Styrofoam Grief
Cameron Crowe's memoir glides on the unspoken ironies of his career
This book review due to run any day at the LA Review of Books:
TURNING JUST ABOUT anything into a rock musical smacks as the antithesis of rock'n'roll. Cameron Crowe did this to his own rock movie totem, Almost Famous, turning himself into a paradox. His sentimental impulse also drives his charming, conflicted memoir, The Uncool, which tracks his career as a journalist and screenwriter, culminating in the 2019 stage premiere of Almost Famous: The Musical—which slams up against the agonizing cancer death of his mother, Alice.
Like fellow rock film classic This Is Spinal Tap, Almost Famous endures largely because the competition for rock representation on the silver screen remains weak. Nobody goes to the movies for Rock Concert Thrills; biopics do not deepen any listener's understanding of Freddy Mercury or Elton John. Does anybody prefer A Complete Unknown to Bob Dylan's Blonde on Blonde? Does Nebraska cry out for Jeremy Allen White's Bruce Springsteen to somehow authenticate its anguish? Among his other films (1996's Jerry McGuire, 2001's Vanilla Sky), only his script for 1982's Fast Times at Ridgemont High captures some of rock's waterfall spray. By the release of 2011's We Bought a Zoo, and 2015's Aloha, Crowe's arc had tilted pretty far in the non-rock direction.
Almost Famous succeeds by capturing a specific, early 1970s feel, tracking an eager 15-year-old from San Diego who hustles his way into Rolling Stone. The film's casting elevates its script: Frances McDormand's fierce maternal love as Alice, and Philip Seymour Hoffman's Lester Bangs, who inhabits the film's weary, brilliant conscience. Crowe's Oscar-winning screenplay both revels in and gently parses rock's backstage world, capturing a moment when a wide-eyed kid could serve as a fan's ears for rock stars' hot air.
We understand this to be no more than capricious hypocrisy: it was Wenner who ran Crowe's Zep profile as a splashy, best-selling cover, then chastised the young writer for sycophancy. He even hands Crowe a copy of Joan Didion's Jim Morrison profile as an object lesson…
The Uncool spins out from there, detailing the messy life behind the movie. Crowe threads his own family tragedy—including an older sister's suicide—alongside a portrait of his mother, creating a narrative that, like his best work, glimpses profound pain before retreating to a safer, reassuring space. (Let's put on a show!) But as with so many rock stories, why fuss with the original mediums, as if the material needs some different stripe of legitimacy—The Uncool reads much more like a memoir of a fictional movie than someone's journal. And only a Mr. Show satirist would put songs to it. Does anybody think Almost Famous lacks a backstory? (continued…)
more
Cameron Crowe’s site: http://www.theuncool.com/
Crowe’s 1975 Led Zeppelin profile in Rolling Stone
Lester Bangs archive on rocksbackpages…
Maria Bustillos on Lester Bangs in The New Yorker (2012)
“A Final Chat with Lester Bangs” in Perfect Sound Forever
when the ERA felt possible…
Jean Knight’s 1971 smackdown, “Mr. Big Stuff,” finally gets its car commercial. We drifted back into a mashup reverie…
noises off
“The Motown Story: The First Decade, or A Star Is Born,” American Music Perspectives, Vol. 4, No. 1, SPECIAL ISSUE: MOTOWN, The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2025 (Tim Riley, issue editor). With more from Riley, Olivia Davis, Kit O’Toole, and Ben Greenman.
Let the archives walk all over you
Coming soon: chatting with James Campion about Bob Dylan’s Freewheelin’; Peter Richardson’s new book, Brand New Beat, on the history of Rolling Stone Magazine; Peter Doggett’s UK angle on the Beach Boys…
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