Bebe Buell

Bebe Buell first gained notice less for the handful of recordings she released than for her turbulent romances with numerous rock musicians and her role as mother to actress Liv Tyler. Born July 14, 1953, and raised in Virginia, she developed an early passion for rock & roll that began with Elvis Presley and intensified once the Beatles and the Rolling Stones reached American audiences. Her mother steered her toward modeling; at eighteen Buell moved to New York City and signed with Ford. She soon entered a relationship with Todd Rundgren during one of his most commercially prosperous stretches. Through Rundgren she met photographer Lynn Goldsmith, who arranged test shots for Playboy; the resulting exposure led to Buell being named a Playboy Playmate in 1974. Subsequent partners included Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page, Iggy Pop, Rod Stewart, the Dead Boys’ Stiv Bators, and Elvis Costello. In 1976 she shared an intense liaison with Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler that ended after she grew alarmed by his drug use; the affair produced daughter Liv, born in 1977. Although Rundgren knew he was not the father, the couple reconciled and he helped raise the child. Liv regarded Rundgren as her father until the 1980s, when a sober Tyler reappeared. Rundgren and Buell eventually parted permanently, an event Rundgren chronicled in his 1978 hit “Can We Still Be Friends?” By 1980, long immersed in the rock scene, Buell assembled her own group, the B-Sides. The band’s 1981 EP Cover Girl included contributions from Rick Derringer and the Cars’ Ben Orr and Ric Ocasek, who appeared on covers of Iggy Pop’s “Funtime” and the lesser-known “Little Black Egg”; both tracks later surfaced on the 1995 compilation Just What I Needed: The Cars Anthology with Orr’s vocals in place of Buell’s. In 1985 she fronted another outfit, the Gargoyles, which issued only an obscure self-titled single some years afterward. Buell supplied extensive interviews for the oral history Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk by Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain, as well as for Aerosmith’s memoir Walk This Way. She later wrote her own memoir, Rebel Heart: An American Rock N' Roll Journey, published in 2002. On her own, she has released albums intermittently, among them 2004’s Retrosexual, which mixed originals with renditions of Johnny Thunders’ “Little Bit o’ Whore” and Motörhead’s “I’ll Be Your Sister,” the four-song EP Free to Rock, 2010’s Sugar, and 2011’s Hard Love.