Cameron Crowe’s adolescence was, figuratively and literally, the stuff of a Hollywood movie. As a teenager in the ’70s, he started writing for Rolling Stone, going on the road and hanging out with the likes of Led Zeppelin, the Eagles and David Bowie. Crowe would eventually turn those experiences into his classic 2000 film, “Almost Famous,” which he wrote and directed and which won him an Academy Award for best original screenplay.
Now Crowe, who is 68, is again revisiting those days in a memoir, “The Uncool,” which will be published next month. In it he shares the personal dramas — of the rock ’n’ roll and family variety — that inspired the tender self-mythologizing of “Almost Famous.” But the book’s tight focus means there’s a lot still left to explore. That includes Crowe’s successful transition from wunderkind journalist to writer-director of beloved and big-hearted Gen-X classics like “Say Anything,” “Singles” and “Jerry Maguire,” as well as some thornier subjects, such as the dissolution of his marriage to Nancy Wilson, the lead guitarist of Heart, and his latter-day career struggles. Simply put, the past few feature films he has made — “Elizabethtown” (2005), “We Bought a Zoo” (2011) and “Aloha” (2015) — failed to capture the magic of his earlier work.
So what happened there? And has any of that tougher stuff chipped away at the sweet idealism at the heart of his earlier successes? There’s a lot I wanted to know, both as an admirer of Crowe’s best work and as a fellow member of the club of former rock journalists, which, to paraphrase the aforementioned Eagles, is a psychic space from which you can check out, but you can never leave.
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“Almost Famous” came out almost 25 years ago. So you’ve been thinking about this part of your life, these formative experiences, for a long time now. What are you still trying to figure out? I love that time when everything meant life or death emotionally and you really felt things and you hadn’t built up layers of leatherlike skin. I wanted to never forget the joyful experience of following your dream and finding your voice in the world, which is sometimes a youthful experience and sometimes doesn’t happen until late in your life. I loved the journey of finding that kind of comfortable place where you know, This is who I am as a writer, this may even be who I am as a person, and that happened very vividly in that time.
Was there something you saw in those earliest days that made you think, Oh, I’m seeing something that most people don’t see? The hunger of people that weren’t understood in their own adolescent life. They chose music because music chose them. Also, there wasn’t a feeling that rock was going to last that long. So there was that thing of, Well, we’re making hay while the sun shines. I saw a documentary on the Eagles recently where Don Henley basically said, “We don’t know what we’re gonna do when our real life starts.” So everybody was on an adventure not knowing where it would end.
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