Cameron Crowe has a vivid memory of the day he began filming his own life story. It was the summer of 1999 and he was back in his home city of San Diego, on the same streets where he had spent his surreal teenage years, flitting between suburban domesticity and his new life as a prodigious music writer, spending long weeks in the company of such 1970s gods as David Bowie, Fleetwood Mac, the Allman Brothers and Led Zeppelin.
Shooting was about to begin on a scene in which his 15-year-old self – renamed “William Miller” and played by the unknown actor Patrick Fugit – receives career advice from Lester Bangs, the legendary music writer who was Crowe’s hero and mentor, played by Philip Seymour Hoffman. “It’s gonna get ugly, man,” he says. “They’re gonna buy you drinks, you’re gonna meet girls, they’re gonna try and fly you places for free, offer you drugs – I know, it sounds great. But these people are not your friends.”
As everything was set up, Crowe says, he felt a sudden pang of emotion, so strong that he decided he needed to speak to one of the prime movers at DreamWorks, the studio that had come up with the movie’s $60m budget.
“I was just giddy,” he says. “So I picked up the phone and I called the office. I said, ‘I wanna talk to David Geffen’ who was one of the founders of DreamWorks. And so he gets on the phone and is like [deadpan], ‘Hello.’”
He recalls the next bit in the most corny, aw-shucks voice he can muster. “I said, ‘Hello! David Geffen! I’m standing here, and I’m looking at Philip Seymour Hoffman … and he’s playing Lester Bangs … and it’s my home town … and we’re making this movie … and, you know, I just can’t help but say: How did this happen?’”
Geffen, he says, gave him a somewhat crushing response. “He said, ‘How did this happen? Jerry Maguire.’ And he hung up. He hung up!”
To some extent, it was an accurate answer: the success of Crowe’s third film as a director – which starred Tom Cruise, received five Academy Award nominations and won Cuba Gooding Jr an Oscar – had indeed opened the way to the movie that would be titled Almost Famous. But there was also an undeniable magic at work, to do with the dizzying tale this new film told, and how it brought the romance and excitement of the best rock music to life. The right people had recognised this straight away: when Geffen’s fellow DreamWorks founder Steven Spielberg first read Crowe’s script, Crowe tells me, he simply said, “Shoot every word.”
And here we are, a quarter-century later. Almost Famous is one of those rare films parents show their kids as a rite of passage. Its cast – Fugit, Hoffman, Kate Hudson, Billy Crudup, Frances McDormand – contribute to a viewing experience where warmth and charm never seem to fade. In a modern context, it has arguably taken on a subtle new meaning, evoking an increasingly distant America full of hope – and how much the country’s fragile connections to that past are being severed by its current mood of discord and nastiness.
Crowe is now about to publish a memoir, The Uncool, which recounts the real-life experiences that inspired and informed the film. Its pages are full of famous musicians and the alluring portrayal of a music business that was still in its naive infancy. But it is also built around two more emotional themes: the very moving tale of Crowe’s damaged, driven family, and the solace and refuge he found in three-minute songs.
Crowe is 68 and instantly recognisable: tousled, centre-parted hair that has seemingly evolved from the style he sported in the mid- to late 70s, casual attire and the air of someone still brimming with enthusiasm. He talks to me for nearly two hours via Zoom, from a barely furnished house he and his new family – in 2024, he became a father for the third time with his partner Anais Smith – have been living in while their home in Pacific Palisades recovers from the effects of the fires that raged through that part of Los Angeles earlier this year. “It all came 100ft from our front door, and everything got marinated in deep, dark mesquite smoke,” he says. “But so many people had it worse than us.” His conversational style is like this: evocative, self-deprecating and full of a palpably Californian sense of optimism and redemption, even when he is remembering difficult and traumatic experiences.
Crowe was born in 1957, and raised in Palm Springs, before his family relocated first to the desert city of Indio – now the home of the Coachella festival – then San Diego. His mother, Alice, was a college teacher and “unstoppable force”. His father, who went by the rather unfortunate name of Jim Crowe, served in the US army and then worked as an estate agent. Crowe had two older sisters, Cathy and Cindy.
