The Uncool: A Memoir by Cameron Crowe

The arc from teenage music journalist to Oscar-winning filmmaker has to be the coolest career trajectory since John Glenn went from Marine Corps pilot to astronaut to US senator. It would make the title of Cameron Crowe’s starry memoir, The Uncool, either sarcastic or deeply self-deprecating if it weren’t an homage to the legendary music critic Lester Bangs, who applied that adjective to himself in the exhilarating and enduring 2000 film, Almost Famous, which Crowe wrote and directed to memorialise his time reporting on 1970s bands and musicians for Rolling Stone. This book is that story in a more exacting form.

The Uncool is bookended by quite recent history, with the staging of Almost Famous: The Musical, which Crowe’s 97-year-old mother Alice – a prominent figure in both film and show – has been awaiting. As the book opens, the previews are a few days away and he is convinced it will fail, and mother props up son with her habitual peppy aphorisms. In the closing pages, it is Crowe who has to dig deep as Alice dies right before the show debuts.

The force of her personality and intellect, coupled with her loathing of rock music for its association with sex and drugs, shapes Crowe’s life, which is seems largely charmed, at least for his almost mystical ability to be in the right place at the right time and persuade virtually anyone to talk to him. It’s a little cursed, too: the last of Korean War veteran Jimmy and Alice’s three Californian children, Crowe loses his eldest sister Cathy to suicide at 19. She has been in a secure facility, but there was never a clear diagnosis of her troubles, and for the rest of her life Alice generally rebuffs her son’s questions.

The three siblings shared a love of music, though, and Crowe sees a message in the records Beach Boys-loving Cathy ordered for him right before she died: Don’t worry, baby. And full credit to Alice, a college professor, for indulging these interests despite her own reservations; she takes seven-year-old Crowe to see a young Bob Dylan play in a local gymnasium in 1964, and at 13, in the span of two weeks he sees Elvis, entering his circus-act final era, and an on-fire Eric Clapton.

There is also estrangement between Crowe and his sister Cindy, the middle child, but we only learn what little we do about this much later, because The Uncool concentrates on the decade from around 1973, when Crowe emerges as a 14-year-old music journalist working for a local free newspaper in San Diego. The paper is at the centre of the 70s counterculture in southern California and the target of some violence for its anti-Nixon stance.

Then, very soon, comes Rolling Stone. Crowe doesn’t use the word precocious to describe himself, but it’s the one that comes to mind. In his telling, just by hanging around and taking the advice of a show promoter to “act like you belong”, one thing leads pretty directly to another in a vibrant era of free spirits and immense creativity, not to mention a true golden age of magazines, many of which have print circulations in the millions. He is good at what he does, and his bosses don’t care that he’s still in high school (though he will graduate three years early).

For a long time Crowe is the youngest person in every room, something he often feels insecure about, and club bouncers dislike having a minor around. But he gets a boost from his first real interview, with Glenn Frey of the Eagles, who takes him seriously, and soon after from Kris Kristofferson, hyper-famous at the time in music and film, who is sweepingly generous and gives him a scoop about new Dylan music.

It’s the stuff of pop dreams: he sees a young Springsteen’s LA debut at the Troubadour and joins the background of a party scene at the home of Peter Bogdanovich. It’s for a movie being made by Orson Welles.

Where Crowe really shines is in snagging the impossible get – interviews with notoriously press-shy subjects which yield countless cover stories: Joni Mitchell, who persuades him to break an iron rule of journalism and show her his draft copy; the members of Fleetwood Mac about their new album, Rumours; and the highlight of it all, what might be thought of as the David Bowie sessions, when Crowe is introduced by Ronnie Wood of the Rolling Stones and Bowie gives Crowe an 18-month-long, access-all-areas pass into his life. By the time Crowe is in the studio watching Bowie record “Golden Years”, it’s clear - if it wasn’t before – that Crowe has the luck of the Irish.

The weight of meaning of all this seems to have come with time and reflection. In the moment, the young Crowe is just trying to meet and talk to his musical heroes and “build a chain link of trust” from one to the next. Jackson Browne puts in a good word for him with Gregg Allman, which leads to a remarkable series of conversations (less interview than “confession, an unburdening”, as Crowe recalls) and another Rolling Stone cover, until a drug and grief-addled Allman turns on him in one of the book’s most chilling passages. (Indeed, the spectre of hard drugs hangs over much of the book, to the point where Bowie, interviewed again by Crowe in much later, sober life, claims to remember very little of their time together – but Crowe says he always passed up what was offered to him and usually received a response along the lines of, “Great. More for me!”.)

Crowe persuades a distant, prickly Jimmy Page to sit for an interview as Led Zeppelin is first unleashing what will become classics. Perhaps it’s just the perfection of hindsight, but Crowe writes about this past life as if he knew he was in the eye of a glorious storm of print media and music and he had to move and tape and write as fast as he could, before the moment passed forever.

Almost unbelievably, his luck doesn’t just hold – it finds him again, in a whole other field of enterprise, after he is supplanted by new young star reporters and sees he’s done his dash at Rolling Stone. Still only in his early 20s, Crowe recounts how he turned his hand to long-form writing and drafted a manuscript that was swiftly optioned for adaptation and became the seminal 1983 film Fast Times at Ridgemont High. With its success, he finds new heroes in writer-directors like Billy Wilder, Hal Ashby, and Mike Nichols, and decides screenwriting is for him: “It was the next frontier.”  

And this is pretty much where the book leaves off, which is fine in one respect – if you’re even mildly interested in the history of popular music, the cleanly written, mostly linear narrative is one astonishing Rock & Roll Hall of Fame anecdote after another – but a letdown if you are looking for a starry reminiscence of Crowe’s subsequent career as a screenwriter and filmmaker. He mentions Say Anything and Jerry Maguire, two of his biggest hits, only in passing, and as for Almost Famous, which won him an original screenplay Oscar, the musical gets more time than the film itself.

After this intoxicating, singular, first-person ode to one of the headiest periods in American popular culture, we can only hope there is a second installment in the offing.

Reviewer: Stephanie Jones

HarperCollins New Zealand