Rock Stars Who Were Really Weird People

Rock stars are not known for being the most down-to-earth people. When your job is to have thousands of fans screaming for you every night, and this results in you making millions of dollars, it is hard to stay even a tiny bit grounded. This has resulted in many, if not most, rock stars living lives that are way outside of the norm. 

However, not all the abnormal things rock stars do qualify as "weird." For example, Mötley Crüe's Nikki Sixx had a near-death experience when he overdosed and was technically not alive for a couple of minutes. That's a crazy rock and roll story, sure, and not something that happens to people every day, but is it weird? Or take GG Allin, known as the craziest rocker in history, but whose excesses and illegal acts stemmed from childhood trauma and substance abuse. Addiction and mental illness are not uncommon in rock stars, and they are more tragic than anything else.

So the stories on this list need a different element to qualify — that added strangeness that is unexpected in a rock star's or sometimes even any regular person's life. These might be out-there hobbies, obsessions, or lifestyle choices. Some rockers only have one thing in their lives that stands out as really weird, while others seem to live a life completely devoted to weirdness. Regardless of how they choose to let their inner strangeness shine through, here are some rock stars who definitely qualify as weird.

The music magazine Consequence summed up their review of Jack White's 2018 album "Boarding House Reach" in one word: "weird." But if you need more words to understand just how weird it was, one of the songs was based on music Al Capone composed by hand while doing time in Alcatraz. But this was in keeping with a guy who became famous for being in a band with his sister Meg — until it became impossible to hide the fact they were actually a married (and then divorced) couple. Even then, he tried to keep up the charade for a while. 

In 2012, a reporter from The New York Times visited an industrial corner of Nashville where Jack White had purchased a building before turning it into an office, music venue, record store, and more. The resulting article described the place as looking like it was "designed by an imaginative kindergartner — a cross between Warhol's Factory and the Batcave." One thing there was plenty of was taxidermy, which White loves to collect. He even appeared in an episode of "American Pickers" where he purchased a taxidermied elephant head. Back in 2001, his home in Detroit was filled with animal heads in various states of deterioration and with questionable provenances, which he was very proud of and liked to show off. There were so many, some weren't even hung up because there was no room.

Also, he has a serious dislike of nurses and likes to read scrapbooks from old insane asylums, two things which may or may not be related.

Stephen Morris was the drummer for Joy Division and New Order, but his hobby takes punk to a whole different level. He has a collection of old tanks and armored vehicles, ones that he actually takes out for drives in the English countryside, having pretend battles with post office vans. Morris tried to explain the draw of such a thing to a slightly bewildered reporter from Electronic Beats: "Some people like rollercoasters ... It's a bit like that, driving a tank, and the fact that you could destroy a lot of things by driving over them and somehow when you don't do it you feel very relieved. It's an adrenaline thing but it's a slow sort of adrenaline thing because they don't go very fast."

Originally, however, Morris really wanted a vintage car, but his wife wasn't a fan of the idea. "Two weeks later I saw someone selling a tank, and I said maybe I'll get a tank instead. And she said yeah, get a tank. So I ended up buying a tank!" However, the experience could not have been more different from riding in a classic car, and it doesn't sound like he recommends it: "I always wondered what it was like inside one and now I can tell you it's not very nice."

Sadly, the rock and roller has other responsibilities that take away from time in the tank: "I don't drive it as much as I ought to ... this bloody music keeps getting in the way. I never seem to have enough time."

Tom DeLonge's obsession with aliens was evident on Blink 182's third album, "Enema of the State," which included a song called "Aliens Exist." Since then, his belief in visitors from outer space has taken over his life in a big way.

Not only does DeLonge own hundreds of hours of interviews with government workers who allegedly know about aliens, but he also claims to have had contact with them himself. He told Papermag, "My whole body felt like it had static electricity ... It sounded like there were about 20 people there, talking. And instantly my mind goes, okay ... they're not here to hurt us ... But they're working on something." DeLonge also says he had his phone tapped by the government for years and has been contacted by scientists who know aliens are real.

