First, a little background: You probably recognize the band below — it’s Weezer, specifically the lineup from their 1994 debut album, which featured hits like “Buddy Holly” and “Undone (The Sweater Song).”
Before recording Weezer’s second album, bassist Matt Sharp started a side project, a band called The Rentals, which scored a big MTV hit of their own, “Friends of P.” That’s where Maya Rudolph came in. Right after graduating from college — and before Rudolph had a single acting credit — she joined The Rentals as they toured behind their first album.
“It was such a fun job out of college,” Maya told the New Yorker. “I got to live on the road for six months. We opened for Blur and for Alanis Morissette, and we got to spend Thanksgiving with her and play hacky sack with her band and go bowling.”
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Here’s another wild one — in the late ’60s comedy legend Chevy Chase attended Bard College in New York, where he studied English and played drums in a band called The Leather Canary. The exciting part? The other members of the band were Donald Fagen and Walter Becker.
You know…Donald Fagen and Walter Becker, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inducted duo Steely Dan!
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Academy Award-winning actor Brie Larson (Captain Marvel in the Marvel Cinematic Universe) also had a surprising — and brief — music career back when her acting career was in its embryonic stages.
Larson began playing guitar at age 11 and soon started writing, recording, and uploading songs to her website. This led to her song “Invisible Girl” (written after she failed to win the role of Wendy in 2003’s Peter Pan) getting some airplay on a Los Angeles radio station. Things kept looking up for Larson when the 16-year-old got signed to a major label deal and released her debut album Finally Out of P.E.
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You know Stephen Tobolowsky? The actor who played insurance agent Ned Ryerson in the 1993 classic Groundhog Day with Bill Murray?
Well, before he went on to star in over 200 movies (like Freaky Friday) and on TV shows (like Glee), he grew up in Dallas, where he and some high school buddies had a band called Cast of Thousands. “We were a terrible folk rock band,” Tobolowsky told the Lone Star Plate podcast. “We were really bad.” Terrible or not, in 1970, they were picked to record two songs on a garage band compilation. To fill out their sound, band member Bobby Forman invited a kid from the neighborhood to play lead guitar — future blues legend Stevie Ray Vaughan.
“It was the first time we saw genius,” Tobolowsky recounted, “and when you see that for real, there’s no coming back from it. You realize, one, it exists, and that’s good news, and then you realize how far away you are from that, and that is sorta bad news. But it is true that Stevie did make us sound like we knew what we were doing.”
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You know actor Jason Schwartzman as a favorite of director Wes Anderson (having appeared in eight of his movies including Rushmore and The Grand Budapest Hotel), but four years before making his professional acting debut, a 14-year-old Schwartzman joined the Los Angeles-based band Phantom Planet as their drummer.
Phantom Planet’s 1998 debut album failed to make much of an impression, but right around the time Schwartzman’s acting career took off, the band scored a big hit with the song “California,” which became the theme song for the TV series The O.C. Schwartzman even co-wrote the tune!
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Long before Rashida Jones made us laugh on The Office and Parks and Recreation, she dabbled in the late ’90s and early ’00s as a professional singer.
This probably should come as no shock, considering her dad was 28-time Grammy award-winning record producer Quincy Jones. Still, you might not know she sang on The High & Mighty’s 1999 album Home Field Advantage, the Tupac Shakur tribute album The Rose That Grew from Concrete, released in 2000, and, maybe most surprisingly, Maroon 5’s debut album, 2002’s Songs About Jane.
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These days, Peter Dinklage is known as the star of Game of Thrones and Elf, but back in the ’90s, the twentysomething future Emmy award winner was the frontman of a punk band called Whizzy.
Whizzy released a four-song demo tape in 1995 and played in New York clubs like the famous CBGB.
Dinklage told the New Yorker, “We had a following, but our following was, like, progressive rock. It was all guys. For some reason, just dudes came to our shows. I felt a little bit, like, what’s the point of being in a rock band if there’s no ladies?”
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Have we got a photo for you! It’s of comedian Ricky Gervais, who you know as the creator and star of the British The Office and controversial host of the Golden Globes.
But before his comedy career took off, Gervais and his friend Bill Macrae formed the new-wave duo Seona Dancing (I promise this is real, LOL). That’s young Ricky on the right.
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Speaking of The Office stars, Ed Helms fell in love with bluegrass music as a boy and later met some like-minded musicians, Ian Riggs and Jacob Tilove, at Oberlin College. Dubbed The Lonesome Trio, they played on back porches and at basement keg parties, then moved to New York after college and became a fixture in the NYC bluegrass scene.
Of course, Helms was most focused on becoming a comedian/actor, and after hitting it big, he used his star power to help the group record a self-titled debut in 2013. They also performed at the prestigious Bonnaroo festival, and the LA Bluegrass Situation, a festival Helms helped put together.
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And lastly, Harrison Ford wasn’t a musician pre-fame, but he did have a wild connection to music history.
In 1970, Ford was trying to start a career as a carpenter when he got hired for a massive job — building a recording studio for Brazilian bossa nova music legend Sérgio Mendes.
