27 Big Music Producers’ Bands Before + After Switching Careers

Big-name music producers are most often remembered and associated with the records they worked on and not their own bands.

Producers such as Rick Rubin and Bob Rock are known more for their associations with acts like Metallica, Slayer and Slipknot rather than where they started their music careers.

For Rubin, it was a punk band called The Pricks. The act’s most notable claim to fame is likely getting kicked out of New York’s CBGB club in the 1970s after fighting with what was believed to be hecklers.

“Apparently, the group had orchestrated the heckling beforehand so that they could react violently and create a scene,” Far Out Magazine wrote about the incident. “Rubin even had his father, a volunteer policeman in Long Beach, travel up to Manhattan in uniform to ‘shut down’ the show.”

This did not go over well with the folks at CBGB who informed The Pricks they were no longer welcome. At least Rubin had a career producing music to fall back on, which seemed to work out rather well in the end.

Here is a look at the bands to music producers played with before and after making a career switch to work with other acts in the studio.