As McDormand’s brilliant performance in the movie shows, his mother was a fierce, obstinate presence, with such belief in her son that she accelerated his education, putting him in school a year early and then allowing him to skip fifth grade, the last phase of primary school. He ended up graduating from high school three years early, with a deep sense of being an awkward outsider (hence the title of the book). When he was taunted by his peers, she would offer words of encouragement that must have sounded like very cold comfort: “One day you’ll be a great success, and those kids will be in the dustbin of your memory.”
As Crowe became obsessed with rock music, she was horrified – and though that feeling eventually receded, it seems to have never completely gone away. Throughout her life, she hung on to the idea that, at some point, he would call time on his creative life and do something much more respectable. The night he won his Oscar for the Almost Famous screenplay, for example, her first response was, “It’s not too late to go to law school.”
“I think she felt, ‘This movie thing – it’s done,’” he says. “‘Let’s get back to what’s real: finishing education, becoming a lawyer, it’s important.’ That was the rudder that never quite came out of the water.” He smiles. “There was no irony when she said that, by the way. She was like, ‘You’re still young enough. Let’s do this.’”
She died in 2019, having lived long enough to witness most of Donald Trump’s first term as president – which, he says, both fascinated and appalled her. “It was a cultural thing, which rock was part of,” he says. “Like … the erosion of what it is to honour goodness. She felt it had been eroding and eroding, and then Trump showed up and it was like, God help us, where is it all going? But she had a teacher’s optimism that with good, hard work we could restore what’s important.” A telling part of her character, he says, was her fondness for aphorisms, one of which begins the book: “The only true satisfaction comes from doing good.”
She and her family also had to deal with profound tragedy. In the summer of 1967, Crowe’s eldest sister, Cathy, ended her life by overdosing on barbiturates. At different points in her life, her parents had been told she was “emotionally disturbed” and even schizophrenic. She was only 19. For a long time afterwards, his mother would not discuss the details of her death, while his father seemed to offer only the most simple explanation: “She was in pain.” It was, Crowe writes, “the only time I’d ever seen him cry”.
He has never written or spoken about any of this before. So why now? “I did it for me,” he says. “I just had some time on my hands and the tech had gotten better, so I could get into some archives.” The most revelatory, he says, were those of the Desert Sun, a local newspaper. “I started seeing tiny mentions of her: even some photos of a birthday party she had. And there was this book that she loved, The Fairy Doll, in a news report. And when I read that, it was like meeting her.”
In The Uncool, he describes The Fairy Doll’s principal character as being “unlike the others in her family. They were skinny; she was plump. They could ride a bike; she could not. They recited math problems; she got confused.” In hindsight, does he now have a better understanding of what Cathy was going through?
“The doctors were flummoxed at the time. They would swing from really dire diagnosis ideas to, hey, give it some time. But she was bipolar, without a proper diagnosis to really deal with it.”
A few minutes later, he says this: “The loss of my oldest sister was an unresolved pain in our family. I never wanted to, like, pull the scab from that … but over time you become the person who’s the same age as your parents when a lot of this happened. And you’re like, wow, show me the scab. Let’s do it. And with my sister Cindy’s help, I did it. And the more I learned about my sister, the more it linked up with my memories of her, because she was trying to give me pop as a manifesto. It ended up influencing my whole life. So that was important to write, just for me.”
There are two striking bits of symbolism in the story of Cathy’s death and how it affected the family. One is the empty chair that was always left in the kitchen, because “nobody wanted to be the one to remove it”. It was copied over into Almost Famous, as a representation of a fictional dead father. “It was turquoise, and I’ve never forgotten it,” he says.
The other was about her love of music. Crowe associates one particular song with his sister: the version of Silence Is Golden by the British band the Tremeloes, a hit single from 1967 that hints at jealousy, unrequited love and a sadness so deep that it sounds completely tragic. He also has an indelible memory of two Beach Boys singles Cathy had ordered just before her death, which his dad had to pick up from the local record store the next weekend: California Girls and Don’t Worry Baby.
Both are perfect examples of something that recurs throughout the book: the kind of happy/sad music that conveys something ordinary language can’t express; a kind of sadness that’s somehow enjoyable. At one point, he describes it as the cure for the “strange itch of not belonging” that he felt throughout his youth and beyond. And it was Cathy who introduced him to it. “She might have been the most organic and true music fan in our family,” he says.
