Children of Rock

Being raised by a rock star would seem to be every teenager's dream, unless you happen to be that teenager. Then, things can get weird.

Trixie Garcia had her first psychedelic experience when she was one and a half. A bag of mushrooms had been left sitting out. Trixie's parents -- the late Grateful Dead singer Jerry Garcia and the prototypical hippie chick Mountain Girl -- were not particularly alarmed. "My mom was like, 'Oh, it made you more communicative!' " says Trixie, now thirty and a painter living in the Bay Area. "Most of the kids in the scene had some early dosing incident. My sister got into some acid-spiked orange juice."

The flip side of Trixie Garcia's childhood might be that of Anna Gabriel, who grew up in a modest cottage in the city of Bath, in the English countryside. Her father, Peter Gabriel, insisted he'd never done drugs and actually made her promise not to smoke cigarettes until her eighteenth birthday, in exchange for a car. He still doesn't know about Anna's tattoo (a flower, on her ankle), clandestinely inked during his 1993 Secret World Tour. For Anna -- now a thirty-year-old filmmaker -- the most harrowing experience involving her father's fame was the time she inadvertently made out to one of his songs: "It was 'In Your Eyes,' of course. I was with one of my first high school boyfriends and a three-song special came on the radio. I had to stop. It was like he was in the room!"

The rock & roll parents who most readily come to mind tend to be the most inappropriate. There's Courtney Love telling People how she tried to make her 2003 OxyContin overdose "fun" for her eleven-year-old daughter, Frances Bean, who made Love green tea while they waited for the ambulance to arrive. Or 50 Cent outfitting his six-year-old son, Marquise, with a miniature bulletproof vest. And of course, there is the rock family America knows best, Ozzy Osbourne's. If The Osbournes is one's only insight into such matters, it would be understandable to assume the children of rock stars are spoiled rich kids whose loving but overly permissive parents have bequeathed them foul mouths, personal publicists and stints in rehab before their eighteenth birthdays.

But consider, as a counterpoint, Ozzy's longtime bandmate Geezer Butler, the bassist who wrote many of Black Sabbath's most evil-sounding lyrics and who once drunkenly menaced AC/DC guitarist Malcolm Young with a knife during a tour in England. As a parent, it turns out, Butler is as buttoned-down as they come. "If they made a program called The Butlers, it would be the most boring thing ever," he says. "It would be my son doing his homework, me reading a book -- right now, I'm reading the new Philip Roth -- and my wife watching TV."