For much of the world, he had us at “Jerry Maguire,” or his “Fast Times at Ridgemont High” script, or “…Say Anything.” But for a select portion of his fandom, filmmaker Cameron Crowe really had us at the hello that was his early journalism career. Crowe first came to a kind of fame as a leading rock journo for Rolling Stone who just happened to be an emotionally intellectual teenager at the time — the time being one of rock ‘n’ roll’s golden ages in the 1970s, when he was tagging along on tour or in the studio with Led Zeppelin, David Bowie, Lynyrd Skynyrd and just about every other major rocker of the period. It’s an era he mined for semi-fiction in the movie and stage musical “Almost Famous“; now he’s telling the even truer stories, and plenty he never got to before, about in his splendid new memoir, “The Uncool.”
Crowe arrived already so fully developed as the world’s most precocious teen scribe in the ’70s that it was hard to imagine he would ever get much better as a prose stylist, however many decades he might keep at it. But “The Uncool” proves that he has, even with all the time taken away from concentrating strictly on the page to focusing on major motion pictures. It’s the kind of a book where you want to blow a chef’s kiss to sentence after well-honed sentence, written in a richly detailed, at times almost passionately epigrammatic fashion that he maybe could only have arrived at after exercising different muscles doing mostly screenplays for the last four decades. If it’s stories about the greatest musicians of all time you want, come for the Allman Brothers and Fleetwood Mac, or a description of Gram Parsons’ and Emmylou Harris’ first musical encounter, then stay for the just-as-compelling stories of his family life growing up in Indio and San Diego. Both these sides were well-explored in “Almost Famous,” but “The Uncool” brings them to a light and life that dramatic rendering could only begin to get at.
The focus here is on memories, but we also asked about his immediate future, which includes a long-planned biopic of his friend Joni Mitchell. (Instances of him returning to music journalism in recent years have included his interviews and liner notes for Mitchell’s retrospective boxed sets.) Variety talked with Crowe before he embarked on his own first tour — a book tour that will find him appearing in a handful of theaters around the country, having conversations with guests ranging from Jake Tepper to Sheryl Crow to Kate Hudson. Meanwhile, “The Uncool” is out this week.
Some of the book has you tagging along with the great artists on tour dates, and some of it has you-are-there moments in the studio, like when you witness David Bowie making “Station to Station.” Is there a single project where you were kind of lingering around the edges that you most get excited to remember?
With some of the last movies that we’ve made, the lunchtime experience in the editorial room had been about, like, “What was Fleetwood Mac like around ‘Rumours’?” And it turned into like the Garrison Keillor-ization of some of these stories. At a certain point, I just felt like I need to write all this stuff down so that I have it. And it was also just a chance to put people in a place where we’re not looking back: We are with Glenn Frey in the moment, or we’re with David Bowie, or trying to convince Jimmy Page to pose for the cover of Rolling Stone, to access the fear and longing to actually pull it off and what that felt like. It was an exciting chance to not say “I remember,” but just to be in the moment with the writing.
I did really want to write about the Bowie experience, because I thought the kind of Wikipedia-ization of his life, as rapturous as some of the writing is, kind of missed the thing that I felt from him, which was a nervous brilliance but also a real warmth. I mean, the fact that he wanted to kind of help me along the path as a so-called artist was unimaginable at the time, that somebody would even think that there was that kind of voice to be brought out in the stuff I was doing. So I really wanted to write about that.
I was thinking of what kind of description you could give people that would make a lot of people buy this book. And one of the things that came to my mind is this is — forgive this for being the most glib and reductive thing possible! — you could tell them it’s “Almost Famous: The Novelization.”
Kind of — the actual events and the novelization combined. It wasn’t meant to be that way.
I wanted to write about my family and the experience of how music found us and what it did, and the gift of my oldest sister, who I’d never written about (in “Almost Famous”). Because over time I realized that so much of everything that I love as a writer and as a fan came from what she gave to me as a 9- and 10-year-old, before she died. (Crowe’s oldest sister, Cathy, died by suicide after periods of being institutionalized while he was growing up.) To me, for a long time, she was a towering adult that left us too soon. Then as I got older, I realized she was a teenager who loved music and loved the way music could transport her and take her out of a painful adolescence. And that was her gift to me. Like, “Here’s your ticket to a certain special kind of transcendent experience. See what you do with it.” There are people in your life that do that for you. And not all the time is it a sibling. But I wanted to write about her.