Which brings us to the most spectacular period of Crowe’s early life. Four years after Cathy’s death, he had become acquainted with the people who ran a countercultural San Diego publication called the Door, who were open to the idea of him becoming a contributor. In a single evening at the city’s sports arena – and with no advance notice – he interviewed a long-lost band called Wild Turkey, Black Sabbath and the progressive rock titans Yes, simply by summoning up the chutzpah to hustle his way into their dressing rooms. He was 14 years old.
“There was no stopping me once I walked in the door,” he says. “It was so arduous getting into the arena that by the time I was there, it was like Disneyland plus. And I just felt like … all things were possible.”
If his time at school had constantly involved the disorientation of being the youngest person in the room, here was a way to turn that experience to his advantage. Does he look back and marvel at his sheer front? “It was do or die, in a way. I didn’t know if I was ever going to get backstage again. But also, we have a different idea of what backstage would be, based on today – where there’s like armies moving you from room to room. Then, it was like the band and a road manager – so if you said, ‘I’m here and I’ve got all these questions, can you get me into the room?’ the guy would be like, ‘Well, they’re just hanging around doing nothing – I’ll ask.’ And then it’d be, ‘Yeah, bring the kid in.’”
On his first big assignment for Rolling Stone, his age – and abstemiousness – almost led to disaster. In Almost Famous, the principal character’s writing career threatens to implode before it has even begun, when the lead singer of the fictional band Stillwater falsely tells the magazine’s factcheckers that his quotes have been made up. This is a rewritten version of something much more surreal, which happened when Crowe was sent to go on tour with the Allman Brothers Band, the pioneers of so-called southern rock who were then at the height of their success, despite a run of catastrophes.
In San Francisco, Crowe did his second, amazingly candid interview with Gregg Allman, who was still reeling from the recent deaths of two bandmates, including his brother Duane. But at 2am on the same night, he was summoned back into Allman’s company and subjected to an unsettling tirade: “Sixteen! You’re underage. How do I know you aren’t with the FBI?”
Allman told Crowe the ghost of his dead brother was in a nearby chair, laughing at him. He then demanded the tapes of their conversation and the interviews Crowe had done with the rest of the band, an instruction Crowe complied with. For four days, he was convinced he had blown the most important opportunity of his life.
What was all this about? “Being older now, and having seen Gregg before he died, I’ll give you my theory,” he says. “I think he got very high and realised I had not done drugs. I had been asking very personal questions that sometimes involve that level of hijinks. People had obviously come to Gregg and said, ‘I talked to that kid and I told him some stuff … ’ I wasn’t there to party and suddenly, maybe to a slightly paranoid mind, that made me a cop.”
A pause. “I thought I might get beaten up. Not by him, but anything could have happened. This was the middle of the night. My dad was in the army and I’d never heard him talking like that. So it was hardcore.”
What did he think would happen to the tapes? “Oh, they weren’t going to come back. I knew this was the end of a dream. It was that feeling of the mask being ripped from your eyes and seeing it: ‘Oh, this is what life really is. Wow. OK. This is where all those songs come from where people are really sad.’”
Less than a week later, thanks to “shame that lived in him somewhere”, Allman returned the tapes, and Crowe’s career resumed. Part of his role at Rolling Stone was about covering bands and artists that the magazine – staffed by people, he says, who revered Bob Dylan, Van Morrison and John Lennon – tended to think were beyond the critical pale, which is essentially how he came to write about Led Zeppelin. But he was also known as that rare interviewer who could put musicians at their ease and instinctively get inside their heads.
There is no better illustration of this than the time he spent in Los Angeles with Bowie between 1974 and 1976 – a period when, as well as creating such albums as Young Americans and Station to Station, he was largely living on a diet of peppers, milk and cocaine, developing an interest in the occult and exhibiting signs of obsessive-compulsive behaviour and paranoia.
Crowe spent a huge amount of time with him. “I don’t think you spend a year and a half around a kid unless you’re interested in what is gonna come out of it,” he says. “He said, ‘I want you to hold up a mirror to me and I wanna see what you write.’ And I think he really enjoyed throwing all kinds of crazy stuff at me.”
