It’s not her first time in the studio she’s been trying to get her singing career going for over 30 years, with a deep, raspy voice that she put to use in high-school choir and hotel-room sing-alongs. Jimmy Walls), who also plays lead guitar.

I’ve always been a pioneer!”īuell’s new album, Hard Love, was co-produced by her husband, Jim Wallerstein (a.k.a. “I was ahead of the curve even with that. “It almost looks like I had a fur bikini.” But by the eighties, she’d taken a page from her drag-queen friends and started waxing. “We had hair on our hoochees back then, yeah, baby!” she says about the centerfold. She opens a coffee-table book and points to a photograph of herself, modeling, covered in daisies and only slightly less naked than she was in her 1974 Playboy spread. There were no rock stars buying me my clothes.” When I got a paycheck, I went to Bergdorf and I bought my own clothes. I made my own money, I bought my own airline tickets. I was a very independent, successful girl. “I consider ‘groupie’ a sexist term, and I think it’s misused. She sits astride a gallery bench as if riding a horse. I can count the number of men I’ve been with on two hands it just seems like a lot because you recognize their names,” she says, wearing vintage boots embroidered with flowers, her hair still blonde, her eyes large and blue. “On the record, I want to apologize to Elvis if I ever embarrassed him talking about what a good lover he was,” she says earnestly. The two women used to put on Stooges records and sing into hairbrushes “pretending to be rock stars” back when Smith had yet to put music to her “wacky poems.” There are no photos up of Elvis Costello, whom Buell in her bestselling autobiography, Rebel Heart, declared both the love of her life and a fantastic lay he no longer speaks to her, for various reasons. Next to the photo of Jagger is Patti Smith, who dated Rundgren before Buell. For your first three boyfriends to be Mick Jagger, Todd Rundgren, and David Bowie, I don’t think anyone would have a problem with that.”

“And I figured if he was going to date, I would date, too. If you had a jealous streak, the seventies wasn’t your era,” she says.

“I think every little girl would like exclusivity, but that wasn’t how it was. It was, like, instant flirting.” Never mind that Buell was then living with singer-guitarist Todd Rundgren, with whom she would continue to co-habitate as she dated Jagger, Iggy Pop, David Bowie, and Jimmy Page, and as she had daughter Liv Tyler, the actress, by Steven Tyler. They met at an Eric Clapton show, says Buell, a model turned singer, now 58 and about to release her first big-deal album: “It was on. Near the floor is a photo of Mick Jagger, a lover. Tourists and rock nostalgists perusing the Morrison Hotel Gallery in Soho see iconic photographs of music legends Bebe Buell sees her youth.

Bebe buelle playboy photo