#the uncool

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It’s a testament to Cameron’s writing and Frances McDormand’s performance that his mom, Alice [or Elaine on film], is so endearing in Almost Famous because she did not come across that well in real life based on Cameron’s memories. She was clearly stuck between being independent and a woman of her era because she seemed to constantly flip-flop from being super progressive to super conservative at any given moment, especially toward CC’s older sister Cindy. When she finds out Cindy is most likely sexually active and thinking about eloping with her high school boyfriend, Alice ships her off to college so Cindy can be ‘a liberated woman.’ Sad to say, their mother-daughter story does not have a happy ending like in the movie, with Cindy cutting off contact from Alice the last decade or so of her life. :/ Cameron clearly loves both of them though and tries to explain Alice’s dysfunctions are because she apparently had depression and anger issues, but I don’t really think that excuses questionable parenting, tbh. Funny to know her brief cameo in Jerry Maguire, where she shouts out “I finally got in touch with my anger!” was actually a real-life reference, lol. Also, I think Cam forgot Frances was nominated for Best Supporting Actress for AF, because he mentions taking Alice and Cindy to the Oscars that year and they were all rooting for her co-star Kate Hudson to win, lol. Cameron’s dad, Jim, seems fine and a good father, but he’s just like, there and barely added anything to the stories, so I can see why he wasn’t written into the movie; plus he and Alice ended up separating by the time Cam was a teenager, and Jim died the year Say Anything was released. Honestly, some of the most accurate parts of the movie are the scenes with Anita [Cindy]. I could hear Zooey Deschanel’s voice in my head anytime he quoted her in the book, lol. It’s also funny Kate was originally cast as Anita because Zooey looks a lot more like young Cindy based on the vintage family photos in The Uncool. Of course, the darkest part of CC’s childhood was his other older sister, Cathy, who suicidally overdosed on pills when she was only 19. Naturally she wasn’t written into AF either, but there are some really subtle Easter eggs throughout the film [notably Simon & Garfunkel’s ‘America’ and the Beach Boys’ ‘Feel Flows’ on the OST]. Since he really cleaned up his family background on the big screen, both Alice and [especially] Cindy weren’t actually comfortable with Cameron portraying them as characters for a long time until Alice’s death and they all got closure together.

According to Cameron, Glenn Frey is the coolest rockstar to ever exist with no competition. I didn’t know the ‘attitude’ bit from Fast Times at Ridgemont High was directly lifted from something Glenn told Cameron after he was rejected by a female radio DJ, lol. I was shook seeing the pictures of young Cam and his best friend, rock photographer Neal Preston, because I don’t think I’ve ever seen Neal under the age of 50, lol. DeeDee Ramone allegedly stole $75 from CC’s wallet when they were hanging out at a bar in NYC, but he said he was more disappointed than angry because he figured out DeeDee spent it on his heroin addiction. TBH, a problem I had with the book’s whimsical, youthful tone is that no one’s bad behavior ever really gets called out, even people like Jann Wenner, who we now know sucks. The worst was when he tried to claim Rodney Bingenheimer was like LA’s Andy Warhol, and super hip and elite…lmao?? I realize CC was a kid at the time and he wants most of the book to be from the perspective of a teenage fanboy, but this is really not a good look post-metoo [plus, who even believes that? lol]. Joni Mitchell is portrayed positively anytime she’s brought up too, so if he actually does get that biopic on her made, it’s probably going to gloss over her racism.

Maureen Donaldson, Lisa Robinson, Michelle Myers and Pennie Ann Trumbull, on the other hand, all sound awesome. Cameron was friends with Maureen, a fan mag reporter, when she was dating Cary Grant and got to prank call old Hollywood stars she was familiar with at the time. Cary was apparently the biggest sport out of the bunch, while Lucille Ball literally told him to fuck off and slammed the phone down. Ann Moses also has a whole story on meeting Cary and his movie star friends when she was buds with Maureen, which made me realize it’s kind of surprising Cam and Ann never crossed paths in the early ‘70s considering how similar their journalism careers were. Lisa is just as cool and chic as she seems, and was Led Zeppelin’s no. 1 go-to journalist for tours [sounds like Cameron went on tour with them when Lisa was busy]. Same with Michelle, who usually palled around with showbiz photographer Richard Creamer on the Sunset Strip when she wasn’t booking gigs for The Whisky a Go-Go. Pennie and the Flying Garter Girls are the well-known groupies he discusses the most, and confirms the ‘blow jobs only’ rule was real, but suggests Pennie was one of the rare groupies to actually follow it. He calls Bebe Buell the most beautiful woman in the world, but also asserts she could get easily jealous [like of Todd Rundgren’s ex Marlene Morrow]. I mentioned earlier on here that Cam also verifies that the groupie who was sold for a case of beer wasn’t Pennie, but a San Diego girl/groupie known as Tamarind Brown, who left town crying when she found out about the deal. He doesn’t mention which band tried to trade her, but the band on the receiving end was supposed to be the Allman Bros Band. There is absolutely no mention of Pamela Des Barres anywhere in the memoir other than Cameron briefly saying he thought the GTOs and the Plaster-Casters were tacky and ditzy. Safe to say Pam and Cam are no longer friends [if they ever really were]. I’m not surprised, since not only has Pamela been erroneously claiming her life was ‘ripped off’ in Almost Famous forever, but a couple of years ago on Jenny Dino’s podcast, she randomly stated Cameron and Pennie dated in real life and Pennie was CC’s first ever girlfriend, which is really weird since neither of them have ever suggested that. And if you read The Uncool, you’ll see that clearly never happened, so IDK why Pamela said that, lol. No mention of Lori Mattix in the memoir either, even though Cam would namedrop her in old interviews. I’ve always felt like besides Pennie and maybe Bebe, he didn’t really seem comfortable around most groupies because they were either too forward sexually or would make fun of him for being a ‘dork’ [which Jenny openly talked about in that same podcast ep, though she admitted it was out of envy].

