Nevertheless, Josette says she felt she had no choice but to continue sleeping with them until the drummer John Bonham "saved me and made me his girlfriend". It was like magic." In a world where she never had any reason to doubt her own choices and in an environment where it was normal for a woman to be fêted for being merely decorative, Josette claims she felt in total control of her life. I knew who was in town, where they would be and if I wanted to do them was up to me. "I could scope somebody out and be in bed with him in 15 minutes if I wanted to.
What now seems like a form of prostitution was, according to Josette, an empowering experience. I called his hotel and told him I wanted him. For example, I saw Ian Gillan from Deep Purple on the cover of Circus magazine and I fell in love with him. "The sexual revolution was all happening. Josette maintains that there was nothing wrong with the way she used her body. The groupie's attitude to sex was that it constituted a currency to be traded for a share in the Olympian glamour radiated by rock stars. I met Deep Purple, Ten Years After and all the other British bands of the time." She left high school and became a full-time party girl, continuing to live at home, supported financially by her mother, who took phone messages if bands wanted to see Josette. "There was always a new band coming into town. "Before then boys had not really been part of my life, but suddenly it just snowballed," says Josette. Other bands followed when the Zeppelin tour finished. She said she was afraid that, if she didn't let me, I would leave her." "Years afterwards I said to her: why did you let me do that? Her answer brought tears to my eyes. Instead, her mother was all smiles and went home apparently quite content for her daughter to cuddle up with the group. She expected to be dragged home immediately. When Led Zeppelin came back to New York to play Madison Square Garden, Josette asked her mother to meet the band and bring her some clothes.
#BEBE BUELL WIKI FULL#
"Here I was on Jimmy Page's lap it was my fantasy come true." Josette stayed with Page for several days knowing full well that her single mother – whose only child she was – would be desperately worried. "What else was I going to do?" she says now. Page took her by the hand, pulled her on to his lap and asked her to come up to his room later. Nearby sat Led Zeppelin's Jimmy Page and that other prominent British guitar strangler of the day, Jeff Beck. One day in 1969 she found herself sitting in a restaurant adjacent to Fillmore East, Bill Graham's famous New York concert hall. Like most teenagers she was obsessed with rock stars. Josette was a sexually inexperienced 16-year-old from New Jersey. Yet still the book does not explain what it takes to be a groupie – that cocktail of blind naivety, lasciviousness and adulation that compels pretty little girls to sleep with skinny egomaniacs for absolutely no emotional return.Īt a time when rock'n'roll had yet to be absorbed fully into the consumer mainstream, stars such as Bowie or Mick Jagger were youth culture royalty. Rebel Heart: An American Rock and Roll Journey has already ignited controversy for its frank account of the Seventies rock'n'roll lifestyle and brought blushes to several of its central players: Elvis Costello, Rod Stewart, Mick Jagger and David Bowie. And this week the exploits of one of that decade's most famous groupies, Bebe Buell – ex-model, Playboy centrefold and mother of the actress Liv Tyler – will be published in the US.
Once upon a time no rock band was complete without a cache of beautiful girls hidden behind the amplifiers – girls who were more than happy to put out and didn't ask for anything in return.Īlthough the breed is not entirely extinct, the groupie – part fan, part geisha, part prostitute – was essentially a phenomenon of the 1970s, that pre-Aids, post-Pill world of drug-saturated concupiscence.