It sounds like this book might have started as an exercise in collecting and offering updates to your old pieces from way back then, and out of that branched your interest in doing an actual memoir, which this is. But the other book is still happening, it just got pushed back a little bit?
It’s true, it’s true. Well, I think they go hand in hand. But what I didn’t realize is that there was so much that I still wanted to say about Southern California and what that life was like and the way music sounded and felt. And I loved “Just Kids,” the Patti Smith book. I thought the Patti book was a magic trick. It made me feel like I was right there with her, and there wasn’t any kind of any soggy sentimentality about it. It was just “Come meet these people.” I loved the quiet generosity of it, and I just thought, “You know what? That’s a great place to be.”
Cameron Crowe’s new book “The Uncool”
Simon and Schuster
The book has a finite time frame — mostly covering your rock journalism years, and your family life before and during that, and then ending with you writing the screenplay for “Fast Times at Ridgement High” and being on-set, and then doing the 1983 Tom Petty documentary that recently got re-released. You do flash-forward at the beginning and end to being in rehearsals for the “Almost Famous” musical in San Diego in 2019, and what was happening with your mom’s health then. But how easy was it to decide not to move much past the early ‘80s? And will there be another book someday that covers the film years?
Maybe so. I mean, yeah, I’d like to do it. It’s a different book. Things really do change at that point. I didn’t want to do a book that was celebrity-heavy or that even might appear that way. And (being a film director) wasn’t a life I ever imagined when I was 15, or until Tom Petty said, “Pick up a camera.” It was a far away land. Just talking to Kris Kristofferson about the set of “Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid” (a 1973 story recounted in the book), it felt like he was talking about a far away, magical place where only special people were let in. And it kind of is.
But that wasn’t the feeling that this book is about, which is music and the way music informed everything that came after — including the movies in a big way. I wanted the characters to all have equal value. Like, Chuck, the guy that lived in our condominium complex, has equal value with Gram Parsons. These are all people that affect your life. And whether they’re later to be super well-known or not, at that age, you imprint so easily and strongly that I wanted to write about that too.
Obviously you weren’t trying to do a tell-all all of a sudden, but was there stuff that at the time, you didn’t feel like you could write about in your articles about the rock stars, but now, it’s appropriate?
Well, the thing that I wanted to get across was what it was like to experience the music on stage or as it’s being created or, or when you’re close to that flame. In all those Rolling Stone stories, I wanted people to like have a front row seat with me. Sometimes I’d seen, in things like Grover Lewis’s piece on the Allman Brothers Band (which preceded Crowe’s own feature on the group), that it was weird, snarky gotcha stuff. And I loved the Allman Brothers Band. I didn’t get anything from reading his story except rage at how he sold out Duane Allman, one of my heroes. So I always wanted to write this story that made you meet those people and make a judgment yourself.
In-between the lines, obviously with the David Bowie stories, you could see that he was dabbling, at least, in satanism and drugs and things like that. You could feel it, and that was good enough for me. I wasn’t trying to take the spotlight off the thing I loved, which is the opportunity to talk to the musicians about their actual lives and emotions and stuff like that. And I didn’t feel like I was covering for anybody. They might’ve kept stuff from me, but generally I always felt like I had come away from being on the road with Led Zeppelin or something with the experience of what it was like to be in that tight circle of guys. It wasn’t a big entourage. There weren’t a million little backstage coves. It was like one room or they all were on one plane, and I wanted to capture the closeness of this huge band. And so that was most important in situations like that.
You probably devote the most space of any famous figure in the book to Bowie. It’s fascinating because it does seem like you had a very warm, even borderline-normal experience with him a lot of time. And then there are moments where he’s telling you that Satan is in the swimming pool, and suddenly we’re brought back to what a drug-fueled period this was for him. But generally he’s very cogent and clearheaded and very affectionate and supportive toward you, so we get a sense of him as real person who may be going through a little bit of a weird thing at times. We have this kind of chilly image of him during that “Station to Station” period, so the fact that he’s so warm toward you is almost shocking.
