Everything you say now
Sounds like it was
Ghost-written...

--Elvis Costello, "New Amsterdam"

We all have guilty pleasures and harmless addictions. If reading moronic rock-n-roll biographies is a crime, then lock me up and throw away the key! And of course the only thing more moronic than a rock bio is a rock autobio, such as the one I spent 60 minutes reading this morning when I should have been living life: Rebel Heart: An American Rock and Roll Journey, by Bebe Buell.

Bebe as you may know is the mother of Liv Tyler, the ex-girlfriend of Todd Rundgren, Steve Tyler, Elvis Costello, Stiv Bators and a bevy of heavy-lipped English guitar-slingers. She was also a fashion model, Playboy Miss November 1974, and career party-goer. But, as she informs us over and over in the pages of her memoirs, she's not really a rock girlfriend but a serious artist. She underscores this by beginning each chapter with a verse of her icky lyrics. Her tone throughout is bubbly Pamela DesBarres fannishness and naivete...and her prose (well, her ghostwriter's prose) gets a little weird at times. She's convinced that all of Elvis's lyrics from the 80s up til now have been about her--which could very well be true, but the way she pounds the idea in italics is a little...obsessive. Fairly disrespectful of his current wife, too, not to mention the wife he cheted on to be with her.

Oh, well...not to judge. I'm sure she's a nice person... I just don't see where the "rebel" part factors in. What did she rebel against, exactly? Stupid female behavior? Nuh-uh.

That decadent 70s rock partying is something I could never relate to. I've had my share of the partying life (mostly in college), but there's nothing that appeals to me about it now. I have such a hard time keeping it together now, I'm not sure I could function and write and perform if I was taking all them drugs...