I thought for sure this would be any easy item to find online, but multiple searches have proven fruitless.
The only story I thought I knew was that Madonna survived on popcorn for a month or so after arriving in New York from Michigan. But then I learned she actually came to learn ballet and the music thing didn’t happen for almost three years. One of her breaks was with touring with Patrick Hernandez (“Born to Be Alive”) in Europe, but as a dancer, not singer.
I’m hoping there’s a simpler place to find this information than by watching the entire VH-1 Behind the Music catalog.
The Beatles never had jobs outside of music (except, I think, for Ringo). They played the Liverpool clubs for next to nothing while living with their relatives. They weren’t paid all that much in Hamburg, either – enough to get by (when they weren’t being stiffed by their bosses), but lived in crummy housing provided by the clubs they played at. Until Brian Epstein discovered them, they were just barely scraping by.
Kris Kristofferson scraped along in the beginning with odd jobs, finally getting a job as a janitor at Columbia Studios in Nashville, where he met Johnny Cash, who liked his songs, but didn’t record them. He then became a helicopter pilot, writing songs on the side, until others began recording his music.
While **Exapno’s **reply is a bit curt, he’s right. If you want to tell us what particular rock-music sub-category, time period or artists you want to focus on, I suspect many of us Dopers will have books and/or websites worth pointing out to you…
Randy Bachman has a show on CBC called Vinyl Tap , which frequently features anecdotes from throughout his career. Like the first time The Guess Who toured the states, and before they left Winnipeg they all got these matching powder blue mod suits. They thought they were going to be the height of hippie fashion until their first gig, when they realized they were opening for Frank Zappa and they looked like dorks…