The most awkward sections of the book are definitely Cameron talking about his love/sex life and learning he was only ever involved with women 3-6 years older than him back then. Like, I guess it’s not a shock since he skipped three grades and spent most of his teens around famous musicians, and Penny Lane is supposed to be a little older than William, but the notion never really occurred to me until he started mentioning his exes, lol. The most uncomfortably frustrating story is when he was 19/20 and living with an A&R woman who was 26/27, and she stole his stuff and allegedly gave his records away after CC broke up with her because he didn’t want to move to NYC. At the end of the chapter, he blames himself for ‘breaking her heart.’ Cam, my dude… :/ He also accused a Fleetwood Mac roadie of stealing his date backstage a concert, lol. Magazine editor Bill Maguire and his girlfriend allegedly had sex while Cameron was staying in the same hotel room as them too. I found it baffling Cameron didn’t even mention his ex-wife, Heart’s Nancy Wilson, or their kids, outside of the acknowledgements, yet revealed on the very last page he now has a one-year-old daughter named Vivienne with his current, younger girlfriend Anais.

Unless I missed it, Pink Floyd seemed to be the only huge ‘70s rock band he had no direct contact with, and in general didn’t really go into detail on as many British bands as one might expect. He actually talks the most about Americana and southern rock groups, specifically the Allman Bros [which re-confirms the main plot of Almost Famous was based on his tour with the band]. NGL, I skimmed through some of the pages on ABB, Jim Croce, Grateful Dead, Lynyrd Skynyrd, etc, because those genres aren’t really my thing, lol. I do not agree with Cam that the Eagles “were even better than the Byrds.” But for any Gram Parsons/Emmylou Harris shippers, there is a short chap on the Fallen Angels tour, which Cameron ends with saying his teen self wished he could have a romance like them when he grows up. 👀 I laughed when he called David Bowie’s manager, Tony Defries, ‘British Col. Tom Parker,’ lol. There is no new dirt/tea on Led Zeppelin, or at least nothing that he hasn’t already shared before. The only semi-interesting thing I remember noted was that they were apparently the only super big rock band to have a tiny entourage of like four men, a press correspondent, and maybe a groupie [they usually preferred having ‘favorites’ in each major city rather than road wives]. This just confirms to me we really are never going get an accurate, in-depth, legitimate expose/biography from anyone trustworthy associated with the band, and they are going to be the one group to ever exist on pure ‘mystique,’ just like they want. Cam doesn’t say anything about grunge or 1990s rock in The Uncool, which is weird considering his movie Singles. Surprisingly, neither he nor Cindy cared about the Monkees as kids, even though they were directly in the act’s demographic.

I didn’t know when I started the memoir it was primarily going to be about his childhood/family and his early journalism career, and hardly anything on his filmmaking career, so that was disappointing for me as someone who enjoys both sides of his work. He mainly brings up Almost Famous whenever it’s relevant to a story he’s telling about his childhood or rockstars. He actually talks about the production of Fast Times the most [I think roughly a single chapter]. There’s a funny anecdote about how the principal of the high school he ‘attended’ to research for the original book allowed him to be on campus because he interviewed his favorite music artist [Kris Kristofferson]. There are no tidbits on Singles, Jerry Maguire, Vanilla Sky or his later movies, only a couple references to Say Anything, only a few shout outs to his directing mentors, Polly Platt and Billy Wilder. There is quite a bit on the preparation for the Broadway musical adaptation of Almost Famous, which tbh, didn’t really interest me, but it’s brought up consistently because that’s when Alice died. I get the impression since the disastrous production and release of Aloha, Cameron’s self-conscious over his reputation as a director and is now leaning into his first legacy as a rock expert [hence the music docs and going back to writing columns/articles]. Which is a shame, because yeah, his heyday is over, but some of his films are still classics he should appreciate. One of my favorite stories from the whole book is Cameron and his friends spending a day/night as extras on Orson Welles’ final film as a director, The Other Side of the Wind, with Cameron being amazed at seeing both Orson and Peter Bogdanovich, who was the AD on the set, in person. And another was learning Cameron and John Hughes were office neighbors in LA during the ‘80s. I’ve always seen parallels between their careers, so it was really cool to learn they knew each other and were actually aware of the comparisons; and even intimidated by them until they met and realized they had similarities [i.e. favorite music] and differences [John could whip up a rough draft of a script in a day, while Cameron prefers to take a long time writing his screenplays].

The Uncool by Cameron Crowe

Inside rock’s wildest decade, from shadowing a cocaine-addled David Bowie to winning over Joni Mitchell, deliciously readable tales by the director of Almost Famous

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 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.”

One of my favorite movies is Almost Famous, there are a bunch of reasons why, not least of which is, as I pointed out when I wrote about Micky Dolenz’s autobiography, even though I grew up in the 90’s (and have a love for pop punk) classic rock is my favorite and was the soundtrack of my childhood. So I related to William because while he was writing reviews and following Stillwater on tour. I…