“Put some goodness into the world before it blows up.”
- Alice Crowe
Some kids aspire to be architects, or astronauts, doctors or accountants. Not me. At the age of 14, I decided that I wanted to be a roadie for The Allman Brothers. I had recently acquired the Allman's At Fillmore East album and I was obsessed. My tastes were not sophisticated, but even I knew that the music this band made possessed a gravity and maturity that belied their young age. My highest calling, I thought, would be to schlep their Marshall amps around the country. It didn't pan out and it's just as well. I probably wouldn't be here today, the mortality rate being what it was for a gig like that.
But I couldn't help thinking about that desire as I read with much pleasure and some envy, Cameron Crowe's new memoir, The Uncool. You may not be familiar with Crowe by name but you probably recognize some of his work - movies like Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Say Anything, Vanilla Sky, Jerry Maguire and Almost Famous.
Before writing and directing movies, though, Cameron Crowe lived a rock-n-roll odyssey that if presented as fiction, no one would believe.
He was San Diego born and raised, the youngest of three, with two older sisters. His father, a quiet presence, was former military who became an entrepreneur and his mother…his mother was the center around which everything revolved. Loving, charismatic and complicated, her shadow loomed everywhere.
She had a law career picked out for Cameron and that was his assumed future. Although she had little interest in music, when he was seven she took him to see “a kid named Bob Dylan.” It was in a high school gymnasium, tickets were $1.50. Afterward he didn't know what to make of any of it but he knew he “sure wanted to go to another concert.”
Having two older sisters filled their home with the music of the times and Cameron absorbed it with relish. His oldest sister, Cathy, struggled mentally and had been labeled by classmates as “not normal.” When she was 19 and Cameron was 10, she committed suicide, sending the family into emotional fragments. Music became a way for Cameron to cope with the fallout.
When he was 14, his other sister, Cindy, impressively cool, introduced him to some folks who worked at a small underground newspaper called the Door. He began hanging around the “office” and soon approached the editor about writing a music review. He was given a shot, and one turned into another, and then another. He was soon interviewing bands when they came through San Diego and writing about them. His work got noticed by the senior editor of Rolling Stone Magazine, Ben Fong-Torres, and he was hired to write a feature on The Allman Brothers Band.
It might be difficult now to understand Rolling Stone's power at that time in America. It was the preeminent shaper of culture and music. Unbeliveably, the esteemed publication hired a 16 year-old to go on the road to get the most coveted story in music at the time. The Allmans were coming off the recent deaths of two members of the band, the beloved leader and godfather of the group, Duane Allman, and bassist Barry Oakley. They were in mourning as well as being generally hostile to the press.
Crowe graduated from high school at 15, his mother insisting that he skip a couple of grades. He was obligation-free when the assignment came. Although his parents were reluctant to turn their son loose into the hedonistic world of rock-n-roll, they eventually acquiesced, trusting his good sense. Get it out of his system and proceed to law school, they thought.
He got the Allman interviews and his story ended up as the cover feature. 16 years old. From there he interviewed, wrote about, toured with, and in a couple of cases, lived with almost every rock luminary of the time - Gram Parsons, Joni Mitchell, Kris Kristofferson, Don Henley, Glenn Fry, The Ramones, Robert Plant, Jimmy Page, Ronnie Van Zant, Van Morrison, Bruce Springsteen, Emmylou Harris, Joe Walsh, Todd Rundgren and Jim Croce. His age seemed, in most cases, to work in his favor. He spent 18 months with David Bowie who told him he trusted him because, “You're young enough to be honest.”
Eventually, his relationship with Rolling Stone began to show fissures and by the time he was 21 he had run out of steam. The rest of the book covers his post-journalism career, family dynamics interwoven throughout, especially the larger than life figure of Alice Crowe.
Oh, and he never made it to law school.