Cameron Crowe remembers wild times as a teen…
Cameron Crowe doesn’t visitors in regrets, besides perhaps one. He virtually forged David Bowie in “Almost Famous” — the Oscar-winning 2000 film loosely based on his life as a teen journalist on the street with a rock band — but didn’t.
His unique plan, Crowe told The Post in an exclusive interview, was to forged Bowie as Rocky Fedora, “a Peter Frampton–type character who’s working with this British, Brian Epstein–style publicist named Russell De May.”
But then the script advanced. Side characters muscled ahead, the ensemble swelled, and Rocky vanished.
Cameron Crowe initially deliberate to forged David Bowie (pictured) in “Almost Famous.” Andy Kent
“I still feel bad about it,” Crowe lamented. “It was really tough to lose that character, and to lose Bowie.”
In his wildly entertaining new memoir, “The Uncool” (Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster, out Tuesday), Crowe describes assembly Bowie in the mid-’70s when he was just 18, and being invited to spend long stretches around the singer in Los Angeles as he chased the sound that grew to become “Station to Station,” the 1976 art-rock opus that includes hits like “Golden Years.”
The lifestyle was famously spartan and unhinged — Bowie was surviving solely on milk, crimson peppers and cocaine at the time — while the artwork was laser-focused.
“I don’t know how that could ever happen today,” Crowe says with a chuckle. “Somebody as famous as Bowie telling a kid, ‘Spend a year and a half around me and hold up a mirror.’ There was no assignment. I was just winging it.” By night time, Crowe watched Bowie assemble the Thin White Duke in real time; by day, he slipped into a type of home sitcom with Angie Bowie and their son in a nondescript Beverly Hills rental.
There had been surreal moments aplenty. “Sometimes there might be a hexagon drawn on the curtains in his bedroom or a bottle of urine on the windowsill,” Crowe writes. “He might cheerfully take me to the edge of the indoor swimming pool adjacent to his bedroom. ‘The only problem with this house,’ [Bowie told him], ‘is that Satan lives in that swimming pool.’ It was as if he were pointing out a pesky problem with termites.”
In his wildly entertaining new memoir, “The Uncool” (Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster, out Tuesday), Crowe describes assembly Bowie in the mid-’70s when he was just 18, and being invited to spend long stretches around the singer in Los Angeles as he chased the sound that grew to become “Station to Station,” the 1976 art-rock opus that includes hits like “Golden Years.”
Digging through his outdated tapes for the e-book, Crowe even discovered a second he’d forgotten, a type of on-the-spot collaboration. Bowie demonstrated the William Burroughs cut-up methodology for songwriting, and told {the teenager} to throw phrases at him until a melody snapped into place.
“It was participatory journalism to the max,” he recalled. “The song had a ‘Space Oddity’ feel. Never ended up on a record, but it was good.” His months with Bowie in the end grew to become a 1976 Rolling Stone cowl story.
Crowe’s journalism profession reads like a biggest hits of American rock music. A Palm Springs–born, San Diego–raised prodigy, he blew past grades and graduated high college at age 15.
When his friends had been still cramming for midterms, a teenage Crowe was crisscrossing America with a pocket book, submitting meaty options on Fleetwood Mac, Lynyrd Skynyrd and Tom Petty — whom Crowe helped introduce to a national readership with Rolling Stone’s first big function on him in 1978. His youth and unassuming persona helped to get him past the velvet rope into whatever counted as the real room.
Crowe graduated high college at 15 and began working as a music journalist. Redferns
With Led Zeppelin, that “room” may very well be the least anticipated place in city. After enviornment blowouts during their “Physical Graffiti” tour, the band would slip past the autograph hunters and reappear someplace followers weren’t trying. As Crowe writes, they often discovered refuge in “a gay bar just around the corner. Fans combing the streets looking for the band never realized they could find Jimmy Page and Robert Plant dancing together, unbothered, to a song by Gloria Gaynor or the Average White Band.”
Meanwhile, younger Crowe used the homosexual bar’s lavatory as a newsroom, “making notes on little pieces of paper, often to the soundtrack of cocaine-sniffing patrons and sometimes sex on the other side of the stall door.”
He even briefly lived with the Eagles, at a rented home off Mulholland that singer Glenn Frey dubbed the “Eagles’ Nest.”
While on tour, Led Zeppelin’s Robert Plant (pictured with Crowe) and Jimmy Page would discover refuge in homosexual bars. Neal Preston
“I was six feet away, with tape recorder on, as they wrote ‘Lyin’ Eyes,’ ‘One of These Nights’ [and] ‘After the Thrill Is Gone,’ ” he writes. The access bought so acquainted that Frey gave him a nickname: C. C. Writer.
There had been other rites of passage. Kris Kristofferson helped the underage reporter into bars with his film star appeal — “I’d really appreciate it if ya made an exception,” the singer told one bartender —before heading onstage at San Diego’s Civic Theatre.
Lee Michaels, using high off “Do You Know What I Mean,” pressed a reward into the child’s arms: “a gallon-sized mason jar packed with freshly grown purple-and-green-flecked marijuana.”
