Oscar-winner Cameron Crowe is going on tour to promote his memoir, \u2018The Uncool\u2019<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n He is no less so when recounting those experiences in his warmly engaging new memoir, \u201cThe Uncool.\u201d Published Oct. 28 by Avid Reader Press, the book vividly chronicles Crowe\u2019s experiences in an era when Rolling Stone was a must-read for many young people and an arbiter of nearly all things cool.<\/p>\n It was also an era when some of the world\u2019s most celebrated rock stars granted almost unlimited access to Crowe, the endlessly enthusiastic and completely guileless wiz-kid writer.<\/p>\n Still a student at University High School in Linda Vista when his career as a music journalist ignited, he graduated three years early.<\/p>\n \u201cI looked younger than everybody. That would be my calling. My diploma came in the mail,\u201d writes Crowe, whose book poignantly begins and ends in San Diego with his dying mother in the first chapter and his father in the last.<\/p>\n Crowe\u2019s fresh-faced passion and sincerity endeared him to even his most press-wary interview subjects. They welcomed the opportunity to open up to an interviewer whose questions were well-researched, who listened intently, wrote insightfully and whose only agenda was to let them speak freely to their fans.<\/p>\n He had at least one other advantage:\u00a0Crowe was an unabashed admirer of bands that most Rolling Stone writers viewed with disdain, including Yes, Deep Purple and the Eagles. He would go on to interview all three for the magazine.<\/p>\n The fact that Crowe declined any and all offers of drugs from his interview subjects also endeared him to them, with one notable exception. A paranoid and glazy-eyed Gregg Allman was unnerved by Crowe\u2019s abstention, including turning down a speedball (which mixed cocaine and heroin). So unnerved that \u2014 after pouring his heart out to the young writer \u2014 Allman demanded to see his ID card.<\/p>\n That Crowe had yet to obtain his driver\u2019s license incensed Allman, who accused the hapless 16-year-old of being an undercover police informant. Allman confiscated the tapes of Crowe\u2019s in-depth interview with him and the band\u2019s other members, and insisted he sign ownership over to Allman. Scared and under duress, Crowe reluctantly agreed.<\/p>\n The tapes were returned, intact, a few days later. Crowe\u2019s sensitively crafted article on the Allman Brothers earned him his first Rolling Stone cover story. What transpired also provided pivotal source material for Crowe\u2019s Oscar-winning 2000 feature film, \u201cAlmost Famous,\u201d which he wrote and directed. He also masterminded its rebirth as a musical in 2019, when it opened at San Diego\u2019s The Old Globe before heading to Broadway.<\/p>\n The longest chapter in \u201cThe Uncool\u201d gives a blow-by-blow account of what transpired with the Allmans. As an epilogue to that sometimes-harrowing saga, the book later recounts the 2015 backstage meeting at the Del Mar Fairgrounds Grandstand Stage between Crowe and Allman.<\/p>\n \u201cThank you for \u2018Almost Famous,\u2019\u201d Crowe said.<\/p>\n \u201cYou\u2019re welcome,\u201d replied Allman, who died in 2017. He was 69, just one year older than the still-youthful Crowe is now.<\/p>\n Crowe\u2019s teen exploits are the primary focus of \u201cThe Uncool,\u201d which is also the title of his website. The name was inspired by former La Mesa rock critic Lester Bangs, who memorably cautioned Crowe about the status of music critics: \u201cWe\u2019re from (expletive) San Diego. We\u2019re uncool!\u201d<\/p>\n Crowe\u2019s admiration for Bangs has never diminished, as he acknowledged in a 2023 Union-Tribune interview:\u00a0\u201c(Lester\u2019s) writing presence could be powerfully sharp and almost scary-brilliant. He was reckless, and alive, and his banter had sound and fury in it. It read like music. And he was from San Diego!\u201d<\/p>\n Lester Bangs at 75: legacy of \u2018America\u2019s Greatest Rock Critic\u2019 endures four decades after his death<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Some of the most enjoyable parts of \u201cThe Uncool\u201d are when Crowe provides fresh new facts and added context to events that inspired some of the most memorable scenes in \u201cAlmost Famous.\u201d By disclosing previously unknown details, including the fact that he initially wrote the film as a starring vehicle for David Bowie, Crowe has produced a book that is part memoir, part novelization and all heart.<\/p>\n \u201cThe Uncool\u201d also serves as a moving valentine to San Diego and Crowe\u2019s family: his mother, Alice, a former San Diego City College professor and guidance counselor; his father, James; and Cameron\u2019s two older sisters, Cathy and Cindy. Cathy suffered from mental illness and depression. Her suicide, at the age of 19, devastated her 10-year-old brother.<\/p>\n He found solace in the records she had shared with him, including The Tremeloes\u2019 \u201cSilence Is Golden\u201d and the Beach Boys\u2019 \u201cDon\u2019t Worry Baby.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cMusic was already more than music,\u201d Cameron writes. \u201cIt was a door that opened for three minutes. Sometimes way longer. In the forbidden world (of music) there was no judgment. Only your own thoughts and secret desires \u2026 Sometimes I would listen to one song twenty or thirty times in a row. There had to be other people like me. I just hadn\u2019t met them yet.