She turned it down to stay home and raise Liv, who was starting high school, beginning a modeling career, and watching the public discover who her father was. In 1991, her next band, the harder-edged group the Gargoyles, was offered a six-figure record deal. In 1984, John Taylor of Duran Duran formed the supergroup Power Station around her eventually, Robert Palmer took her place. Keith Richards encouraged her to start her own band, as did good friend Ric Ocasek, who in 1980 sent her into the studio backed by the Cars later, Bebe Buell and the B-Sides opened for Alice Cooper. But Buell didn’t just hang out with rockers she is one, too - she’s been trying for over 30 years to get her singing career off the ground, with a deep, raspy growl that she put to use in high-school choir and hotel-room sing-alongs.
The partial inspiration for Penny Lane in Cameron Crowe’s Almost Famous, Buell spent her seventies youth befriending or bedding a who’s who of legendary musicians, from Mick Jagger and David Bowie to Elvis Costello and (obviously) Steven Tyler, all of which she chronicled in her best-selling autobiography, Rebel Heart: An American Rock n’ Roll Journey. Spending two and a half hours at the Morrison Hotel Gallery and walking around downtown Manhattan with Bebe Buell, the former model and Liv Tyler’s 58-year-old mom, is like getting a crash course in rock and roll.