Not everybody was charmed. When Crowe met Lou Reed in New York, the greeting was a single sound impact — “a small hissing sound,” Crowe writes.
Crowe also helped introduce Tom Petty to a national readership, writing Rolling Stone’s first big Petty function in 1978, when the singer bristled at being mislabeled a punk and vented about the document business.
courtesy of Petty Legacy LLC
In “Almost Famous,” one of the most bruising turns is when the fictionalized Stillwater band’s frontman claims the teenage reporter’s quotes are fabricated and almost tanks the child’s profession. That second wasn’t pure invention. It was a softened model of one thing stranger. In the early ’70s, Crowe joined the Allman Brothers Band on tour at their peak and sat down with Gregg Allman in San Francisco.
What began as an interview grew to become an unburdening. “The room changes when deep truths are being spoken, when raw honesty is in the air,” Crowe writes. “It was no longer an interview. It was Gregg Allman’s confession.” The singer spoke frankly and brazenly about topics that had been normally off limits, like his two lately deceased bandmates (including brother Duane) and the homicide of his father.
A few hours later, it all flipped. At 2 a.m., Crowe was hauled back to Allman’s suite. Allman had found that the younger reporter was just 16, and he was outraged. “How do I know you aren’t with the FBI?” he said, according to Crowe. “You’ve been talking to everybody. Asking questions. Taking notes with your eyes. Making tapes. I could have you arrested.”
Crowe’s Oscar-winning 2000 film “Almost Famous” portrayed his early rock journalist days. The movie starred Patrick Fugit and Kate Hudson. ©DreamWorks/courtesy Everett / Everett Collection
Allman pointed to an empty chair. “My brother is sitting right there, right now,” he said, referring to Duane, who’d died in a motocycle crash in 1971. “And he’s laughing at you.” Crowe surrendered his tapes, and spent 4 days satisfied he’d blown the largest shot of his life, before they had been returned.
Crowe’s own mom was memorialized in the movie’s overly protecting, big-hearted mother, performed by a younger Zooey Deschanel. His real-life mom, Alice, was a school instructor and “unstoppable force,” he said. She put him in on an accelerated monitor with college that made him one thing of a consummate outsider — the right perch for a journalist and later a movie author and director.
She died in 2019, and Crowe still remembers her fondly. “She had intellectual curiosity to her last breath,” he told The Post. “I think about her hourly. She was a remarkable woman.”
A key second in the movie was impressed by a real life encounter Crowe had with Gregg Allman (proper). Neal Preston
Even triumphs had been met with her regular hand. The night time he gained a screenwriting Oscar for “Almost Famous,” Alice told him lovingly, “It’s not too late to go to law school.”
Steven Spielberg was the wind at Crowe’s back. He devoured Crowe’s 172-page screenplay for “Almost Famous” in a single weekend and phoned with the verdict: “Shoot every word.” Crowe virtually did, but one scene that bought away still needles him.
“Neil Young had a part and he had been costumed and everything,” Crowe told me. The plan was for Young to play the estranged father of Stillwater guitarist Russell Hammond, exhibiting up at a live performance with a new, a lot youthful spouse who flirts with Russell while Dad stays oblivious. The day of filming, “in a slightly heartbreaking moment,” the rocker called and said he’d determined not to do it.
Crowe discovered a measure of closure with a few of the giants who formed his early life. With Bowie, it arrived over the cellphone in 2006, when Rolling Stone requested Crowe to revisit their landmark story.
Crowe last noticed Allman in 2015. Neal Preston
Crowe’s mom was a school instructor who put him on an accelerated monitor. Courtesy of Cameron Crowe
Bowie told him he’d tried re-reading the piece that morning but “couldn’t finish it,” calling the mid-’70s “one of the worst periods of my life” where he had “too much time on his hands and too many grams of amphetamine or PCP or cocaine, and maybe all three, in his system.”
Another circle closed in 2015. Crowe drove to Del Mar, Calif., to see Gregg Allman play an afternoon set at the fairgrounds. The former “sleek rock god,” now in his late 60s, carried himself “like a biker on a pit stop,” Crowe writes.
He watched Allman flip through outdated photographs with his “weathered and tattooed hands,” pausing on one with his late brother Duane, onstage at the Fillmore East. “I … I can’t,” he said softly, before closing the Pandora’s box of reminiscences.
Crowe is now at work on a biopic about Jodi Mitchell. WireImage
They took one remaining photograph together, and Cameron observed that Allman “stood up straighter, puffed his chest out a little,” he said. “The rock star in him was taking up residence. Not much had changed in four decades, except everything. It was showtime.”
He’s not executed telling music tales. Crowe is quietly at work on a docu-drama about Joni Mitchell’s life, and he’s cautious not to spill an excessive amount of of his plans. But at the suggestion that Rocky Fedora might make a visitor look, he brightened.
“I like that!” Crowe exclaimed. “He’d make a great Easter egg. Who knows, he might just pop up again. I think Bowie would approve.”
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