Cameron Crowe, the justly legendary, one time boy-wonder rock journalist (it was he who interviewed Dylan for the liner notes that would appear in Biograph) has a new memoir out. It is hard to imagine a book that lands more squarely in the center of our sweet spot, given that in addition to his mind-bending experiences with everyone who was anyone in the rock world of the 1970s, Crowe then turned increasingly to cinema (including a very fine interview book with Billy Wilder). As a filmmaker in his own right, he wrote Fast Times at Ridgemont High, and then was the writer-director of movies including Say Anything (an underappreciated gem), Singles, that Tom Cruise movie many of you like, and, most important, Almost Famous.
How great is Almost Famous? Well, let me put it to you this way . . . it is one of our favorite movies . . . and it has a happy ending. (I’m glad you were sitting down when you read that.) I could go on and on about this one, but that’s not why we’re here today, so I will just mention briefly my appreciation for the brilliance of Kate Hudson’s performance, and the sheer joy of experiencing Philip Seymour Hoffman play the legendary rock critic Lester Bangs. Also, I could not find a proper clip of the sequence, but when you watch this movie – and if you haven’t, you should – pay close attention to the “I’m with her” sequence: from the party, the departure, the pursuit, and on to the hotel. It captures in microcosm all of the great strengths of this wonderful film. It is funny, it is moving, it is masterfully directed (watch the eyelines in the first part of that sequence, which tell the story with astonishing economy)—and it features Elton John’s “Mona Lisas and Mad Hatters,” one of the most beautiful songs in the English language.
Almost Famous is loosely based on Crowe’s own experiences—he landed his first piece in Rolling Stone at the age of fifteen (!!), traveling with the legends and their affiliates, and getting stories that might have eluded other journalists who were more easily recognized as serious reporters and thus to be approached with some wariness. The Uncool dives deeper into those experiences, and, elaborated in print, they are even more astonishing—and thrilling. It is a pleasure to see that the Lester Bangs of the movie is pretty much Lester Bangs, verbatim, in real life; the book also has the time that the movie did not to flesh out the importance for Crowe’s development of Rolling Stone editor Ben Fong-Torres, whose own narrative is quite something.
For eighty percent of The Uncool Crowe comes across as quite cool indeed, although the book does peter out at the end, rushing though (or skipping over) more than three decades of material, perhaps saving stuff for a sequel. Those later, hurried passages, I must report, are a bit of a disappointment. Crowe boasts of his emotional transparency, but his twenty-five year marriage to Nancy Wilson (the lead guitarist of Heart) goes unmentioned (she is thanked in the acknowledgements). And one suspects that the younger Crowe would have grasped something the more mature incarnation does not—that making of musical of your movie is . . . uncool.
But I don’t want to dwell on that, man, it’s just required that I mention it. As Lester Bangs lectured in Almost Famous “you have to make your reputation on being honest, and unmerciful” (unmerciful is italicized in the book’s version of those events, so don’t blame me). With that out of the way, as for the rest of the book, Wow. It is a thrilling page-turner that goes from strength to strength. You think you’ve heard the coolest anecdote ever told, and the next chapter tops it. There he is, at age 15, interviewing the publicity shy Kris Kristofferson, who was so taken with the young lad that he invited him to continue the conversation the next day, in LA, at the Troubadour. Which is followed by an encounter with Gram Parsons, accompanied by a then-unknown Emmylou Harris. And, hey, there’s Bruce Springsteen, looking “shy but earnest, like a slightly nervous out-of-towner.” What’s next? How about a party at Peter Bogdanovich’s mansion, where Orson Welles is staying (“Bogdanovich, wearing an ascot and a worried look, was usually in serious discussion with Welles, who roamed happily with a cigar”).
Can it get any better than that? I told you, it can—we’re barely into 1973 and Crowe is not yet sixteen. I’m going to skip over some stuff (otherwise we’d be here all day), but soon enough our boy protagonist is on the road with the Allman Brothers band, which led to the cover story that would make Crowe’s early reputation. There is some drama around that story arc, which takes up several chapters, but I’ll let you read that yourself, because it’s time to skip ahead to encounters with Lynyrd Skynyrd and Pete Townshend—and it’s still 1973.
Lou Reed makes a great cameo, at, of course, Max’s Kansas City. Introduced to Reed as the guy who wrote that great cover story on Jackson Browne for Rolling Stone: “‘I read it,’ Lou said sharply. Whatever you’d call the opposite of impressed, that was his tone.” Don’t worry about Cameron, though; he spends the next few chapters traveling with Led Zeppelin, for whom Rolling Stone was anathema (an early negative review still stung). His thought to be un-gettable cover story was a huge success. Can he top that? Yes. Ron Wood affably wanders by, and two handshakes later, Crowe has access to the legendarily reclusive David Bowie, which led to an eighteen month sojourn that yielded stacks of taped interviews. “Nothing was off the record.”
Quality time was something of a hallmark of Crowe’s journalism. A early champion of The Eagles (“A collection of rock writers at a party would challenge each other on their musical taste, each one going further and further into the world of the obscure until they’d collectively decided that Self Portrait was Bob Dylan’s greatest album and the Eagles barely deserved a record contract”), it almost fails to register as a surprise when he . . . moves in with them. As he recounts, “There were two main bedrooms on either side of the sprawling single-story home. Henley occupied one, Frey the other,” which he describes as a fitting metaphor for their Odd Couple routine. Crowe’s room was in the middle.
I could go on, but the point is clear. If you like great rock music, or the seventies, or both, you will find this book irresistible. Just try not to feel bad that you weren’t there. If we were, they wouldn’t have let us behind those curtains, anyway. We were the uncool.