6 Famous Rock Stars With Surprisingly Ordinary First Jobs

Even the biggest musical stars had to start out somewhere. It's notoriously difficult to make a living in any creative industry and, for most, success is far from an overnight accomplishment. Many aspiring musicians have to support themselves with day jobs, and this was the case for all the names on this list. You’ll probably recognize all these famous artists, but you’ll likely be surprised to learn about the mundane work they labored at along the way.

1. Rod Stewart - Cemetery Worker
2. Ozzy Osbourne - Slaughterhouse Worker
3. Debbie Harry - Playboy Bunny
4. Tom Waits - Pizza Chef
5. Sting - Teacher
6. Mick Jagger - Hospital Porter

Rod Stewart - Cemetery Worker

The British singer-songwriter rose to fame as part of the Jeff Beck Group and then the Faces, going on to enjoy an astoundingly successful solo career. Before all that, Stewart worked as a newspaper delivery boy for his family's store. Later on, he had a brief stint at a far more unusual vocation. Writing in his autobiography, he revealed: “... there were a couple of Saturdays up at Highgate Cemetery, earning 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.”

Ozzy Osbourne - Slaughterhouse Worker

As frontman of Black Sabbath, Osbourne helped pioneer heavy metal. As the self-titled “Prince of Darkness,” it's perhaps fitting that one of Ozzy's pre-fame jobs was working at an abattoir. In a 2018 interview with Classic Rock, the singer explained: “It wasn’t because I was killing animals. It was because when you’d finished the kill you could go home…When you finished the kill you could go home and that’s what I liked about it. The money was good as well.” 

This wasn't the only job Ozzy held, though. “First, I worked at a jewelry company—they made napkin rings and cigarette boxes,” he told Rolling Stone. “Then I was a plumber, then a tea boy on a building site… Then I got a job in a mortuary. My mother went ballistic: ‘You are crazy.’ The formaldehyde was awful. I’d have visions of the dead people’s faces when I got home. Then my mother got me my first musical job—I tuned car horns. You were supposed to do 900 a day."

Debbie Harry - Playboy Bunny

The question of whether you can be both a feminist icon and a sex symbol has long been debated, but one person who certainly proved that the answer is yes is Blondie lead singer Debbie Harry. When Harry was just starting out in New York in the latter half of the 1960s, she earned cash working as a Playboy Bunny. Speaking to BBC Radio 4, she said: “Well, I like to dress up, so it didn't really bother me. I probably did much crazier or funnier things to myself over the years. But it was kind of curious because they took very good care of us. We became like performers, you know. We were important to them. We were important to the business.”

Tom Waits - Pizza Chef

It's difficult to imagine Tom Waits anywhere except a late-night bar or up on a stage, but even the gravel-voiced, mercurial maverick once held a mundane job: working as a pizza chef. This was in National City, San Diego, as the singer once explained: “…sandwiched in between a Triumph Motorcycle shop and Burge Robert's is Napoleone's Pizza House, it's been there for a good 25 years and I worked there when I was real young. I've worked since I was 15 there and I guess not till I was away from it for a long time I could really sit down and write something constructive about it.”

Sting - Teacher

You could be forgiven for thinking that the former Police frontman and multi-million record-selling solo artist, Sting, sprang fully formed into the rock and roll world. In reality, he held a series of common jobs before finding fame—construction worker, bus conductor, and tax office employee. For two years, he also taught at St. Paul's First School in Cramlington, England. Sting recalls of that time: “I taught everything…Maths, bit of reading, bit of poetry, bit of art, bit of football. I would sit and play music to them. I’d play the guitar and teach them songs. I enjoyed that more than anything.”

Mick Jagger - Hospital Porter

The English singer and founding member of the Rolling Stones possesses one of the most distinctive voices (and faces) in rock and roll. The Stones formed in 1962 and didn't take too long to become an established act. Jagger was only nineteen at the time, sharing a flat with the Stones' guitarist, Keith Richards, and studying at the London School of Economics. For extra cash, Jagger worked as a porter at the Bexley psychiatric hospital. He even reportedly had a certain formative encounter in a cupboard with a nurse at that very institution.