For all the frazzled quotes Bowie came out with (“I think I might have been a bloody good Hitler … I’d be an excellent dictator … very eccentric and quite mad”), Crowe insists he observed someone very different from the impenetrable Thin White Duke of legend. “He was really warm. He knew I didn’t have a driver’s licene. He gave me rides from the studio back to the place where I was living, cos I didn’t know how to drive. He would bop around LA traffic early in the morning in a yellow VW and nobody recognised him. He was talking about music and he was talking about life, and I was recording constantly. And I didn’t even have an assignment.”
Crowe watched him write two songs, neither of which was ever released. He also witnessed the recording of Wild Is the Wind – the classic ballad most closely associated with Nina Simone that Bowie included on Station to Station. He still sounds awestruck at the memory: not for the first time, he got the sense that Bowie was trying on a new persona, right in front of his eyes. “He was Frank Sinatra for an audience of three. And with the lighting and the cigarette, it was a performance. I thought, ‘This guy does not fuck around. He’s putting on an audiovisual presentation of a possible new direction live in real time. He’s going to try this out and I get to be there.’”
In 2006, Crowe was asked by Rolling Stone to look back at the landmark piece that all these encounters eventually produced, and to interview Bowie on the phone. But as soon as their conversation began, he knew their respective views of the time were going to be very different: whereas he recalled Bowie being constantly fascinating and personable, Bowie regretfully spoke of the “morbid, misdirected enthusiasm of a young man with too much time on his hands and too many grams of amphetamine or PCP or cocaine, and maybe all three, in his system”.
He paraphrases what Bowie told him: “I had no friends. I knew you. Drug dealers were the people who mostly populated my life. You know what? I’m really glad I survived. I could have died very easily and here I am. I’m with a family that I love and a life that I love, and … Good luck.”
By 1977, Crowe was a comparatively ancient 20 and had begun to get the strong feeling that he had already reached the end of his career as a music writer. Rolling Stone had moved from San Francisco to New York, and punk rock was in full effect. He was also suffering simple burnout. “I had a feeling I’ve had a few times: ‘What am I putting in the reserve tank to write about in the future?’ I took so many assignments that I would go and meet another band in the airport, and go off on another tour, and never even come home.”
In 1981, he published Fast Times at Ridgemont High, the product of the time he spent undercover at a school in San Diego: he then turned that book into a screenplay for the movie of the same name that was released a year later, prophetically looking ahead to a Hollywood decade that would be dominated by the onscreen teenager. The first movie he both wrote and directed was 1989’s Say Anything, a romantic comedy that starred a young John Cusack; the last – to date – was Aloha, released in 2015, whose cast included Bill Murray and Alec Baldwin. “I haven’t directed a movie in 10 years,” Crowe says, sounding slightly surprised at himself. “I’ve done documentaries and written a lot … but I can’t wait to direct a movie again.”
He says he feels a nagging itch to make another film about journalism – which, in the Trump era, sounds like an expression of belief in civic virtue very like his mother’s. “I hate seeing journalism marginalised – you know, ‘Can we get rid of these journalists, they’re the enemy of the people?’ No, they are the people, and if a young writer thinks for one second that journalism isn’t as important in our current environment, I’ll shove my book into their hand and I’ll say, ‘This is what journalism did for me. Journalism gave me a voice in the world.’”
In the meantime, he is about to start directing a biopic about Joni Mitchell. There are strong rumours that it will star both Meryl Streep and Anya Taylor-Joy, but Crowe is reluctant to give away any details. The little he can say arrives five minutes after our interview has ended, in an email: “We start next year. It’s Joni Mitchell’s story from her point of view, and it’s been a delight because her music is already so cinematic.”
He also sends me an answer to a question about music biopics so often going wrong, and how to do it right. “Most biopics about musicians are scary because they are usually so solemn and Wikipedia-like,” he says.
He then names three of his favourites: the Joy Division film Control, The Buddy Holly Story and Coal Miner’s Daughter, the movie about country singer Loretta Lynn. He nails what they have in common in a single sentence, which captures his two sides, as writer and director, and lifelong fan. The words could easily have come from the script of Almost Famous. “They never forget the elixir of the subject,” he says. “It’s pure heaven.”
