The Weird Jobs Music Stars Did Before They Were Famous

Now one of the world’s most successful rappers-turned-music moguls, he had a different vocation back when he was plain old Shawn Carter from Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn. “I know about budgets. I was a drug dealer,” he told Vanity Fair. “To be in a drug deal, you need to know what you can spend, what you need to re-up. At some point, you have to have an exit strategy, because your window is very small; you’re going to get locked up or you’re going to die.”

Yeezy could fold a jumper like no one’s business back in the day. “Let’s go back, back to the Gap, Look at my check, wasn’t no scratch,” he raps in the track Spaceship. “Oh now they love Kanye, let’s put him all in the front of the store, saw him on break next to the ‘No Smoking’ sign with a blunt and a Mall… So I quit, y'all welcome.”

Charmingly, before he was famous, Ozzy used to work in an abattoir. “I had to slice open the cow carcasses and get all the gunk out of their stomachs. I used to vomit every day; the smell was something else,” he said. Despite the infamous bat-eating, he’s now 'pretty much a vegetarian’, he says.

Well, not quite a gravedigger, but he marked out the graves for excavation at Highgate Cemetery in London, where he’d 'earn a few quid by measuring out plots and marking them off with string’. “You learn a lot about yourself, doing physical work. And what I learned about myself was that I didn’t like doing physical work,” he said.

Fergie from the Black Eyed Peas, under her real name Stacy Ferguson, voiced Charlie Brown’s sister Sally, and Lucy in the Peanuts cartoons. “My mom has them all on tape,” she told Playboy. “I was Sally for two years and Lucy for one.”

Yes, the Material Girl worked in the Times Square branch of Dunkin’ Donuts. But sadly it was not to become a career. She was fired after she squirted the jam filling from a doughnut over a customer. Their loss was pop’s gain.

Kurt Cobain was no stranger to menial work before he became the frontman of Nirvana, working nights - much like Hong Kong Phooey - as a janitor to pay for their first demo. “When I was a janitor I used to work with these guys Rocky and Bullwinkle,” he once recalled. “They’d clean the toilet bowls with their bare hands and then eat their lunch without washing their hands.” Nice.

Impressively, before becoming a musician, Cash was in the Air Force, where he intercepted Russian intelligence, deciphering morse code transmissions. He used his pay cheques from the military to buy his first guitar. And in a rather amazing twist, he was the first person in the US to hear about the death of Joseph Stalin, from a intercepted communiqué.

Prior to his tenure as the lead singer of the Rolling Stones, Mick Jagger worked as a porter at the Bexley psychiatric hospital. Interestingly, he was seduced by a nurse while working there, and lost his virginity in a store cupboard.

Blondie legend Debbie Harry worked as a Playboy bunny at New York’s Playboy club from 1968 to 1973, the year she met bandmate Chris Stein. Of her time there, she admitted: “I fooled around with drugs and was consequently often half-asleep.”

The legendary Patti Smith worked in a toy factory after graduating high school. But it was an awful experience, one which she immortalised in the track 'P**s Factory. “The stuff those women did to me in that factory was horrible. They’d gang up on me and stick my head in a toilet full of p**s,” she once revealed.

Hole singer and former wife of Kurt Cobain, Courtney Love worked as a stripper in L.A., Oregon, Alaska, Japan, and Taiwan. “Stripping funded my band,” she said. “There was a lot of temptation in terms of drugs back then. I was like, OK, when I make a million dollars, then I’ll do all the drugs I want. Which I did, by the way.”