Yeah. He was relentlessly and restlessly creative, and he was always chasing… whether it was maybe finding a home in movies or writing his own autobiography, he was a seeker then. I think he judged himself more harshly than maybe anybody. When I last talked to him, I couldn’t figure out if he actually did remember the period that well or if he chose not to. I wrote liner notes for a “Station to Station” reissue; I wrote about the sessions and stuff. The note I got back from him was: “Please write more about the music.” And when I talked to him later, I knew why. He said, “I can’t vouch for anything that happened in that period. A lot of the stuff that you call great quotes to me now, I either don’t remember or they feel like the insane and amphetamine-fueled ramblings of a young man lost with only drug dealers to take care of him. I’m lucky I survived. I’m lucky I’m here to live the life that I’m living right now, so I choose not to go back there. And I couldn’t even get through your story when I tried to read it again this morning.”
The thing that I was going back and forth on was, did he remember and just didn’t want to, or did he legitimately forget what it was like in those times? And of course it was: he did remember. He just didn’t want to or need to introduce that guy to his current life. That was over. So I was a little bit of a souvenir of an old suitcase that he’d thrown away, and here I was going like, “But it’s the greatest suitcase! It was like the best thing!” He was like, “No, no, but at least I made some good music.” I went back and listened to the tape recently of that conversation (from later in his life), and he’s not wistful at all. It was like, “Thank you for your questions. I don’t recall and don’t think I will ever again.”
Speaking of people who choose to remember or not remember… The most dramatic encounter you describe in the book is the one you had in the early ‘70s with Gregg Allman, which you fictionalized in “Almost Famous,” where he seems to have taken you as his confidante but suddenly he freaks out and terrorizes you. As you note, he had his own memoir where he told a different version of the story that didn’t make him seem nearly as scary. You recount how he demanded all the interview tapes you’d done for a cover story and seemed intent on destroying them — which, for a journalist, makes for a pulse-pounding an anecdote. In the book, you go into how it was so depressing to think you’d lost this cover story, you were thinking, “OK, I am going to listen to my mom now and become a lawyer after all, this is so bad.”
Yeah, if I even get out without getting beaten up or something. It all came back. I was scared. I just did the audio version of the book and it all came back. I had to stop and gather myself because it was so wrenching at the time, and I felt that I had scraped some wound (of Allman’s) wide open again, and that I was gonna be repaid with violence, possibly. It was so hurtful, and I really did not realize how deep it even went until I started writing this and then later just doing the audio book. It was emotionally violent.
And so seeing Gregg again decades later, yeah, I think he had a sense memory that he had roughed me up. But for him the story had grown to its tour-bus kind of funny punchline ending, so the lore was meeting the reality when I stood with him. And I could tell it was like, “Oh fuck. Something happened here and there’s still something between us.” So when we posed for a picture together, I really felt like we were finding some kind of place where I was appreciative for the experience and he was apologetic for the pain that had happened. It all happened in a moment and in a flash. You can see it in the picture. I’m really happy to be there, and he’s kind of like figuring out what this particular crossroads is. But I got to thank him for “Almost Famous,” and he said, “You’re welcome. You’re welcome.”
Let’s talk about your precocity at the time, and how you were perceived. Of course early on you talk about how nervous you were about being 14 or 15 and hanging with the rock stars. But after a certain point, we forget about that, and we’re just thinking about you as this very mature, seasoned journalist. And then all of a sudden you begin one chapter with “I was 14,” and we kind of snap back to, okay, this was unusual. Even later on, you mention that Bowie asked you how old you were, because he was suddenly curious, and you were 18 but you answered “19” because you thought the extra year sounded good. Hours. Did you have a sense, when people weren’t asking, that they had an idea of how old you were? Or did they assume you were older? And how old did you feel once you were into this life?
It’s funny. At a certain point, by the time I was 17 or something, I did feel like a seasoned journalist. You know, there’s a thing in “Heartbreakers Beach Party” (the 1983 Tom Petty documentary) where I’m going like, “I’m Cameron Crow, and I’ve been writing about rock for 10 years now.” I’m looking at it and I’m just going like, “You fucking look like Opie, man. What are you (trying to prove) with this “10 years”? Gimme a break!
But at the time, I remember thinking, “I’ve done this a while.” Because I thought loving Dick Cavett had punched a passport of some kind to having these conversations where we took each other seriously, even though I still had a baby face and was the age I was. I felt like after about 17 that I was okay and nobody was gonna say I was too young to be there, but I was still pretty young. And I think they did see a young person who was eager to know more, and for all the right reasons.
