I love learning about metal legends and their day jobs. Phil Anselmo worked in a restuarant, Manowar frontman Eric Adams worked the deli counter and The Haunted's Jonas Björler is a financial advisor. The drummer of Kittie is a real-estate agent.
On a recent episode of the MetalSucks Podcast, we learned about some other days jobs.
Testament frontman Chuck Billy revealed he was still working for a trucking company up until about four years ago:
I worked for several years at a trucking company. I was always the kind of guy that when I came off the road I didn’t wanna sit at home, I had to stay busy, and fortunately I had a friend that owns a trucking company that hauls U.S. mail. I ended up being a safety coordinator for the company and I traveled around doing safety lectures to all the truck drivers.
I quit that job probably 3 or 4 years ago. I did that for 17 years. I kept busy in music. My friend Willie who owned the company, he was in our band Rampage starting as childhood friends, and he was actually the one who was brought up to get the gig in Metallica before Jason [Newsted] got the gig. So he understood the business and my love for music and he let me do both. He’s like, “Go, get out of here, do what you want, come back and I’ll see you when you get back.”
Meanwhile, Steve “Zetro” Souza got into a carpeting union and kept afloat during his less active years with the band:
Union carpenter. I was a forearm in the union for 21 years. When I got kicked out of Exodus in ’93 I got in the union my brother was in. When I re-joined Exodus that’s what I was doing and I made a really good living doing that, but I’m much happier doing what I’m doing now. My children are older now, Tony and Nick, they live together, they’re 25 and 21, and my daughter lives with my ex-wife. So I only have myself to take care of, which is great; I can go and tour, and there’s no distractions. That’s why this time for me is the best mentally, physically, vocally, musically, performance wise, everything.
Doors were my speciality. I would install doors in high-rise buildings; all the hardware that makes them open and close by themselves, latches, fire doors, that sort of thing. It was a job where I was out of the public eye completely. I just threw a hard hat on and after a while I became a foreman.
It's kind of shocking to think somebody like Chuck Billy would be touring the world one week and then driving a truck the next, as recently as 2010. Then again, after seeing what somebody as established as Devin Townsend makes, it's easy to see why some musicians take on extra work.
The rock star lifestyle – extra income required!
