Children of Rock

The sedate image is confirmed by Butler's twenty-year-old son, James, a history student at Oxford University currently focusing on Stalinist Russia. "At home, my dad listens to a lot of Norah Jones," he says. "My dad, coming from quite a humble background, wanted to provide what he wasn't able to get for himself, so he made sure to send us to private school, and I was always encouraged to read from an early age. I remember years ago being around the Osbournes' house and hearing Ozzy tell all these crazy stories from on the road. But my dad never did that. Everything I've heard about those days, I've read in magazines or heard at school from friends." And even those tales may have been more fiction than fact. "A lot of the things James has heard have been exaggerated, as well," Geezer says. "But how many women you've been with, how many times you've OD'd -- those just aren't the things you really talk to your kids about, are they?"

There's a mysterious gravitational pull that seems to bond the children of legendary musicians. Encounter enough of them and it starts to feel like a secret society. They've all grown up with parents who have simultaneously rejected society's rules and reaped its rewards, and they all recognize certain traits in each other.

Rufus Wainwright's father is folk singer Loudon Wainwright III; his mother is folk singer Kate McGarrigle. When Rufus moved from Montreal to Los Angeles in the mid-Nineties to pursue his own music career, he began playing at clubs like Largo, where he met other aspiring musicians -- many of whom, it turned out, were also the offspring of musicians. Soon, an odd coterie had formed. There was Chris Stills, the son of Crosby, Stills and Nash singer-guitarist Stephen Stills. And Adam Cohen, the son of singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen (Adam is now the frontman for Low Millions, which scored a recent hit with the single "Eleanor"). Harper Simon, Paul's eldest, was around, as was Sean Lennon.

"We befriended each other," says Rufus. "I guess because, at the end of the day, we could relate to each other."

The connection is often intense. "It's not like some automatic pass into this club," stresses Chris Stills. "It's just that we might be hip to -- how would I put it? It's kind of like we grew up behind the stage, so we're privy to the smoke and mirrors and the strings holding up the puppets. Most people just have their eye on the puppets. So that knowledge bonds us."