Bebe Buell
Covers Girl

November 1974, three years and odd months, I remember nothing but, as precocious as I might be, I strongly doubt that a copy of that Playboy ever came into my hands: it seems that in the United States of America, that little magazine is doing great because of the scantily clad women who populate its pages, especially the mythical centerfold.

That's why I ignored the existence of Bebe Buell for decades, not losing any sleep or sanity over it: once again it seems the girl – twenty-one in November '74 – made quite a show of herself precisely on that centerfold.

But I grew up on punk vinyls spinning on my turntable, and even today, as I spin a whole different kind of music, I'm always thrilled to retrieve those absurd reissues that many small labels stubbornly keep bringing back into circulation. So I open a small parenthesis in eternal praise and glory for folks like those from Breakout, Hozac, Supreme Echo, and Superior Viaduct, a sort of Greg Shaw and Tim Warren of these days. Parenthesis closed.

Right now, Hozac is reissuing a couple of things by characters who collided – even if just slightly – with punk during that fateful three-year period: one of these, obviously, is Bebe Buell. So there you have it, I know Bebe thanks to Hozac. And if she’s somehow connected to punk, even just slightly, she must be somewhere among the six hundred plus pages of “Please Kill Me” which is half bible and half who's who for the genre: indeed, she's in the index of names, don't ask me where exactly because I haven't the slightest idea, but when, at some point, I reread it for the umpteenth time, for sure I’ll blurt out at some point, "Ah, there’s Bebe!" And since she's somewhere in the book and Hozac had a hand in it, I'll buy Bebe's little record.

It's called “Cover Girls,” an EP released in 1981 with production by Ric Ocasek and Rick Derringer, four tracks, all covers – that “My Little Red Book” which I'm not sure if it's more Burt Bacarach or Love, “The Wild One, Forever” from Tom Petty's debut, “Little Black Egg” by the garage stalwarts Nightcrawlers, and “Funtime” by the moronic Pop&Bowie, to say the girl has excellent and eclectic taste – no punk in sight, just more or less danceable pop that, on first listen, I say meh, on the second, it’s not bad after all, on the third, definitely pleasant, also because if there’s no trace of punk, there’s none of all that plastic that would, in a few years, smother pop and drown every trace of imagination.

And so it's a pleasure to have known Bebe, even now that she's seventy and it's been fifty years since the Playboy centerfold, November 1974. Then I learned that, in those fateful years, from the centerfold she ended up in the groupie melting pot – even if she considers herself rather a muse for many, from Mick Jagger to Iggy Pop, and especially that Todd Rundgren with whom she shares a difficult to define story, at least for me – and that many know her more for being Liv Tyler's mom, but since I couldn't care less about Liv and papa Steven, Hozac only made me know Bebe a few months ago. If I had only been more attentive, I might have known her back when Joey Ramone spoke of her as the girl with Windex-colored eyes, which is like telling a girl "What beautiful Vetril-colored eyes you have!"; but that the four Ramones are beyond any better classification, that I've practically known forever.

Then in June 1996, twenty-five years and odd months, I remember something, I buy a book called “Playboy Stories,” naively thinking it’s the collection of all the centerfolds since the beginning, whereas it's a collection of forty years of stories published in that little magazine, where, besides the scantily clad ladies, apparently writers of some talent like Borges, Kerouac, Marquez, Roth also appear. And today, 2023, I think that if that Playboy November 1974 had ended up in my hands, I would have liked it more for the John Irving story than for Bebe's centerfold, in short, I've aged and poorly too.

For those who might be interested, I recommend both, record and book.