Some people have learned exactly what it's like to be with their favorite rock star — and for a
lucky few, an encounter at a concert or a meet and greet turned into a lasting relationship.
At age 17, Bebe Buell graduated high school in Virginia and moved to New York City to
be a model. That location allowed her to be closer to the rock n' roll lifestyle she'd
craved since she was a young child. As she recalled to Rolling Stone —
"I was obsessed with Mick Jagger. I'd stand in front of the mirror and copy him."
Buell got as close to the lifestyle as one could possibly get. In the same interview,
she revealed that the first four men she ever went out on dates with were all rock stars:
David Bowie, Iggy Pop, Jagger, and Todd Rundgren. It was the latter of
whom she entered into a professional — and eventually romantic — relationship with.
While she was still seeing Rundgren, Buell met and befriended Aerosmith
singer Steven Tyler. One night in 1976, when Rundgren was on tour and Buell was
staying at the New York home of rock star Rick Derringer and his wife Liz,
Tyler called Buell to pick him up because he was too drunk to walk. Buell recalled —
"I threw Steven over my shoulder and took him to Liz's and we threw him in the bathtub."
When Tyler awoke, he and Buell hooked up — and nine months later, Buell gave birth to a daughter,
future model and movie star Liv Tyler. She was raised believing that Rundgren,
her mother's partner, was her father. Buell also revealed —
"It wasn't until August 1988 when she turned 11 that she put it together and confronted me."
"Well, being the daughter of my parents,
I wasn't ever normal…" "There's not a lot of chill?"
"It wasn't normal, but yeah."
It was hard to escape The White Stripes in the early to mid 2000s. The hybrid of blues and
punk from singer-songwriter-guitarist Jack White and drummer Meg White was all over the airwaves
in 2003 after the release of their fourth LP "Elephant" and its hit track "Seven Nation Army."
It was around that time that 13-year-old Michigan resident Olivia Jean Markel started a blog to gush
about her favorite bands. That included the White Stripes, who also hailed from the city of Detroit.
Markel called the site "Olivias Peppermint Palace" as a reference to the White Stripes'
candy-cane colored aesthetic. She wrote in 2003 —
"I love the White Stripes, I love their music and I love Jack and Meg. I knew who they were
before they got big, so don't say you love them unless you have listened to all of their albums."
Before long, Markel started recording demos under the name Olivia Jean. In 2009,
a friend tipped her off that Jack White's other band, the Dead Weather,
would be playing an impromptu gig in Detroit that evening. She set out a trail of demo CDs from the
stage door to White's tour bus. The plan to get White to notice her music worked — weeks later,
he called Markel and invited her to professionally record her songs at his
studio in Nashville. Their professional relationship turned into a romantic one,
as Jack White and Olivia Jean got married onstage in the middle of a concert in April 2022.
The Cavern Club, a basement hall in Liverpool, started showcasing rock acts in 1960. In 1961,
an early formation of the Beatles played its first gig there and would go on to enjoy a residence,
performing nearly 300 times at the Cavern in a period lasting just over two years.
Liverpool teenager Maureen Cox began to frequent Beatles shows at the Cavern because
she was fixated on the band's drummer, Ringo Starr. Cox knew Starr from his previous band,
Rory Storm and the Hurricanes, because of a brief romance with that group's guitarist.
Cox attended multiple Beatles gigs, and she was so committed to Starr that she
had apparently committed his license plate number to memory. Naturally,
the young girl accepted when Starr asked her to dance just after a performance.
In 1965, well into the Beatlemania phenomenon,
Starr and Cox got married. They divorced a decade later in 1975.
Ending their 14 year relationship and 10 year marriage.
Its members became teen-pop sensations upon the debut of their 1997 hit "MmmBop," but Hanson was
also a real rock band consisting of three brothers: guitarist Isaac, lead singer and
keyboard player Taylor, and drummer Zac. All 16 and under during the peak of their fame,
the Hanson brothers got older and continued to pack venues into their adulthood in the 2000s.
"You would get the predominantly female exuberance, and screaming, and so on."
That was when they all encountered their partners. Zac Hanson told Entertainment Weekly in 2007 —
"We met all our wives at concerts, believe it or not. We were in Atlanta,
and my wife got invited by somebody who was workin' for us, and she brought Taylor's wife."
Taylor elaborated —
"Our wives are actually good friends. At the time, Zac was dating somebody else,
so they didn't get together right away, but my wife and I started dating."
Taylor married Natalie Bryant in 2002,
and Zac married Kate Tucker several years afterwards. As for Isaac,
he also met his future wife, Nikki Dufresne, at one of the band's concerts. He revealed —
"I thought she had a really cute smile. I just
noticed her. She was about five rows from the stage."
After the concert, Issac enlisted the band's stage manager to get
the stranger's attention so he could talk to her.
Winning "American Idol" in its early seasons in the 2000s could propel a singer to virtually
overnight stardom. That was the case for Ruben Studdard, an R&B crooner who won the
Fox reality competition series in 2003 over Clay Aiken. Fan votes determined Studdard's
victory — so when he promoted his album releases, he went directly to the people.
