Prince Flashback: If He Hadn't Achieved Stardom, Legendary Singer Wanted to Be a Teacher
It's difficult to imagine Prince in a role other than iconic music superstar, but the singer revealed his surprising backup career choice in a 2014 interview on The Arsenio Hall Show.
"When I was 16, I was completely broke and needed to go get a job. So I got the Yellow Pages out, and I couldn't find one thing that I wanted to do," the Purple One said. "So, I decided that I was going to push as hard as I could to be a musician and went at it."
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Later in the interview, Prince circled back to the topic with a pitch-perfect answer on what sort of job he'd like to have outside of music stardom.
"I think I'd want to teach in some capacity if I didn't play music," he said. "There's a lot of fine musicians in the group right now, and I'm learning from them. So as much as I like to teach, I also like to learn."
The September 2014 episode would become the Minnesota native's final talk show appearance, in which he revealed more quirky, little-known details about his private life. Among the revelations: Prince didn't own a cell phone at the time ("Everyone I know has one"), he had never succumbed to the temptations of a late-night infomercial ("What's an infomercial?"), and his specialty in the kitchen was cooking omelets ("All my friends have high cholesterol").
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See the full episode, which included multiple performances, in the player below.
Prince (full name: Prince Rogers Nelson) died Thursday at his Paisley Park studio, just outside Minneapolis, Minnesota. He was 57.
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