Muse's Matt Bellamy was asked about DeLonge's claims backstage at a festival, and he said he's tried to get his fellow musician to put up or shut up. "Apparently there's a warehouse in Vegas holding some weird alien s*** that he's going to take me to one day," Bellamy told Tone Deaf. "I'm holding him to it, and every time I see him, he says he 'can't do it this week, maybe next week.'" DeLonge's efforts did help lead to the declassification of some UFO videos in 2020, however, so he's having some effect. But now that more people are open to the idea of UFOs being alien crafts, he has moved on to trying to prove Bigfoot exists.

Prince was known for his outrageous fashion, androgynous looks, and that time he changed his name to an unpronounceable symbol. Yet none of that was what made him weird — the name change, after all, was an act of protest against his record company during a business dispute. No, when it came to the enigma that was Prince, those things were downright banal. 

For example, when on tour, Prince would bring his own hairdresser, of course, but then would have them rent out a local salon for his personal use. This might not come with any warning, and Prince was willing to pay whatever it took. While windows were newspapered up to keep his presence secret, once, in Washington, D.C., someone saw him, and the revelation that Prince was there almost resulted in a riot. This obsessive love from his fans was not always returned. In the 21st century, Prince often sued or threatened to sue fans who shared images of him or video from his concerts on blogs or social media. 

Prince not only wrote a song about doves crying but also owned two of the birds as pets; they were even credited as singers on one of his albums. They lived at his iconic home-slash-recording studio, Paisley Park, in Minnesota. There, Prince hosted some of the most famous people in the world, whom he would then challenge to games of basketball or ping-pong – and beat them mercilessly at both. Perhaps the most unexpected thing Prince had in his recording studio was a swear jar, a policy that he rigorously enforced.

Dusty Hill, the ZZ Top bassist, had been in showbiz most of his life. "I've been a singer since I was 8, and I've been a musician since I was 13 and pretty much on the road since I was 14," he told Ultimate Classic Rock. During what ended up being a long break in touring for the band, Hill decided the best way to keep it real would be working a manual labor job at an airport. "I had a lot of jobs for a month at a time or a week or whatever, but I wanted to have that regular experience." 

He had to change his look (although this was before the iconic beard, so it was easier) and go by a false name in order to get away with it. Even then, some people still recognized him, but he always denied being famous. The rock star seemed happy with the results of his experiment: "I did not want other people to think that I thought I was full of myself. But the main thing is that I didn't want to start feeling full of myself. So I did it to ground myself."

Hill was no stranger to unusual jobs before this, either. He and future ZZ Top bandmate Frank Beard were recruited to be part of a group that toured the U.S. pretending to be the British band the Zombies. When contacted by Buzzfeed for details on the strange scam, Hill replied, "It was the '60s, man."

Alice Cooper is well known for his wild stage persona, although in real life he admits to being much more boring, especially since he stopped drinking. However, back in the day, he and his band became famous for a tragic incident involving a chicken being killed during a gig in 1969. It's gone down in rock history, and Cooper himself has discussed it before.

According to legend, the crowd threw a chicken on stage, Cooper tossed it back, and the crowd proceeded to rip it apart. Subsequent media reports added ritualistic elements to the tale and claimed Cooper himself had killed the chicken. However, there is more to the story, and it's very strange. The band's bassist, Dennis Dunaway, wrote about the incident in his memoir, "Snakes! Guillotines! Electric Chairs!: My Adventures in the Alice Cooper Group" (via Rolling Stone). It turned out that far from being used in some sort of rumored blood sacrifice, the only reason there were chickens around to begin with was that the band was traveling with two of them — Larry and Pecker — which they loved and treated like pets. When Cooper tossed one of them off the stage, he expected it to fly, not drop into the crowd. But after the sad event, Dunaway says, the legend that built up around it actually helped "get us off the hook with animal protection organizations, who, after the chicken incident, showed up at every Alice Cooper gig to prevent our murdering chickens, which we never did."