\u201d<\/p>\n Cameron\u2019s mother was his biggest champion. She was also his most trusted editor, sounding board and moral and aesthetic compass. Her aphorisms \u2014 including \u201cDoubt is the devil\u201d and \u201cOnly paranoids survive!\u201d \u2014 account for more than a dozen of the chapter titles in her son\u2019s 333-page memoir.<\/p>\n Or, as Cameron put it in a 2011 San Diego Union-Tribune interview: \u201cMy mom is a real hero to me \u2026 (She) never gives up in making sure something she\u2019s involved in is as great as it can be. She\u2019s a person who\u2019s always happy when something is serving humanity.\u201d<\/p>\n It was Alice who took 7-year-old Cameron to his first concert, a 1964 performance in a college gym, by Bob Dylan. While he was still too young to appreciate Dylan\u2019s generation-defining impact, Cameron immediately grasped the significance of the moment. \u201cThe chilly gymnasium had become a gathering of a tribe,\u201d he writes. \u201cIt was that rare feeling that we were all exactly where we belonged.\u201d<\/p>\n When the concert was over, Alice asked Cameron and his then-12-year-old sister, Cindy, how they liked it. Both responded effusively. Alice, Cameron writes, was quick to retort: \u201cWell, someday the Republicans are going to ruin all of this, for everybody.\u201d<\/p>\n In addition to her liberal bent, Alice instilled in Cameron the importance of making every word he wrote, and every scene he directed, ring with truth and honesty. Despite her strong aversion to rock, Alice gamely accompanied her son to two San Diego concerts in 1970.<\/p>\n The first was by a kitsch-fueled Elvis Presley (\u201cin a glittering white jumpsuit \u2026 striking karate poses\u201d). The second, just one week later, was by the galvanizing, Eric Clapton-led band Derek & The Dominos. (\u201cI can still feel that night,\u201d Cameron writes, \u201cthe private thrill of a committed audience, linking up with a committed performer \u2026\u201d).<\/p>\n Capturing and conveying those private and public thrills would soon become the raison d\u2019etre for Cameron as a young writer exploring the magic behind the music and the artists who made it. The uniquely personal and broadly universal ways a song can speak to \u2014 and for \u2014 its listeners enchanted the teenaged Cameron. It still does now, as \u201cThe Uncool\u201d constantly attests.<\/p>\n Eager to be as prolific as possible, Cameron also wrote for Creem magazine, the Los Angeles Times, Playboy, and other outlets. But his reputation was built as the youngest writer ever published in Rolling Stone (and, soon, one of its star contributors) \u2014 starting when he was 14 and interviewed Kris Kristofferson backstage at the San Diego Civic Theatre and in the lobby of the Mission Valley El Torito restaurant.<\/p>\n His tenure at Rolling Stone laid the foundation for a career that has seen him pen three acclaimed books and write and direct such hit films as \u201cJerry McGuire\u201d and \u201cSay Anything.\u201d He fared less well with \u201cWe Bought A Zoo,\u201d which was set (but not filmed) in Jamul.<\/p>\n Crowe\u2019s current film project is a biopic on Joni Mitchell. He befriended her during a 1979 interview that was his final cover story for Rolling Stone. Mitchell had long held the publication in extremely low regard after being misogynistically slighted in one of its 1971 issues.<\/p>\n Crowe acknowledges in \u201cThe Uncool\u201d that he broke a major journalistic taboo by allowing the iconic singer-songwriter to read his cover story about her before turning it into Rolling Stone. By way of thanks, she gifted him with one of her paintings and signed it: \u201cThanks for the cooperation, Joni Mitchell.\u201d<\/p>\n Reflecting now on the painting she dedicated to him, Crowe writes: \u201cI knew instantly I could never put it where a fellow journalist might see it.\u201d<\/p>\n By way of justification, he adds: \u201cWhat might have been considered criminal to some journalists was a key to her comfort.\u201d<\/p>\n The comfort level musicians felt with Crowe is perhaps best demonstrated by his accepting an invitation to live with Eagles co-founders Glenn Frey and Don Henley while they were writing songs for their band\u2019s next album.<\/p>\n Frey and Henley had become pals with the young scribe when he interviewed them backstage at the San Diego Sports Arena in 1972. Frey went on to give Crowe advice on how to attract women and how to reject their rejection. A woman might leave you, or vice versa, but a powerful song will endure.<\/p>\n A Palm Springs native, Crowe spent his childhood there and in Indio. He was 13 when his family moved to San Diego, where his world opened up dramatically. His love of music was already deeply rooted, as his mother recalled in a 2011 Union-Tribune interview..<\/p>\n \u201cCameron always loved music, since he was two weeks old, and I played him \u2018The Chipmunk Song\u2019,\u201d she said. \u201cHe wouldn\u2019t sleep unless I played him music.