Rebel Heart : An American Rock'n'Roll Journey
Bebe Buell with Victor Bockris St. Martin's Press, New York 2001

All lives are morality plays.

How do we ensure that all our lifestyle choices bring satisfaction? How should we, why should we regulate our intake of pleasure? What should we expect from love? How much is it right to constrict our behaviour in the interests of others? Why be loyal or pure? How to be happy? Your name does not need to be Albert Camus to know, whoever you are, that there are such imponderables lurking in every day, even in the moments of the most apparently shallow whimsy.

So, give it all up please for Rebel Heart, the autobiography of Bebe Buell, model, singer and sometime companion of many rock giants. For this is one thumping good read and, in its own fun way, a very gritty little discourse on morals and men. Laugh at us if you want for taking Rebel Heart as an existentialist tract. But bite on these thoughts and then, we urge you, read the book.

It seems to us that the rock decades have created an almost perfect laboratory for ethical experimentation. Rock, says Bebe here, celebrates "the individual blossom that manages to grow through the concrete". And many of her personal experiences in rock-star land reflect a very acute awareness of just how elusive real human value can be, just how hard it can be to bloom and keep blooming in the penthouse-hothouse of rock culture. In her story, beauty meets the beasts, likes them, loves them - but this is not a fairy tale. The rock life is the stuff of purest excess : a crashing avalanche of noise, cash, dope, pump and pulse, bump and grind, sin and sweat and sex. So, the obvious questions start to howl like a rainstorm. In such excess, can you prevent decadence? If rock gods can choose any pleasure, can decency survive? Can the talented stay sane? Will anyone love you tomorrow?

Bebe Buell records with affecting honesty her life with Todd Rundgren, Steven Tyler, Mick Jagger, Elvis Costello and many other minor princes. Very few of the men whom we meet in Rebel Heart emerge with much moral credit. Indeed, a kind of acrid misogyny - the sorriest trip of all - swirls through the narrative like so much illicit smoke. That being so, Bebe faces interesting choices. Does she, the thoroughbred Virginian beauty, try to mimic the behaviour of the men? Should she claim the same pleasure-power and thus force a crude, post-feminist equality into the pleasure-palace? Here she reflects on her early days :

"I found myself in a very difficult position. There is a certain amount of envy involved when you are a rebel soul and a woman who's not afraid to be one of the boys. Plus, being an unwed mother was not as fashionable then as it is now. Liberated women who took their clothes off and wanted to be as sexually free as a man were not common. There was no Madonna yet. So in the late 1970's, there was not the acceptance of free spirits that there is today".

But there was another difficulty still for Bebe, the rebel heart. Sometimes, her heart did not really want to rebel at all. What makes her life-story specially plangent is the stark longing for stable love that stands over her with the insistent surliness of an unpicked groupie.

Here, she begins to question her life with one particular partner who has been regularly unfaithful while also, to her added dismay, "experimenting with kundalini and tantric yoga" :

"It was grating on my nerves. I just wanted to settle down and have a nice regular life at the movies. Men want their women to be good little girls and never do anything, while they get to be pirates and do everything. And it never changes……The irony is that if only men could see their way through to fidelity, they would have much better lives too".

So what should you do in the garden with too much sun where even sex-bombs get the blues? By what rules should you partake of excess - if you must partake at all? Bebe Buell, whatever quietly throbbing doubts she is occasionally ready to confront, never denies the sheer hellish fun of the rock'n'roll life. Thrill to this recollection from the early years :

"Todd and I respected each other to keep our affairs discreet, and when one was over, we fell back into each other's arms. Then it was makeup sex galore, with Todd competing consistently to be the best lover. Believe me, when your boyfriend knows that you've been with Iggy Pop, David Bowie, or Mick Jagger, you're in for quite a shag".

Yes, Bebe, quite so, we are sure.

And, yes, we know many intellectual friends who would cheerfully abandon a tenured professorship at Harvard or Oxford for one night's a-hanging backstage with Mick and Keith and all the gang with one full scoop of rock depravity thrown in. But it's the spasms of pain and rejection shaking Bebe's confidence in the lifestyle she has chosen that make this such a compelling, sometimes rather sad read.

Bebe Buell is no victim. She traded, in rock's plush moral bazaar, on her own terms. And she is able to measure and to muse, quite fascinatingly, on just how much power the rock market yields to men at the expense of women. Her autobiography is not as well written as, for example, some of the later works of Pamela des Barres who addresses similar themes. But her grief when at a moment in her life, with pleasure a-gogo all around her, she cannot hold the man she obviously loves gives her book a really citric twist.

There are more adroitly composed books than Rebel Heart. But this is as potent a tale of power and beauty, of male supremacy accessorised by glamour and of the search for wisdom within a reckless libertinage that we have read for a while. What are we talking about? Very few books, very few lives can scrape so grindingly into the heart of such themes.

So we unreservedly recommend Rebel Heart. It's fun and it's fast. But it's pointed and painful too. One of the very real Guineveres of rock legend has let us see inside the engine of a very modern myth. And the struggle for a moral order that this, like all myths, contains and elaborates.

We do not know Bebe Buell. But we could not help but like her. One of the best books that has come over our desk in 2001.