Luckily, you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to be a musician. In fact, many of the old blues greats never even knew how to read.
Still, there’s something to be said about bright musicians. And a musician’s intellect can be the difference between a song that’s like poetry (think: Dylan) or a song merely written to get chicks (Motley Crue.)
While no one will accuse Crue front man Vince Neil of being a brainiac, there are plenty of famous musicians who are. Blues musician Bonnie Raitt went to Harvard. Rolling Stones front man Mick Jagger went to the London School of Economics. And Who guitarist Pete Townshend has worked in the literary business for 30 years, once as an acquisitions editor for a London publishing company.
With school in full swing, I figured this would be a good time for my Top Five Smartest Rock Stars:
5.) Barry Melton. The co-founder and lead guitarist for Country Joe and the Fish performed at both the Monterey Pop Festival and Woodstock. 
But he always had an interest in law. So while traveling as a musician, Melton devoured books on the topic, and in 1982 — without having gone to law school — he passed the California bar exam.
As the public defender for Yolo County, Melton headed up an office of 21 attorneys before retiring this year. Now he’s back to focusing on music.
4.) Tom Scholz. Even before he founded the band Boston, Scholz (That’s him above) was an engineer making a 6-figure salary. Scholz, whose mother was a school valedictorian, earned a master’s degree in engineering from MIT before going to work for Polaroid as a senior product designer. While at Polaroid, the multi-instrumentalist — who had created a unique guitar sound — made demos at his home studio. He was eventually signed, and Boston’s debut album wound up selling 9 million copies.
Scholz also invented the popular Rockman amp, a portable amplifier that guitarists could use with headphones.
3.) Kelly Deal. Considered one of the top female guitarists out there, Deal and her twin sister, Kim, headed the Breeders. But Deal also has worked as a defense contractor with a top-secret clearance, working with a mathematical model developed by the Rand Corporation.
2.) Jeff “Skunk” Baxter. Known mostly for his guitar wotk with Steely Dan and the Doobie Brothers, Baxter, like Deal, is also a defense expert, who chairs a congressional advisory board on missile defense. While he studied journalism at Boston University, Baxter had no prior training on the topic when he sent a well-researched paper about missile desense systems to his local congressperson, launching his consulting career.
1.) Brian May. As a musician, he’s known for his signature guitar sound (He created his own guitar at age 16.) and songs he wrote for Queen, including “We Will Rock You,” “Fat Bottomed Girls” and “I Want It All.”
May was working toward his doctorate when Queen’s success interrupted his studies. But not before he wrote two scientific research papers, “Mgl Emission in the Night-Sky Spectrum” and “An Investigation of th Motion of Zodiacal Dust Particles.”
Years after his rock success, he completed his Phd in 2007. That same year, he was appointed chancellor of Liverpool John Moores University.
Posted on October 7th, 2009 by Pat
Filed under: Music
Thomas Dolby, remembered by most for the song “She Blinded Me With Science,” is also a pretty smart dude. He was tinkering around with MIDI and electronic music in the early days of the medium, often building his own sequencers out of parts from other electronics. In the mid 90’s he belonged to a company called Headspace that was exploring ways to deliver rich content via the Internet back when much of the world was still on dial-up. Not sure if Headspace is stil around or if he’s still working with them.