\u201d<\/p>\n Cameron & Alice Crowe\u2019s special bond<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Cameron does not mention \u201cThe Chipmunk Song\u201d in his book. But he stresses how much his mother was opposed to rock and pop music, going so far as to write a letter to CBS executives complaining about a televised performance by \u2014 of all people! \u2014 Simon & Garfunkel.<\/p>\n His mother and father, a former U.S. Army officer, wanted Cameron to become a lawyer. He had other plans, fueled equally by his love of writing and music.<\/p>\n Cameron was inspired by Dick Cavett\u2019s TV interview show and by the razor-sharp writings of rock critic Bangs, who would soon become his mentor and confidante. Cameron was 14 when he began writing for The Door, a San Diego underground newspaper. His first two interviews for The Door were with, respectively, United Farmworkers co-founder Cesar Chavez and comedian and Civil Rights activist Dick Gregory.<\/p>\n \u201cI was almost 15,\u201d Cameron writes, \u201cand had just taken a step into the world I wanted to live in.\u201d<\/p>\n During a subsequent single evening in 1972, he interviewed the bands Black Sabbath, Yes and Wild Turkey backstage at the San Diego Sports Arena. His life would never be the same again, even if doing big interviews in Los Angeles required him to travel there and back by bus.<\/p>\n Cameron didn\u2019t have a high school girlfriend or go to prom. But he was on a first-name basis with rock stars his classmates could only dream of meeting, let alone going on the road with those stars and sharing their innermost thoughts.<\/p>\n His star-making tenure at Rolling Stone in the 1970s ended before that decade did, as punk-rock\u2019s rise made Cameron\u2019s specialization in classic-rock less desirable for the magazine.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m 21. I\u2019m washed up.\u201d he tells his parents.<\/p>\n Happily, the decline of his music interview assignments prompted his shift to authoring his first book, \u201cFast Times at Ridgemont High,\u201d which he researched here by covertly enrolling at Clairemont High School. Cameron subsequently wrote the screenplay for the movie version of \u201cFast Times,\u201d which in turn led to his new career as an Oscar-winning filmmaker. The fact that he write so little about this part of his life suggests a second, cinematic-focused memoir may be in the works.<\/p>\n \u201cThe Uncool\u201d provides a welcome, in-depth look at Cameron\u2019s formative years. Recalling a stay with his mother in San Miguel Allende when he was 7 and briefly attended a Catholic school there, he writes: \u201cThough I would never have known it at the time, Jesus looks like Eddie Vedder, complete with a bleeding heart.\u201d<\/p>\n The book also has some curious omissions, at least for those San Diegans who have long embraced Cameron as a hometown-boy-made-very-good.<\/p>\n While he references his time as a student at University High School, Cameron does not note that the first album review he wrote \u2014 of Creedence Clearwater Revival\u2019s \u201cCosmo\u2019s Factory\u201d \u2014 was for the same school\u2019s newspaper when he was 13.<\/p>\n He also doesn\u2019t mention co-founding the school\u2019s underground newspaper, Common Sense, or his one-day tenure as a salesman at the Swap-A-Tape store adjacent to the San Diego Sports Arena. Later in \u201cThe Uncool,\u201d the only mention of his \u201cthen-girlfriend\u201d Nancy Wilson of the band Heart gives no indication they later married and had two children together before divorcing.<\/p>\n Cameron wrote the extremely well-crafted liner notes for radio station KGB\u2019s \u201cHomegrown\u201d albums in 1973 and 1974, but not a word about them appears in his book. Nor is there any reference to him also writing liner notes for a number of major albums, including \u201cFrampton Comes Alive\u201d by Peter Frampton, who had a cameo as a roadie in the \u201cAlmost Famous\u201d film.<\/p>\n![\"](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/Cameron-Crowe-and-Jimmy-Page-photo-credit-Cameron-Crowe.jpg\")
Led Zeppelin\u2019s Jimmy Page, left, and Cameron Crowe share an airborne moment during one of the band\u2019s tours in the mid-1970s. (Courtesy Cameron Crowe)
\nA drug-free teenager<\/p>\n\n
![\"Cameron](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/Cameron-Crowe-San-Diego-Sports-Arena-2019-new-york-times.jpg\")
Cameron Crowe, shown here in 2019,. was 14 in 1972 when he interviewed the bands Black Sabbath, Yes and Wild Turkey in front of the San Diego Sports Arena. The venue, where he filmed scenes for his Oscar-winning film, \u201cAlmost Famous,\u201d is now known as Pechanga Arena San Diego. (Magdalena Wosinska\/The New York Times)
\nSan Diego valentine<\/p>\n![\"Cameron](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/OCR-L-BOOK-FRAMPTON-1025-06.jpeg\")
Cameron Crowe, left, and Peter Frampton are shown in Los Angeles in 1977. Crowe was living in San Diego when he wrote the liner notes for \u201cFrampton Comes Alive,\u201d one of the biggest-selling live albums of all time. (Courtesy of Peter Frampton)
\n\u2018The Chipmunk Song\u2019<\/p>\n\n
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![\"The](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/sut-z-books-uncool.jpg\")
The cover for Cameron Crowe\u2019s memoir \u201cThe Uncool.\u201d (Avid Reader Press)<\/p>\n