Cobain
Krist Novoselic, founding member and bassist of Nirvana, revealed in a documentary called "Montage of Heck" the job Kurt Cobain had when the two first met. At that time, he worked as a janitor:
"But he’d always have to do some kind of art – usually defacing something. He never had, like, idle hands. It just came out of him, he had to express himself.”
Fred Durst
Fred Durst’s job before his career with Limp Bizkit also involved art, just in a different form: in the mid-90s, he worked as a tattoo artist.
Serj Tankian
System of a Down frontman Serj Tankian had quite a different career path before music. With a degree in marketing, he became the CEO of an accounting software company after finishing his studies.
Ozzy Osbourne
Much about Ozzy’s life and career is revealed in the biography "I Am Ozzy". He held various jobs before Black Sabbath and his solo career. One of them was in a slaughterhouse — we'll skip the details here…
Jacoby Shaddix
The Papa Roach frontman has spoken to Kerrang! about his former favorite job:
“My favorite job before I was a ‘rock star’ was when I worked at a hospital in an intensive care unit as a janitor. I was cleaning up dirty toilets and blood and all that nasty stuff, but I also got to see people recover from what seemed like hopeless states."
Lemmy Kilmister
Lemmy arguably had the best job a “rockstar apprentice” could wish for. He toured as a roadie with Jimi Hendrix and, according to his own words to Rolling Stone, learned a lot from him before succeeding in his career with Motörhead:
"I also learned about theatrics and performing. Jimi was so effortlessly cool and he would move like an elegant spider.”
Jonathan Davis
Perhaps an inspiration for some of Korn’s darker music videos? Jonathan Davis attended a mortuary school and worked for a time as an assistant coroner. His father had wanted to keep him away from the music business, as he recounted in an interview with Addicted to Noise, but this alternative path made him be seen as a troubled kid…
