Back in the mid-1970s, it was fairly common to find Cameron Crowe on tour. Even though he was just a teenager, Crowe was one of the top music writers at Rolling Stone magazine, regularly landing interviews with artists who typically snubbed the magazine’s writers but somehow welcomed this kid from San Diego with a tape recorder slung over his shoulder and notebooks full of scrawled questions and, crucially, passion for the music he loved.
Crowe went on the road with Led Zeppelin and the Allman Brothers, moved in with the Eagles and spent more than a year hanging out with David Bowie, before making a career change (in his early 20s!) into the movie business, where wrote “Fast Times at Ridgemont High” and then wrote and directed “Say Anything,” “Jerry Maguire,” “Vanilla Sky” and others.
He also wrote, directed and won an Academy Award for “Almost Famous,” a fictionalized version of his days as a teenage rock writer – and now, he’s gone back to those days with “The Uncool: A Memoir,” an autobiography of sorts that focuses on his rock wunderkind days and his family from the perspective of a man nervously working on the Broadway musical version of “Almost Famous.”
“The Uncool” is what has put Crowe back on the road, except that this time he’s the headliner, not the journalist who’s tagging along. He’s on a book tour with special guest moderators: Sheryl Crow asked him questions in Nashville and John Cusack did it in Chicago, with upcoming dates scheduled with Kate Hudson, Eddie Vedder, Luke Wilson and Judd Apatow.
As a onetime teen rock journalist myself, I’ve known Cameron for at least 45 years, so our conversation was necessarily personal. Below you’ll find an edited version, and you can watch the full video above.
STEVE POND: I was trying to remember when we met, and I don’t know exactly when except that it was sometime in the 1970s. I was 19 when I started writing about rock ’n’ roll for the L.A. Times, which would have been a big deal but you were 17 and you’d already been writing for Rolling Stone for a couple of years. You were always a presence on the scene.
CAMERON CROWE: Always, always wishing I was older. For sure.
That time so imprints on me for people who loved writing and loved music, and the fact that it’s both wildly different and not so different at the same time. It’s amazing that we can still talk about music and film and care so much. It continues to be such a passion.
So why a book now? What made you want to revisit those years in particular?
Well, I wanted to do a collection book of my journalism. So about 20 years ago, I decided to try and re-interview a lot of the people that I’d interviewed at these kind of important crossroads times. I’d gone back and talked to Bowie. I’d talked to the Eagles, I’d talked to Fleetwood Mac, Pete Townsend. I started writing introductions to all the stories, and the introductions kind of scratched this itch. I was really influenced by Patti Smith’s book “Just Kids,” because I thought it was succinct, intimate, confiding, warm. It is the kind of book I wanted on my desk because I liked the feeling of it.
So I started writing in that mode on yellow legal tablets with pen and pencil and stuff. And it just started to grow. I had like 800 yellow legal tablet pages with the story of that whole time. And when it came time to talk to some publishers about putting out the collection book, somebody had the idea of, why isn’t it two books, and one would be a memoir? I’d never really thought about that, but to distill those 800 pages into a single volume that’s rather succinct felt really fun. And it ended up growing into something that felt real to me.
Had you been yearning to tell some of those full stories, like Gregg Allman essentially forcing you to hand over all of your interview tapes?
Yeah, for sure. I had written and told those stories just for friends and family, and in the case of the Allman Brothers story, it was sitting there like a knot inside me for decades. I didn’t even realize that until I started reading it out loud and for the audiobook, and it really affected me. I had to stop, and I realized I was holding a wound and I really got to confront it. Part of it was when I was able to see him before he died (when Crowe had a backstage meeting with Allman), but the other half of it was, I had never really expressed how painful and scary it was in the day. Because it was violent. I didn’t know if somebody was gonna come in and beat me up.
They were tough guys. They were sweet guys, but they were tough guys. And I had ventured into territory that was dangerous — emotionally dangerous for both of us. And to be 16 and going through that, it’s been sitting there, Steve, for a while. And nothing like it ever happened after. (Laughs) So it was like right out of the box that happened.
Basically, you went on the road with the Allman Brothers and tried to persuade Gregg to do an interview and talk about the death of his brother Duane. But after he did the interview, he made you sign over all of the interview tapes and give them back to him.
