Or, if his music influenced British cars! Perhaps everyone was driving around honking in the Key Of Hell, and that’s how they summoned Margaret Thatcher.
Dale Frashuer (of “Na Na Hey Hey Kiss Him Goodbye” fame) started out as a liquor truck driver.
This is not going to meet all of the OP’s stated requirements, but one might consider Tom Scholz. After earning a master of science in mechanical engineering from MIT in 1970, he worked for Polaroid for six years before becoming a full-time musician. In interviews, he has stated that he kept busy as a musician during this period, but that the Polaroid job was a full 40 hours/week.
Jimi Hendrix was incredibly young when he burst on the scene, but not so young that he didn’t serve a year in the Army and trained as a paratrooper.
Paul Revere (of & The Raiders) grew up on a farm and worked as a barber while he was playing nights and weekends. The group’s lead singer, Mark Lindsay, was working in a bakery when Revere met him.
I suspect these “humble beginnings” stories might have been more prevalent in ye olden times when kids would form a garage band, work their way up to regional recognition and then finally get signed to a big record label.
The worst? The singer for Tesla drove a ‘Honey Truck’ (septic pump-out).
I don’t know for how long, but a day on that job has got to count for many on any other.
Sting was a bus conductor, building laborer and tax officer before he finished college, after which he was an English teacher for a couple years.
O.K., but bus conductor, building laborer, and tax officer were temporary jobs. He did them while a college student. Four years after graduating from high school (well, secondary school to use the British term) he finished college and began teaching. I don’t think that the jobs he held while in college determine whether he came from a working-class background. I worked in a cafeteria, as a night clerk in a student union, as a library clerk, and in a factory while a student. I don’t consider that to determine whether I came from a working-class background. There are undoubtedly people from solidly middle-class backgrounds who worked at similar temporary jobs to decrease the amount of loans they need to take out. What my parents did does determine it, I think. The sources I’ve looked at say that his mother was a hairdresser. His father did work as a milkman for a while, but it’s not clear if that was a temporary job. He also worked as an engineer in an engineering works according to one source. It’s not clear what that meant. The word “engineer” was rather vague at that point. If what his father did was something like what a modern engineer is, then that’s not a working-class job, and thus Sting didn’t come from a working-class background.
Paul Westerberg was a janitor when he worked his way into being the singer for the replacements. I’m not sure how many years he had been working as one, though.
Johnny Ramone was 25 before he co-founded The Ramones. As a teen he was in a few bands but his day jobs were plumber’s helper and dry cleaning delivery.
When Sting went to uni (well, uni very briefly, then a Poly - more like a community college than a uni), there were no student loans in the UK; there were actually grants for most students. Money wasn’t a barrier. I think the jobs were before he started teacher training, not during.
What got him to college was going to grammar school where people would have talked about uni, and getting decent grades. But those were also free (you just had to pass the entrance exam), and every town had at least one.
It’s actually the route to middle-classness that a hell of a lot of people twenty or more years older than me took - born into a definitely working class family, got into grammar school, then went on to teacher training because it meant a reliable job, and then either continued with teaching or moved into something else also middle-class.
Wallsend is really very working class. If his Dad had been an engineer that was a university-qualified engineer, it’s really not likely they’d have lived there. Or that his wife would have worked as a hairdresser.
Sting’s kinda annoying but there’s really not much doubt that his origins are working class.
That really is a different question. I know that’s been pointed out already, but, I mean, although it’s much more difficult to find a musician or actor born this century (or even ten years before that) who was born into a working class family, there were tons and tons before that. It’s pretty hard to deny that Eminem or Kurt Cobain were born into working class backgrounds, but they’ve never done any other job.
But it’s fantastically difficult to break into music as an older person. It always has been. Working another job solidly, not as a by-job or something in high school or college (if you go), for five or more years, probably means you’re already too old to be a successful musician.
You basically need to think of people who became successful in music in their thirties or above. And then it turns out that a lot of them had actually been unsuccessful musicians for most of their adult lives prior to that anyway.
Thank you, SciFiSam.
Actually, the place that Sting graduated from sounds like what was called a normal school in the U.S. It was a college that only taught future K-12 teachers. Now someone who teaches K-12 has to go to a regular university and get a bachelor’s degree. Most of the places that were normal schools turned into regular universities (generally around 1960), training people for all sorts of jobs. The place that Sting went to was not like a community college in the U.S. Community colleges only give two-year degrees that are called associate degrees. This is acceptable for certain kinds of jobs, but for most jobs requiring college degrees, it’s necessary for a community college graduate to then go to a regular university for two more years of education for a bachelor’s degree.
That is correct. Sting worked those jobs before attending uni (or poly).
It’s not really the same as either or those, TBH. It had other courses including degrees, not just teacher training, but they had to be externally validated, and there would have been a lot of HNDs, which are sort of the equivalent of two-year degrees in the US (they do take two years, but they’re only in vocational subjects). But the point is it wasn’t a university, and middle class parents generally did not want their children going to them.
The distinction between people who go to community colleges in the U.S. and those who don’t isn’t a matter of class. It’s mostly a matter of how well you did in high school. Community colleges were created so that people who barely scraped through high school can go to college despite having done badly in high school. The idea is that some of them did badly because they just goofed off in high school. If they then actually work hard in their courses in a community college, at the end of their two years there they should be able to get into a regular university and finish in two more years. Depending on the community college, anybody who graduated from high school can get in, and in some of them even some people who didn’t graduate from high school can get in. Not all the people in community colleges did badly in high school though. Some did very well, but their family is so poor that they couldn’t afford to go to a university. They then go to a community college, often working full-time and taking classes part-time.
There’s no shame in doing your first two years at a community college in the long run. If you go to a community college and get great grades and then go to a reasonably good state university and get great grades (and great recommendations from your professors and maybe publish a paper) and then go to a top graduate department at a top university in your subject (and get great grades and maybe a few more papers published) and get a job teaching at another top university in your subject and then make some brilliant discoveries in your subject, nobody is going to care that you did your first two years at a community college. The Nobel Prize committee isn’t going to say to you, “Well, you’ve made earthshaking discoveries in your field. However, you went to a community college. So we can’t give you a Nobel Prize. Have you considered flipping hamburgers at McDonald’s?”
Yeah, grades are - or were, rather, since Polys don’t exist any more - a factor too. Class was also a factor. When I said “more like,” that’s what I meant - there aren’t direct parallels.
Community Colleges like sound a pretty good institution to me - I think if we lived in the US I probably would have attended one for the first two years at least, mainly because of the difference in tuition fees.
Well, not exactly. Community colleges were created to bring a lot of technical disciplines (agriculture, auto repair, carpentry, teaching assistants, what used to be called “drafting,” etc.) under a single publicly-funded umbrella, rather than the earlier model of separate vocational schools for everything. Academic preparation for a four-year college was just one of the CC responsibilities.
For that matter, Gene Simmons also taught 6th grade in New York City for a year or two before he founded KISS. He said, “I hated those little pricks.”
6th grade! That’s a rough job, seriously! They ARE little pricks at that age…I don’t envy him!