Now, if we’re making a movie and somebody shows up and they’re like, “I’m so-and-so’s assistant, and I just wanted to be close to movies, and I can’t believe that this is how it’s done,” I see that person and I go, “Come along to the next location, check it out. You’ll be excited to see how we play music (on the set) and we do this.” So the roles get reversed. You just feel that having that certain kind of person around is gonna make you a little more excited, because you can look in their face and see the excitement you had, and that’s a person you want to take with you. And if you’re kind of the player coach, you’re like, “Hey, I’m glad you ended up here. Check out how it works.”
Back then, a lot of people were “Check out how it works” with me, and I’m trying to be grateful to all of them when I tell their stories. Right down to Gram Parsons, who was really eager to answer my questions and not be a mystique-filled sphinx. It was really fun to meet some of these people at the time that I did.
And the fact that they came to you sometimes, like, “I heard you’re a good guy” or something — they had heard things or sensed that you were welcoming in a way they weren’t used to from journalists and would have this receptivity. Kris Kristofferson ends up dragging you along to family dinners and things because he wants to keep talking with you, even though Rita Coolidge and everyone are trying to drag him away from you.
I loved listening. It’s like Kristofferson says at one point, “Boy, you’re really a great listener. This is one of my favorite conversations I’ve ever had.” Which means, basically, “The less you say, the more I dig this conversation.” But listening is an active part of a conversation, for sure.
The opportunities to stretch out and do big pieces were very limited. But still, people would spend time with me going over all this stuff. Talk about Pete Townshend. They had flown me to Atlanta to interview the Who for Playboy. Before we’d done the interview, Pete said, “I hope this isn’t ‘The Playboy Interview’ (the famously long-form Q&As the magazine was known for).” I was like, “Well, I wish it was The Playboy Interview. He goes, “I don’t. The Playboy Interview is a tombstone for a career. That’s what somebody does when you’re James Baldwin or you’re in the later stages of your career and you have something you want to say. I’m still a young man. I don’t want to do a big story with you. How about just a column? They’d flown me to Atlanta and put me on tour for, and he’s like, how about just a column?” Then we go to his room and we sit down and do a four-hour interview that goes into every little crevice and nook and cranny of his creative life. He poured himself inside out for a column in Playboy that’s going to be like 500 words.
So this was the kind of situation where I was spinning with joy and also the opportunity to do what my mom said, which is, “Seek out your heroes, seek ’em out. It won’t be bad.” And it often was not bad at all.
Speaking of your mom: You have all these great characters in your book, but none greater than your mom. You’ve mined her for material before, in the film and Broadway versions of “Almost Famous,” but we get such a greater picture of her in the book. She’s such a combination of being a total counterculture figure in one way and then a total square in another. She was all about “don’t do drugs,” which you mine for comedy, and even a whole comedic number in the musical. But then she’s also this kind of wild feminist/poet type of person, and possibly psychic, as you relate. Do you see a reflection of that combination in yourself? You title the book “The Uncool,” so you can relate with kind of being the square man out. But then you really are part of the in-crowd, and you obviously love the power of rock and roll for all the freedom it represents. So where do you see those sides of your mom that are so polarized and fun to write about maybe reflected in yourself?
Hmm. I love the question. She was a combination of theater and teaching, and any opportunity to teach, she would do it. Every time I shuffled through stacks of stuff on her desk (after she died in 2019), there would be faxes and notes and things that she left behind that tend to weirdly just kind of say the right thing at the right time. Like, “You never know, good luck or bad.” It was one of her sayings and it’s so true. Sometimes bad luck turns to something truly great.
And I try and pass her teachings along to people, just because I being a warrior for optimism is a really good place to be. And she did really love that I found a voice in the world of journalism. I think now she would be really anxious to inspire young journalists not to give up because journalism is under attack right now. Her feelings would be very current. But the thing about my mom that was fun to write about is she just wanted to protect brain cells. That was a big, big thing.
And if there was a hint of intellectualism, if there was a hint of a lesson in something, well, then she’d give it a try. “Yeah, come, come see this new folk singer, Bob Dylan.” But you know, “Iggy Pop — who is that man? This is not somebody who’s gonna teach you anything in this world.” And that was where she drew the line. Dick Cavett blazed a path, because Dick Cavett would have real conversations with Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin and stuff. So I was able to throw him up as an example of, like, “You can find wisdom in the oddest places, Mom, you know?” And I like making her a hero.
