Cameron Crowe spent his youth being in the right place at the right time. In 1964, aged seven, he was taken by his mother to see "a kid named Bob Dylan" play a local college gym. By the age of 14, living in San Diego, he was writing record reviews for a local underground magazine whose main aim was to bring down Richard Nixon. Shortly after that, he started interviewing the bands of the day as they came through California - first Humble Pie for Creem, and then the Eagles, the Allman Brothers Band and Led Zeppelin for Rolling Stone.
Crowe previously fictionalised his story in the 2000 film Almost Famous, which he wrote and directed. His lyrical and compulsively readable memoir The Uncool is bookended by the opening of a musical version, which coincides with the death of Crowe's mother Alice whose aphorisms, including "Put some goodness in the world before it blows up", are scattered throughout the book. Alice insisted that Crowe skip two school grades, driving his precocity; she was also dead against rock'n'roll on account of its unbridled hedonism. When Crowe asks her what Elvis did on The Ed Sullivan Show that was so subversive he had to be filmed from the waist up, she "clinically" replies: "He had an erection".
Nevertheless, unbridled hedonism is exactly what the book depicts, through the starry-eyed gaze of youth: unlike, say, Joan Didion in Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Crowe didn't study the counterculture's casualties too closely. His is a world of aftershow parties filled with characters like Freddie Sessler, a drug dealer who is rumoured to have made his fortune manufacturing pencils; late-night dressing-room jam sessions (Crowe has his guitar gently removed from his hands by a roadie called Red Dog when he attempts to join in with the Allman Brothers); eager, undamaged groupies (he knows a crew called the Flying Garter Girls whose leader Pennie Lane’s credo is “only blowjobs, and that’s it”); and, as the early 70s wear on, omnipresent cocaine use, though Crowe doesn’t partake. “I couldn’t shake the image of my teacher-mother popping up,” he says. “You’re killing brain cells!”
The few music journalists making a viable living today would be agog at the access he enjoyed. When I interviewed the Rolling Stones for the Guardian nine years ago, I got about 15 minutes with each of them in a succession of Boston hotel rooms. (Fortunately, they were very good value.) Compare that with the 18 months Crowe spent with David Bowie in LA for a Rolling Stone cover story that ran in February 1976. He shadowed Bowie at parties with Ronnie Wood and in the studio with Iggy Pop; he hung out with him day and night in houses he was renting, meaning that he was there to record the heartstopping moment when Bowie suddenly jumped to his feet mid-interview because he thought he’d seen a body fall from the sky. The cocaine-and-occult-addled Thin White Duke pulled down the blinds, on which he had drawn a pentagram, lit and quickly blew out a black candle, then told Crowe: “Don’t let me scare the pants off you. It’s only protective. I’ve been getting a little trouble from ... the neighbours.”
The Uncool captures an extraordinarily inventive period in which rock music was stretching out in all directions, whether towards country music thanks to artists like Gram Parsons, or the conceptual in albums by the likes of Yes and the Who. Crowe was part of a burgeoning music press that, as well as recommending new bands to its readers, or conveying what rock groups had to say for themselves, would interpret, celebrate and contextualise the huge creative strides some of these musicians were making.
The work of writers like Crowe’s hero, Lester Bangs of Creem, amplified this sense of sonic excitement and exploration. While musicians may not have enjoyed being on the receiving end of his most brutally scathing criticism, Bangs pushed them to do better. One can almost hear him revolving in his grave at today’s Rolling Stone, which this month gave a five-star rave review to one of Taylor Swift’s worst ever albums. Although given that Jann Wenner, the founder of Rolling Stone, fired Bangs because he was insufficiently deferential to Canned Heat, he might not have been that surprised. Wenner, Bangs tells Crowe,is “a self-serving, ass-kissing heap of guano.”
Crowe is honest about the way writers, including himself, could be seduced by this proximity to stardom - something Bangs vociferously warned him against. He was never the build 'em up, knock 'em down type and undoubtedly got closer to some rock stars than was healthy for journalistic objectivity. In 1978, he managed to coax Joni Mitchell into an interview - she was long a "Rolling Stone disbeliever" thanks to a 1971 stunt in which the magazine "published a chart of her boyfriends and dubbed her Old Lady of the Year". When she asked to see his piece before it was published, Crowe agreed, and took in her "corrections" as well. Mitchell rewarded him by signing some artwork for her then-current album Mingus with the words "Thanks for the collaboration". As Crowe says, "Famous for her honesty, she had outed me as a collaborator. What was criminal among journalists was a badge of honour for me."
While his journalistic ethics may have wilted in the megawatt glow of his favourite rock stars, Crowe’s writing style flourished. In The Uncool, he succinctly evokes both eccentric characters and the era they represented. Of fellow journalist and future Doors biographer Danny Sugerman, Crowe writes: “His hands forever on his hips, he looked like he was always posing for an album cover that didn’t exist.” Gram Parsons is encapsulated thus: “The more he woke up, the more he had the air of a well-educated, stony young prince. He spoke about country artists the way a planetary scientist discusses the cosmos.” Crowe’s taste in music doesn’t inspire quite as much confidence—my faith was fatally shaken by his belief that the musically terrible Ryan Adams is “part of the same DNA chain” as Parsons. Crowe admits that one of the reasons he got a foot in the door at Rolling Stone was because he loved Jethro Tull, Deep Purple and the Eagles whereas the magazine’s staff “were the Van Morrison-Bob Dylan crowd.” Sun-dappled, hairy-chested rock is his thing.
Punk enters the book like someone switching the lights on at the end of a party. On the same day the Sex Pistols make the cover of Rolling Stone, Crowe’s friends, members of the southern rock band Lynyrd Skynyrd, are killed in a plane crash. It’s the end of an era. When his name doesn’t appear on the cover of Rolling Stone for his Joni Mitchell story, Crowe knows he is out of favour. “I’m 21,” he tells his parents. “I’m washed up.” He manages to transfer his talents to Hollywood, his career up and running once he writes and directs the film Fast Times at Ridgemont High, which harks back to his schooldays.
It’s another ode to lost youth. Crowe knows how potent an elegiac mood can be, or as he calls it, “the happy/sad”. It’s a gorgeous melancholia he detects in some of his favourite songs, from Silence Is Golden by the Tremeloes to Love Don’t Love Nobody by the Spinners, a Philly soul masterpiece over which he bonds with Bowie. But the source of this ache lies closer to home. Crowe writes that his sister Cathy took her own life aged 19, after suffering from a mental illness that was stigmatised and barely understood in the California of the mid-60s. Crowe, then just 10, couldn’t understand why his beloved big sister hadn’t left him a message of some kind; until he remembered the two Beach Boys singles she had ordered, which arrived at the house after her death: “My California Girl sister was telling me not to worry, baby.”
Crowe shows that music can sometimes be a key, not only to the deepest aspects of one’s own self, but to the otherwise incomprehensible inner lives of others. On top of that, it offers solace, joy and camaraderie for a lifetime. Remembering that Dylan concert in 1964, Crowe writes: “The chilly gymnasium had become a gathering of a tribe. It was that rare feeling that we were all exactly where we belonged.”