The 6 Strangest Previous Careers of Famous Musicians

OK, the second last thing you'd want to see him doing. If you said "teach small children," step forward and claim your prize of one slap to the face for thinking way too hard about potential professions for Gene Simmons. Also, that's exactly what Mr. Simmons used to do, before he turned an unnaturally long tongue into rock stardom.

After he'd finished high school, this living cartoon of a man enrolled in college and got himself a degree in education. And unlike his later smarmy persona would imply, he wasn't some comfy-ass private school teacher: Simmons went the whole nine yards and taught sixth grade in a public school in New York's Spanish Harlem. In later interviews, he claimed he was fired for "replacing the works of Shakespeare with Spider-Man comics, which he thought the students were more likely to actually read." Or maybe he was just a crappy teacher.

Also, on a completely unrelated note, Simmons wrote the lyrics to a Kiss song called "Christine Sixteen," about a middle-aged man who has the hots for a 16-year-old schoolgirl:

I don't usually say things like this to girls your age
But when I saw you coming out of the school that day
That day I knew, I knew
I've got to have you, I've got to have you
She's been around, but she's young and clean
I've got to have her, can't live without her, whoo no
Christine sixteen, Christine sixteen.

So there's that.

Anyway, after teaching, Simmons wasn't done not being a rock star yet. Next he kicked around at a few lady fashion magazines, at one point even landing the job of personal assistant to the editor of Vogue. Wait, Vogue? As in, that Vogue?

For those of you out of the System of a Down loop, System of a Down is this Grammy winning metalish band that's been around since System of a Down began, which was 1994. And Serj Tankian is their lead singer. This is him:

The fun thing about System of a Down is that one, the members are Armenian-American political activists who use their songs to talk about genocide, and two, they sing really fast, kind of like Rage Against the Machine, but more so. Now, knowing how intensely serious and metal this band is, what would be the least metal thing a member of it could do? Ride a unicycle while making armpit farts? Maybe. If that were a career, which it's not, so let's drop it. How about create a company that sold accounting software?

Despite his liberal ideology, devilish pointy beard and rock god status, Tankian is actually a marketing and business graduate from California State University. His business line of choice was software, and before he was strutting around the stage doing this ...

... he was running his very own code monkey company. Their product was something called "proprietary vertical industry modular accounting software," which we're almost sure is a made-up term. But to be fair, Tankian didn't start speaking English until he was 8, so maybe he thought it made sense at the time.

Tankian was happily running his business and probably two steps away from taking up golf, switching to khakis and having talks with Bill Gates when his band suddenly took off. After what had to have been an extremely difficult decision preceded by some truly bizarre "pro or con" conversations with family and friends ("But will the band offer you the same 401(k)?"), it was goodbye accounting software, hello Ozzfest.

Before Jack White became known as the singer/guitarist for the White Stripes, and as the guy who could pass for a goth ghost or pre-dead Michael Jackson on a bad day, he was dead serious about making a career out of building custom sofas for rich people.

And we're not talking about some part-time job he took to pay the bills while he was waiting for a record label to call. White not only went through an upholstery apprenticeship for three years, but also traveled to work under various masters of the craft to further educate himself. And then White became his own master and set up a shop of his own, called Third Man Upholstery.

And he did alright ... until he figured out that he absolutely sucked at the business side of things. He liked building the nice furniture, but wasn't crazy about managing the money part. So instead of making himself sick trying to keep his business afloat, he wrote poetry inside his cushions and stopped giving a fuck.

But here's the kind of cool part: White's then-band (known as, naturally, the Upholsterers) made a recording of which only 100 vinyls were ever pressed. Then they supposedly hid them in the furniture, and none have ever been found. So if you happen to live in the Detroit area and own some antique furniture that was at some point fixed by a pale lanky dude, it might well have an extremely well-hidden valuable rarity somewhere inside the cushions. Happy hunting!

But here's where things get awesome in a crazy Man in Black kind of way. Cash was assigned to the cryptographic intelligence unit. As in, the group that stood between America and the Soviets at a time when schoolkids were told to protect themselves from nuclear bombs by hiding under their desks. And Cash wasn't just on KP duty like all the other Southern sons of sharecroppers -- he was one of the guys who intercepted Soviet Morse code. It's like finding out Marilyn Monroe was also a CIA assassin.

Oh, and he was pretty freaking good at it. He was so great at cracking Soviet messages, in fact, that he was the guy who got called for the hardest jobs. That's why it was Johnny freakin' Cash who was the first American to pass along the news that Joseph Stalin was dead.

But when Johnny's time was up, he bolted. For him, the whole thing had been like a prison sentence -- his job was so hush-hush that he couldn't talk to anyone about it, and his off-base travel was severely limited. On the other hand, one of the reasons Cash was so good at honing in on signals was because the job trained his ears for tones and rhythm. So maybe we wouldn't have gotten the Johnny Cash we came to know if he had never done his Cold War spy stuff.

Sure, you sort of know that a guy like that may have a childhood, and a home, and a family, maybe even a cat or two. Yet your gut instinct insists that men like Tom are constructed at a shipyard, then handed a guitar and placed in a cellar somewhere, where they proceed to headbang with a bunch of other similarly manufactured guys until someone offers them a record contract. And if cats feature anywhere in the picture, it's as a snack.

But this is Tom Araya, an idealistic young man on his way to train as a respiratory therapist:

Araya spent his pre-fame (and beginning-of-fame) years in the 1980s as a respiratory therapist. So if a kid came into the ER during an asthma attack, this was the guy who fixed him. Or if someone was about to die and needed a tube jammed down his throat, Tom was their man. He was also something of a Robin Hood: If he felt that he hadn't helped a patient enough, he made a point of just, no kidding, not billing them.

Therapy Tom's undoing proved to be his commitment to Slayer, combined with the stubbornness of his superiors. He had used a good chunk of his salary to finance the band's first album and, as they were gaining momentum, was getting ready to reap the rewards in the shape of a European tour. The hospital, however, wasn't having any of it and said that Araya could take his request for time off and shove it.

Araya returned the favor, instantly terminating his contract and walking away into the death metal sunset.