Yeah. But he taunted and chastised me before he did that. I think I’ve been really pissed off about that for a long time. I didn’t think it was necessary, and I don’t think he thought it was necessary. It’s in his autobiography. It’s a weird version of it where he said he and Dickie (Betts) were playing a prank on me, and they gave me all the tapes before I went home. No, you didn’t. You didn’t do that. You didn’t do that. And he knew when he saw me. At least he knew that that wasn’t a tour prank. That was bullying. I mean, by modern standards, it was completely not OK. It was an ugly run-in with somebody who was definitely on the dark side. And he knew it because he had seen (Crowe’s friend, photographer) Neal Preston for a photo session for People in the ‘90s, and he’d said, “Whatever happened to that kid? We really put him through the wringer.” So he knew.
A fictionalized version of parts of that story made its way into “Almost Famous,” which feels like a kind of pivot point in your career. It sort of merged the two parts of what you did. And since then, you’ve revisited those early days more often.
It’s true. “Write what you know.” You find yourself saying it all the time and hearing it all the time. And sometimes you pay attention to that, which I kind of did. But then I would always try and go and do research so that I knew enough about the NFL to write “Jerry Maguire” and things like that. But this (book) was actually living in the boxes of all the archival stuff that I kept.
And weirdly, the morning after I sent the manuscript in was the Palisades Fire. So I was thinking about the poetic value of having written the book and then losing all of the notes and all of the stuff that I’d sourced for writing it. But in fact, the house did not burn down. It’s just, we got smoked pretty heavily and still haven’t been able to move back. But symbolically it felt like, “OK, time to start looking forward again.”
In “Almost Famous,” a lot of people warned your character that rock ’n’ roll was changing, and not for the better. It did change after that era, and it’s changed even more seismically since then — and more recently, so has the movie business. Is there a way in which you’re enjoying looking back at something that’s kind of gone?
I always think you have to be moving forward to look back. That’s why love Francois Truffaut’s movies — basically that character Antoine Doinel. I’ve really studied what he said about directing, and what he said is that if you’re in a room looking back, you are longing for the past and not facing the future. But if you have that same conversation on a train moving forward, it’s put in context and you’re not stuck in a sepia-toned past. You are moving forward collecting inspiration from the past to make the future better. And that’s the best way to look back, I think.
It’s why in the book, I tried not to have “I remember.” You’ve got to embrace the fact that the future is the future and the present is the present. And that’s why you’ve got to judge, I think, what rock has become and what music has become on its own terms. I don’t long for the past and over romanticize it.
I do feel as if we came up in an era where rock felt like it was at the center of popular culture and at the center of our lives.
Absolutely.
And most people don’t feel like that now. But in a way, your book is saying, “Yes, you can still feel like that.” And some of the movies and TV shows you’ve made, there is a sort of insistence that we don’t have to move on from that feeling of how important this was to us.
That’s so beautifully said. I really appreciate that. That was what I was going for. I was at a memorial not too long ago and people were talking about the accomplishments of the person. It was Elliot Roberts, the manager of Neil Young and Joni Mitchell, and people were talking about all his accomplishments. And then somebody said, “Yeah, but you know, the best thing of all was how he made you feel when you were around him.”
And that was really profound to me, because you don’t think that when you’re trying to achieve all this stuff. You’re so busy trying to do good work and have it be appreciated that you don’t ever think about how people feel around you. Are you a good hang? (Laughs) What happens in between these things that all seem so important? You remember the feeling, and I remember the feeling, and that’s what I wanted the book to be. And you just said it. It makes me feel like I can leave the casino, I don’t need to bet anymore.
Looking at the photo in your book of a notebook with pages of interview questions, I had to wonder: Did you ever get through all of the questions you wrote out?
With Bowie, I think so. Just the other day, I found some stuff that I didn’t find while I was writing the book. And I had asked almost all of them, including “How do you think you’ll die?” With Bowie, I interviewed him so much that I got through everything.
And you were doing those interviews without even having an assignment.
Right. I did not have an assignment. He didn’t care about an assignment. But yeah, looking back, it would never happen like that today. There’s too many publicists that would blow the whistle on that little plan. (Laughs) And I don’t know that he was so happy with all the stuff that came out of those interviews. He told me he couldn’t get through the Rolling Stone article on the day that we did an interview about it. He’s like, “I started it. I couldn’t get through it.” That’s a guy that knew that reinvention saved his life.
One more sign of the times: I know you used to make monthly mix tapes. Do you now make monthly playlists?
I do. And they’re way too long. The C-90 (cassette tape) kept things in check. Now they’re just like 137 (songs) and all that stuff. (Laughs) But I love it and it’s a good diary.