In 2006, Studdard's promotional tour took him to an Atlanta Walmart,
where he met with fans and signed CD copies of his latest release,
"The Return." Zuri McCants, admittedly a minor fan of Studdard, attended the event,
securing an autographed disc for a mega-fan friend stuck at work. Studdard told Essence —
"When I saw her, I just thought she was beautiful. She told me about how much her friend loved me,
and I was like, 'Well what about you?' She was like, 'Well, you're all right."
After McCants departed with her signed CD,
Studdard sent an associate to track her down inside the Walmart to get
her contact information. The couple ended up marrying in 2008, and they divorced in 2012.
Aspiring pop singer Liam Payne tried out for the British televised singing competition
"The X Factor" in 2008, and was ultimately eliminated late in the contest. In 2010 he
returned to the show, where producer Simon Cowell grouped him with four
other young singers to create the boy band and pop cultural phenomenon One Direction.
During its 2010s reign as one of the biggest musical acts on the planet,
One Direction sat for meet-and-greets with its most passionate fans. During one such session
of photo-taking and autograph-signing held in connection with a concert tour stop in Buffalo
in 2015, Payne briefly chatted up and took a picture with 15-year-old fan Maya Henry.
Three years later, Henry was an Instagram influencer and
model with more than 700,000 followers. That was when she and Payne connected,
for a second time, seemingly at a Dolce & Gabbana event in Italy.
"We've seen you've got a beautiful new girlfriend."
"Yeah, yeah…"
"We're fairly happy at the moment." [cheering]
The pair dated off and on for a few years and were even engaged
at one point, until Payne ended the relationship.
The radio-friendly soft rock of Train hit in a big way in the late 1990s and early
2000s. Fronted by singer-songwriter Pat Monahan, the group got a lot of attention
for singles like "Meet Virginia," "Drops of Jupiter," and "Calling All Angels."
In 2004, Train embarked on a major concert tour that included a show in Seattle. While
Monahan sang from the stage, a paying audience member caught his eye. He asked a member of his
crew to locate the woman and invite her to meet Monahan in his dressing room at the concert's end.
The woman's name was Amber Peterson — and the two hit it off, struck up a romance, and later
got married. The meeting went on to inspire lyrics in the Train song "This'll Be My Year" that go —
"2004, began in May, on tour when I met ya."
On May 14, 2014, Monahan tweeted via the Train account —
"I met my wife 10 years ago today. She's the reason for all of the positive change in my life."
Green Day released its first full-length album, "39/Smooth," on the independent punk
label Lookout Records in 1990. Already popular on the San Francisco Bay area's emergent underground
punk scene, Green Day's ambitions inspired a national tour, and the band's packed van took
the musicians to a show at the Varsity Theater in Minneapolis on July 5, 1990.
The crowd turnout was low that night, allowing for the members of the band to both see and
talk to the fans that actually did show up. One early Green Day fan in attendance was 22-year-old
University of Minnesota sociology student Adrienne Nesser. Both the Green Day singer,
18-year-old Billie Joe Armstrong, and Nesser were in relationships, so they built an easy
friendship that developed into something deeper over the next few days. Green Day's tour manager
had slotted them for another Minneapolis gig, so the pair got to hang out plenty. Nesser gave
Armstrong her phone number, and he called her from every subsequent stop on the tour. In July 1994,
Nesser and Armstrong got married — and they've stuck together ever since.
One of the first mainstream popularizers of electronic music, Gary Numan,
whose real name is Gary Webb, is best known for his 1979 debut single "Cars." Numan also
fronted the group Tubeway Army, and it's in that iteration that 11-year-old Gemma O'Neill
first noticed the British musician. As she later told the Independent —
"My big brother Shane was always buying albums. One day I went past his bedroom
and saw the back cover of Gary's first Tubeway Army album. I thought,
'I like the look of that bloke,' so I took the album, started playing it — and I was hooked."
O'Neill characterized her feelings toward Numan as a "schoolgirl crush," and it continued when
she met the musician for the first time at the age of 12. At age 14,
O'Neill told a teacher during a careers lecture that her only major future plan was to be Gary
Numan's wife. O'Neill then would go out of her way to bump into Numan at events and conventions.
After O'Neill's mother died in 1992, she stopped going out — and Numan's fan club manager,
his mother, noticed. She told her son, who asked the grieving young woman out on a friendly date.
"It was Gemma's mum being, being ill that made me notice she hadn't been around as much."
After nearly a year of being close friends,
they became romantic. The pair moved in together in 1994 and married in 1997.
Barenaked Ladies, known for their quirky alternative rock songs like "Brian Wilson,"
"One Week," and "Pinch Me," formed in Toronto in the late '80s. Founding member Steven Page
left the band in 2009, following a period of creative unhappiness and a drug-related arrest.
Before his departure Page participated in a Barenaked Ladies cruise, where it became
public knowledge that he and Carolyn Ricketts — the mother of their three children — had
split up and initiated a divorce in 2007. Page then headed into a relationship with
a woman called Christine Benedicto, whom the rock musician met on the then-popular social
media site MySpace — and who ended up getting arrested alongside Page on the drug charge.
Benedicto, who also uses the name Christine Munn, wrote on her blog that she and Page had first
connected as strangers online in December 2006 while he was still married. She wrote —
"This amazing thing happened. I met Steven Page. One of my favorite
musicians. A musician I had loved for nine years. Loved in the way that
anyone loves any musician that makes them feel something or think about something."
Page and Munn married in July 2011.