Adam Levine and More Stars Who Were Nerds in High School

beyonce knowles young middle school yearbook photo

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Beyoncé Knowles as a Child and Beyoncé in 2011

Before she was Blue Ivy’s mama, before she was Mrs. Jay-Z, before she was an actress or the girl-power songstress of “Independent Women Part 1” and “Single Ladies,” superstar Beyoncé was a precocious youngster. Her first group, Girl’s Tyme, performed (badly) on Star Search (they lost). “I was a shy girl until I was performing,” Beyoncé told the Chicago Tribune. “No one wanted to come over to my house because I'd make them watch shows my little sister and I put on. We'd wear tutus and tap shoes and make up tickets. On top of watching us, people had to buy tickets!” (For truly adorable home video clips of Beyoncé as a kid, check out this birthday montage that Ellen DeGeneres put together for her show.)

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Paula Abdul, as a Senior at Van Nuys High School, in 1980 and Paula Abdul in 2011

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Paula Abdul, as a Senior in 1980

Paula Abdul went from geeking out in her high school Science Club in 1980 to becoming a beloved pop star. Guess all that time in the lab helped Paula find the formula for fame to help her make the leap from Lakers cheerleader to pop sensation to reality-show judge. Abdul was also the class president and on both the science and debate teams, and even played the flute in her school’s band.

dee snider yearbook high school young 1973 photo

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Dee Snider as a Senior at New York’s Baldwin High School in 1973 and Dee Snider in 2011

Twisted Sister’s colorful front man, one of the very first head-banging hair-rockers, is many things—including a classically trained countertenor who sang in the church choir until age 19. “Those are my only really great memories of high school, the choir and the drama club,” Snider said in a Long Island About.com interview. “I was sort of an outcast, not a person in a group or clique that fit in.” The singer and principal songwriter of Twisted Sister hits like “We’re Not Gonna Take It” goes on to make an important point about high school—and what comes next. “Most of us, especially in the arts, our lives start after we get out of frickin' high school, when we get into the real world. That's when we become people.” Snider is a longtime supporter of March of Dimes (two of his own children were born premature) and won a bunch of cash for the charity on The Celebrity Apprentice. His album Dee Does Broadway, featuring um, unusual takes on classic show tunes was released in 2012.

marilyn manson young high school yearbook photo

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Brian Warner (a.k.a. Marilyn Manson) in Eighth Grade at Heritage Christian School in Canton, Ohio, in 1983 and Marilyn Manson in 2010

Before he transformed himself into the transgressive musician/performance-art entity known as Marilyn Manson, Brian Warner was just a regular kid from Ohio. In his autobiography, The Long Hard Road Out of Hell, Manson writes, “Most of my education took place after class, when I escaped into a fantasy world immersed in role-playing games” like Dungeons & Dragons. While studying journalism and writing about music in college, he generated the identity of Marilyn Manson by combining two American icons: Marilyn Monroe and Charles Manson. And he’s been messing with images of gender, beauty, and violence ever since in songs like “The Dope Show” and goth-gangsta in “Tainted Love.” His last album, Born Villain, came out in May 2012.

trent reznor young high school 1983 yearbook photo

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Trent Reznor as a Senior at Pennsylvania’s Mercer Area High School in 1983 and Trent Reznor in 2012

You wouldn’t necessarily guess it, given the industrial-rock sound he’s famous for, but Trent Reznor was something of a classical-piano prodigy as a child. He learned to play saxophone and tuba as well, eventually joining the jazz and marching bands. “I grew up in a little town in the middle of nowhere, pre-Internet, pre-college radio,” Reznor said on Fresh Air. “My input for the first 16, 17 years of my life was AM radio, FM radio—pretty mainstream stuff.” (His multi-instrumental skills came in handy later, when he started recording Nine Inch Nails music; he played virtually all the parts.) As a high schooler, he also played Judas in a production of Jesus Christ Superstar.

steven tyler young high school yearbook 1964 photo

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steven tyler young high school yearbook 1964 photo red carpet 2011

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Steven Tallarico (a.k.a. Tyler) as a Freshman at Walt Whitman Junior High School in Yonkers, New York, in 1964 and Steven Tyler in 2011

The big-lipped, loud-screamin’ Steven Tyler started singing in his church choir and later played in his school’s marching band (he was compelled to pin up his hair for performances, no joke). Though Tyler plays harmonica, keyboards, guitar, and percussion, he insisted on becoming the frontman when he joined his first band, the Strangeurs. His band of the last 40 years, Aerosmith, are still (or should we say again) making music together; their megahits include “Dream On,” “Walk This Way,” and “I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing.” Tyler's contributions as a judge on American Idol ranged from the downright weird to the wildly inappropriate (and hilarious).

mariah carey young high school yearbook 1982 photo

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mariah carey young high school yearbook 1982 photo jenny craig 2012

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Mariah Carey in Seventh Grade at Oldfield Junior High in Greenlawn, New York, in 1982 and Mariah Carey in 2011

Mariah Carey… beauty school dropout? Believe it or not, it’s true. Carey didn’t have much interest in attending classes during high school days, preferring instead to write music with her friends, but she did have time to learn about hair and makeup. “I went to beauty school," she told the Los Angeles Times. “Five hundred hours in 11th grade.” Since her debut album in 1990 featuring the hit songs “Someday” and “Vision of Love,” Carey has become one of the most successful solo artists of all time, selling upward of 200 million albums. Carey’s movie debut a decade ago, in Glitter, was not exactly a success (it was panned by critics and landed her in the hospital for stress and exhaustion), but she received high praise for her gritty role in Precious in 2009. The mom of twins with husband Nick Cannon revealed the title of her upcoming album The Art of Letting Go.