But the other thing is, my dad was a real hero to me too. And I liked bringing my dad into the picture. He was a more quiet presence. His birthday was yesterday and his effect echoes throughout the whole thing. He was a quiet, charming person who was a celebrated man in the military who left to kind of help our family and be present. And I wanted to give him the last word in the book, which, in a book that’s so much about music, is: “Always treasure the sound of the human voice.” I love giving that to him.
One last quick thing about that was so funny. My cousin came to see the “Almost Famous” musical in San Diego, and he didn’t know that my mom had died. He’s like, “Well, where’s Alice?” I’m like, “Well, besides in every performance of the play, she died.” He’s like, “Oh no.” And I go, “Yeah, man. You don’t know how many people come and see the play and look for my mom and then say, ‘You look just like her. You’re just like her, aren’t you?’” And I said, “I guess I am.” And he said, “You really don’t get it, do you?” I go, “What do you mean?” He goes, “You are your father. Don’t you see it?” And that really lingered with me too. So I wanted to kind of explore that and it’s really true.
You have a beautiful story near the end of the book about your dad staying up well past midnight on New Year’s Eve while you’re out at a party so he can tape a live Allman Brothers Band broadcast off the radio for you. It’s a touching way to wrap up the book, and with a character we never got to meet in “Almost Famous.”
Yeah. I mean, I like writing in that voice. With a (prospective) book about the years of making movies, I think there’s so many stories to be told, but it’s a different kind of path. It’s probably a little less happy/sad. This was the feeling I wanted to catch.
Before we go, can we ask the inevitable question that people want to know, about your Joni Mitchell movie?
Working on that baby, yes. We’re gonna do it next year. And I just feel really confident that we are telling that story in a way that you wouldn’t call a traditional so-called biopic. It’s the telling of her story with amazing input from the artist herself, who is opening her life, her closet, her collection of instruments, her notes, her everything for us to make a movie that is as emotionally authentic as her music. I just feel really lucky to have spent the last few years finding the way to tell the story that will give you a physical body rush as well as loving her story. … I can’t wait for you to check it out.
All those casting stories that have been out there about women who supposedly are in or out, is that all wild speculation, or is there…
Nothing I can confirm. I’m just grateful that people are talking about it and that I get to tell the story. The Joy Division movie “Control” for me was the high-water standard in terms of like telling a great story that also gives you the absolute feel of Joy Division, so that you go back through the music and go, “Holy shit, now this music even means more to me.” And to be able to do that with Joni Mitchell is a labor of love beyond my wildest dreams.
Music journalism today — do you recognize it? Does it seem like a foreign thing to you? You often use the phrase in the book “the promise” in terms of what rock ‘n’ roll felt like in the 1970s at the moment you are capturing it. Is there a role for music journalism 50 years on from whatever that promise was? How does it it feel, as someone who’s just reading this stuff and not really doing it now?
Well, I feel like I’m writing about music in different ways, in the movies that we’ve made, too. And that’s been fun. But, you know, I love music writing when it’s committed and passionate and not just blowing through a person’s life and career and maybe making a snarky observation or two and then onto the next. I love when you plant a flag for the music you want to write about, good or bad. And to me, I look no further than, I don’t know… Mikal Gilmore can write about music in a way that you feel his passion and it does this thing… and this is the thing that I love about music writing, and you don’t always see it: I love it when it makes you want to listen to the music. When somebody says something that makes you go, “Oh wow, I want to go back and listen to ‘Folklore’ again. I want to go back and listen to ‘Pleased to Meet Me.’ I now understand something I didn’t know before.” Or this person said to look over here and see this… That’s when it goes back to the thing that first made me write about music, which is pass a feeling onto a friend to experience themselves and share that delight in the transcendent thing that music can do for you. And when people acknowledge the wonder of music, when it works best, I can read it all day long.
Cameron Crowe’s book tour dates:
Oct.29 | Washington, DC | Warner Theatre
Oct. 30 | Nashville, TN | CMA Theater
Nov, 1 | Chicago, IL | Athenaeum Center
Nov. 13 | San Diego (El Cajon), CA | The Magnolia
Nov. 19 | Seattle, WA | Benaroya Hall
Nov. 20-21 | Los Angeles, CA | The Montalban
Nov. 23 | San Francisco, CA | Orpheum Theatre
