Random Rock Stars Who Were Nerds When They Were Kids (18 items)

• 

  (#10) Travis Barker

  Before Travis Barker was the badass drummer for Blink-182, he was in Fontana High School's madrigals choir, marching band, and jazz ensemble. 
• 

  (#9) Tommy Lee

  Tommy Lee was never a great student, but he was very involved with the marching band throughout middle and high school. He even joined a marching band in the short-lived reality show Tommy Lee Goes to College.
• 

  (#11) Dexter Holland

  Dexter Holland, the lead singer for the punk band The Offspring, was valedictorian of his high school class in West Garden Grove, California, and he was even a pre-med student in college. After all his music industry success, Holland went back to school and began working toward his Ph.D in virology from the University of Southern California.
• 

  (#17) Dave Mustaine

  In an interview for Metal Mayhem, Megadeath frontman Dave Mustaine said that he was constantly bullied when he was growing up because he was a redhead. In the same interview he said, "I didn't have a lot of friends and the guitar was the one friend I had." 
• 

  (#15) Justin Timberlake

  When Justin Timberlake was given the Innovator Award at the 2015 iHeart Radio Awards, he gave a heartwarming speech about the perils of growing up. In it, the pop star said, "Growing up in school, no one ever called me anything close to an innovator. They called me different, they called me weird. So, thankfully my mother taught me that being different was a good thing."
• 

  (#16) Kurt Cobain

  The grunge rocker who spoke for a generation began as an outsider in school. Cobain once said he had few friends growing up, and that he "felt so different and so crazy that people always left [him] alone."

New Random Displays    Display All By Ranking