adam levine young high school 1993 yearbook photo

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Adam Levine as an Eighth Grader at the Brentwood School in Los Angeles in 1993 and Adam Levine in 2012

Adam Levine is a thinking girl’s sex symbol, and his band Maroon 5 has huge hits like the ubiquitous “Moves Like Jagger” (featuring his fellow judge from The Voice, Christina Aguilera). But it wasn’t always that way. As a kid, Levine—who plays guitar, bass, and piano in addition to singing—told Access Hollywood, “I was very uncool, had disgusting long hair and shorts down to [to my knees], cutoff shorts—I desperately wanted to be Eddie Vedder from Pearl Jam really badly, and I was just a nerdy, awkward kid and I was obsessed with music.” Obsessive? Maybe. But it clearly paid off.

bruce springsteen young high school yearbook 1967 photo

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Bruce Springsteen as a Senior at New Jersey’s Freehold Regional High School in 1967 and Bruce Springsteen in 2012

This legendary Rock & Roll Hall of Famer has always been a champion of the underdog and the outsider. Maybe that’s because he himself was one as a kid. Springsteen originally attended parochial school but didn’t get along with the nuns or his fellow students; in ninth grade, he transferred to public school, but didn’t fare much better. “I didn’t even make it to class clown,” he says in Bruce Springsteen: Two Hearts, the Definitive Biography, 1972-2003, by Dave Marsh. “I had nowhere near that amount of notoriety.... I was the kind of kid that never got into trouble, but trouble would gravitate around me.” His social commentary (like the ode to a declining Main Street America in 1985’s “Hometown”) has never waned (his last album includes the song “Death to My Hometown”). Rumor has it, that Springsteen will be releasing the single "High Hopes" on November 25th.

chris robinson young high school yearbook 1984 photo

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chris robinson young high school yearbook 1984 photo red carpet performing 2010

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Chris Robinson as a Junior at George Walton High School in Marietta, Georgia, in 1984 and Chris Robinson in 2010

When the Black Crowes released Shake Your Money Maker in 1990, they became an overnight sensation thanks to their danceable, hard-hitting version of Otis Redding’s classic “Hard to Handle.” But it had been a long journey to get to that success, including years on the Atlanta music scene. Robinson was a budding countercultural even as a kid. “I read too much, I questioned authority,” he told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “It was typical middle-class bohemian stuff.” Being from Atlanta “gave us a philosophical difference, almost an inner ‘us versus them’ outlook in terms of business and art.” The Black Crowes have been on-again, off-again for the past decade; Robinson’s most recent venture is the Chris Robinson Brotherhood (which, interestingly, doesn’t include his actual brother, Black Crowes guitarist Rich Robinson).

mickey madden young high school 1993 yearbook photo

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mickey madden young high school 1993 yearbook photo red carpet 2011

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Mickey Madden in Eighth Grade at the Brentwood School in Los Angeles in 1993 and Mickey Madden in 2011

The bass player for Maroon 5 has been buddies with lead singer Adam Levine since they were in junior high. Their first band, which he refers to as “the unfortunately-monikered Kara’s Flowers,” released one album and one single, “Soap Disco.” The bright, cheerful album did not perform well and nearly led to the dissolution of the band’s core members. Instead, they explored new sounds and eventually became Maroon 5. In addition to advocating various environmental and social causes, Madden has been vegan for the past decade, which presented an interesting challenge for the contestants on Top Chef Masters when the band guested.

jc chasez young high school yearbook 1991 photo

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JC Chasez as a Freshman at Maryland’s Bowie High School in 1991 and JC Chasez in 2012

As a child, JC Chasez discovered that he could overcome his natural shyness by performing, especially after joining the cast of The Mickey Mouse Club in the early '90s. By 1995, he and fellow Mouseketeer Justin Timberlake, along with Chris Kirkpatrick, Joey Fatone, and Lance Bass, had been molded into ’N Sync, one of the hottest boy bands in the world. Chasez demonstrated his impressive dance moves as well as his vocal chops on hits like “Bye Bye Bye,” with its awesome marionette video. Chasez was a judge on America’s Best Dance Crew. He's currently overseeing the girl group, Girl Radical, which he helped put together.

natalie merchant young high school yearbook 1985 photo

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natalie merchant young high school yearbook 1985 photo red carpet 2005

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Natalie Merchant as a Freshman at Westfield Academy in Westfield, New York, in 1978 and Natalie Merchant in 2005

“I'm not a closeted nerd,” Natalie Merchant told the Huffington Post. “I'm an out-of-the-closet nerd.” After Merchant’s mother discovered her and her siblings watching an “age-inappropriate film about Lenny Bruce” when she was 12, that was the end of TV watching in her household. Instead, “we played in the forest and wrote little books and drew, and we had to talk to each other, deal with each other.” Merchant has described herself as a “painfully shy girl” who eventually dropped out of high school to work at a health-food store and started singing with 10,000 Maniacs when she was just 16. With 10,000 Maniacs, she had hits like “What’s the Matter Here” and “These Are Days”; Merchant then left the band and had solo hits like “Carnival.” Her last album, about childhood (she has a daughter named Lucia), was 2010's Leave Your Sleep.

travis barker young high school yearbook 1993 photo

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travis barker young high school yearbook 1993 photo red carpet 2011

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Travis Barker as a Senior at California’s Fontana High School in 1993 and Travis Barker in 2011

The Blink-182 drummer started drumming at 4 years old and also picked up trumpet, piano, and singing. He not only joined his school’s madrigals group but was a member of the jazz ensemble and the marching band. Before becoming a star with Blink-182, Barker was known as the Baron Von Tito in the über-nerdy, costume-donning band the Aquabats. His first solo album, Give the Drummer Some, was released in 2011. In addition to his music career, Barker founded the Famous Stars and Straps clothing line.