Writer/filmmaker Cameron Crowe celebrated the release of his Avid Reader Press memoir, The Uncool, last night (Oct. 29) with an event at New York’s Symphony Space, during which he read an Allman Brothers Band-focused chapter from the project and also sat for a conversation with Roots drummer and fellow music nerd Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson.
The Uncool focuses largely on Crowe’s southern California upbringing and how his complex family dynamic and unique experiences as a teenage rock’n’roll journalist equally inspired his beloved 2000 film Almost Famous. One of the most gripping segments, which he read aloud last night, details his time on the road with the Allman Brothers Band, whom he profiled for a 1973 Rolling Stone cover story shortly after the death of founding member Duane Allman.
Many of these real-life adventures, including a Greg Allman cocaine-induced episode of psychosis that led him to briefly confiscate hours of Crowe’s interview tapes, made their way into Almost Famous, which has found new life as a stage production in recent years. Talking with Thompson, Crowe touched on the delicate balance between passion and professionalism in his younger days of chronicling the biggest names in music, including then-reclusive stars such as David Bowie and Led Zeppelin whom hadn’t granted interviews in years.
“Some of the editors at Rolling Stone kind of challenged me for a time, like, why don’t you spend some time and write about somebody that you don’t really admire? See what that’s like,” Crowe recalled. “I took an assignment to write about Bachman-Turner Overdrive. I don’t know if I treasured it, but I went on the road with them for a little bit. Bob Seger was opening for them and I don’t think he was thrilled about it. They were committed guys, but I just thought they were really full of themselves, and so I quoted them being full of themselves. The story came out and I think they loved it. But I thought, I’d rather spend time interviewing Pete Townsend of the Who and get to see some Who shows. For better or worse, I just wanted to spend the time learning about the people that I really cared about.”
Asked by Thompson if he would have secured some of these iconic interviews if he were merely a run-of-the-mill 20-something fan, Crowe replied, “I was a pleasant change from some of the people that had come before me, like the guy who wrote about the Allman Brothers [for Rolling Stone] and looked down his nose at them. [He] didn’t know why they were worthy of that kind of coverage, and there was a band playing their hearts out. And yeah, they were southern, but come on, man. Don’t play that card on them. That kind of prejudice was still in the air. You know this, because you’re amazing at it. If you listen well and care, people will tell you their stuff, and that was why I was able to get some of the interviews I was able to get.”
Crowe and Thompson also touched on their mutual memories of shopping in record stores as kids, their love of novelty hits such as “Yummy Yummy Yummy” by Ohio Express and what they’d save from their memorabilia collections in the event of an emergency (Thompson said his life-spanning hard drive of music and Soul Train episodes, while Crowe named two autographed Marvin Gaye albums and the coat Kate Hudson wore as Penny Lane in Almost Famous).
The chat wound down with Crowe providing an update on his long-in-the-works biopic of Joni Mitchell, whom he also named as his favorite interview subject of all time. “My feeling is you don’t have to cram,” he said when asked how such a film could encompass the entire life of someone as prolific as the nearly 82-year-old Mitchell. “You don’t have to do just a slice. You do what is true to the power of the person that you’re doing a film about, whether it’s someone famous or not. A lot of biopics are storytelling from a distance. Sometimes they’re not alive. Sometimes it’s kind of a Wikipedia-ization of their life.”
“If you can do something like Control, which was a movie about Ian Curtis and Joy Division, it gives you the feeling of the band,” he continued. “If you don’t even know the band, the elixir works. That’s a so-called biopic that is also kind of a storytelling gift that’s also a body rush, because you can use the music. And for me, doing a movie like that on Joni gives you the body rush of seeing that person from the inside out as opposed to looking in. [It’s also] because of her participation and opening her life up to us and allowing me to interview like crazy. She keeps all of her stuff — all her instruments, all her houses. Her Laurel Canyon house, she’s still the landlady of! So, we’re gonna use all of it and it’s gonna be from her life looking out, using all of her music. I want to subvert the genre and have somebody that’s never heard of Joni Mitchell see her story and feel the music and go, I want to know more about this person. And [for] the people that love her [to say], that guy gets it.”
Crowe’s The Uncool promo tour continues tomorrow in Nashville alongside Sheryl Crow and will then visit Chicago (Nov. 1 with John Cusack), San Diego (Nov. 13 with Kate Hudson), Seattle (Nov. 19 with Eddie Vedder), Los Angeles (Nov. 20-21 with Luke Wilson and Judd Apatow) and San Francisco (Nov. 22 with Machine Gun Kelly).
