Rock Stars Who Famously Hooked Up With Fans

The White Stripes was one of the hottest new bands in the early 2000s. Consisting of singer-songwriter-guitarist Jack White and drummer Meg White, the duo presented an amalgam of soulful, gritty, punk-blues. In 2003, around the time when the White Stripes' fourth LP "Elephant" earned critical consensus as the best album of the year, 13-year-old Olivia Jean Markel started a blog to gush about her favorite bands, including the White Stripes, which, like her, hailed from Detroit. 

Markel called the site "Olivias Peppermint Palace," a reference to the White Stripes' usual wardrobe of alternating red and white. "I love the White Stripes, I love their music and I love Jack and Meg," Markel wrote in 2003. "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. Professional partners, then romantic ones, Jack White and Olivia Jean got married onstage in the middle of a concert in April 2022.

Once a jazz venue, 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.

At the time, Liverpool teenager Mary Cox, who'd changed her name to Maureen, began to frequent shows at the Cavern because she was fixated on the 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 Hurricanes gigs and was so committed to Starr that she committed his license plate number to memory, and she readily accepted when the 21-year-old asked the 15-year-old to dance, just after a performance. Their relationship quietly heated up as Starr transitioned from the Hurricanes to the Beatles. Well into the Beatlemania phenomenon, Starr and Cox got married in 1965; they divorced in 1975, ending their 10-year marriage.

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 X Factor," where producer Simon Cowell grouped Payne with four other young male 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 with One Direction lovers, 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 would become an Instagram celebrity, an influencer and model with more than 700,000 followers. Also in 2018, Henry and Payne connected, for a second time, it would seem, at a Dolce and Gabbana event in Italy. The pair dated off and on for four years and were engaged at one point, until Payne ended the relationship.

One of the first mainstream popularizers of electronic music, Gary Numan is best known for his 1979 debut single, "Cars." Numan fronted the electronic group Tubeway Army, and it's in that iteration that 11-year-old Gemma O'Neill first noticed the British musician. "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," O'Neill (later Webb) told the Independent. "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 (real name: Gary Webb) as a "schoolgirl crush," which would continue when she met the musician when she was 12 — Numan's label was a subsidiary of Warner Bros., O'Neill's father's employer: "I was crying, and I told him I really loved him." 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 purposely bumped into Numan at events and conventions. 

After her mother died in 1992, she stopped going out, and Numan's fan club manager — his mother — noticed. She told her son, who asked O'Neill out on a friendly date. After nearly a year of being close friends, they became romantic, first cohabitated together in 1994, and married in 1997.

Singer Charlie Puth came to fame in a self-made way, earning viral attention (and an appearance on "The Ellen Degeneres Show) for his home-produced videos of himself performing cover songs, and he also enrolled at the prestigious Berklee College of Music. He wouldn't release a real album until 2016, with "Nine Track Mind," all the while playing gigs at little venues around the United States while building up a fanbase.

One of those fans helped Puth meet a personal milestone. "This girl came up to me and was like, 'Can you sign my chest?' I was like, 'I feel like a rock star,'" Puth told Bustle of the 2013 post-show encounter in Boston. Twenty-one years old at the time, Puth says he then freed himself of his virginity with that same fan later that evening. "I never saw her again. She was lovely, but it makes me sad sometimes because I wish the older version of me was like, 'Hey, you might want to just make this like a little more memorable.'"

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, which included a show in Seattle in May of that year. 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. 

That woman's name was Amber Peterson, and the two hit it off, struck up a romance, and later married. The meeting would certainly inspire some lyrics in the Train song "This'll Be My Year": "2004, began in May, on tour when I met ya." "I met my wife 10 years ago today," Monahan tweeted via the Train account on May 14, 2014. "She's the reason for all of the positive change in my life."

Barenaked Ladies, known for its quirky, humor-laden, 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 Page and Carolyn Ricketts, his wife and mother of their three children, 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 channel MySpace, and who was arrested alongside Page on the drug charge.

Benedicto, who also uses the name Christine Munn, wrote on her blog, Oh You Guys!, that she and Page had first connected as strangers, online, in December 2006, while he was still married and she was working in a newspaper advertising department. "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," she wrote. Page and Munn married in July 2011.