The Uncool

Cameron Crowe opens his memoir in September 2019, on the eve of previews for Almost Famous: The Musical at the Old Globe Theatre in San Diego. The stage adaptation of his autobiographical film was in crisis: The lead actor had quit six weeks earlier, the director had never helmed a musical, and Crowe was convinced the show would fail. During a nightly phone call, his mother, Alice Crowe, then 97, insisted it would be great. Alice, recently left by her second husband and terrified of a nursing home, confessed her fear of abandonment. Crowe promised he would not let that happen. This framing narrative anchors a story about family, music, and the path from adolescence to adulthood.

To explain the heart of Almost Famous to Casey Likes, the 17-year-old actor cast as his teenage self, Crowe traces his family history. His father, James Crowe, was a West Point graduate from Kentucky who met Alice George, a schoolteacher from California, in an elevator in Kyoto, Japan. Alice had transferred there after a premonition of disaster at her school in Honolulu; a tsunami later struck, killing her roommate and 150 others. They married, but Alice bristled at military life's conformity. After being scolded for serving stale peanuts at a general's cocktail party, they left the army. Crowe reflects that without this "Stale Peanut Incident," he would never have been born.

The family moved to the California desert. James became a real estate man and later built a thriving answering service business. Alice reinvented herself as a community college professor and counselor in San Diego, devoted to her students but controlling at home. She hated rock and roll, skipped Cameron through kindergarten, and a school error later advanced him past fifth grade, leaving him years younger than his classmates. His family imagined he might become a lawyer, but Cameron was drawn to music.

Crowe's eldest sister, Cathy, had emotional difficulties never fully diagnosed. She came home from first grade saying kids teased her about "not being normal." During the summer of 1967, Cathy bonded with nine-year-old Cameron, coaching him to give a record to his schoolyard crush and sharing her turquoise transistor radio. Her moods swung between sweetness and despair. She cut her wrists, was institutionalized, and died by suicide at 19. Records she had ordered arrived after her death: the Beach Boys' "California Girls" and "Don't Worry Baby," which Cameron heard as her final message. Cathy's turquoise chair remained at the kitchen table. This "empty chair," Crowe tells the young actor, is the secret of Almost Famous.

Music became Cameron's lifeline. He listened to songs on Cathy's radio, discovering that a song was "a door that opened for three minutes." His mother took him to see Bob Dylan in 1964 and later accompanied him to see Eric Clapton's band Derek and the Dominos. That night, Alice conceded: "I understand your music. It's better than ours."

At 14, Cameron began writing for the San Diego Door, a free underground newspaper where his older sister Cindy, then a flight attendant, also worked part-time. He discovered unpublished reviews by his writing hero, Lester Bangs, a rock critic from nearby El Cajon, and wrote to Bangs at Creem magazine, receiving a reply: "Your writing is damn good." Creem published his first national piece.

His career escalated quickly. He interviewed the Eagles at their earliest San Diego show, and their leader, Glenn Frey, gave him the nickname "C. C. Writer." He interviewed singer-songwriter Jim Croce and his musical partner Maury Muehleisen at Funky Quarters in San Diego, and witnessed singer-songwriter Gram Parsons rehearse with Emmylou Harris, a singer Parsons had discovered at a club in Washington, DC. Crowe describes their chemistry as "a quiet bonfire." Months later, Croce and Muehleisen died in a plane crash on the same day Parsons overdosed, sharpening Cameron's sense that everything in the music world was temporary.

The Allman Brothers Band assignment for Rolling Stone became Cameron's biggest triumph and most harrowing experience. He earned the band's trust and joined their tour. After the San Francisco show, Gregg Allman, the band's lead vocalist and keyboardist, summoned Cameron to his suite, demanded all the tapes, and accused him of being FBI. Days later, the tapes were returned, and the cover story became a landmark piece. Bangs offered a diagnosis that echoed throughout Cameron's life: "You made friends with them. That was your mistake. They make you feel cool, and I met you. You are not cool." Bangs later warned that publicists would buy loyalty with drinks, girls, and drugs, predicting an industry of manufactured "cool" that would strangle authentic music.

Cameron's career accelerated through the mid-1970s. He landed a Led Zeppelin cover story for Rolling Stone by overcoming guitarist Jimmy Page's opposition to the magazine. Jann Wenner, Rolling Stone's founder, told Cameron he had "missed the story" and gave him Joan Didion's Slouching Towards Bethlehem, urging personal conviction. Cameron spent 18 months with rock star David Bowie in Los Angeles during the recording of Station to Station and lived with Glenn Frey and Don Henley as they wrote Eagles songs. A counselee of his mother's named Gloria revealed that Cameron's parents had nearly broken up, deepening his sense that music's emotional complexities lived in his own family.

His relationship with Mary Beth Medley, Lynyrd Skynyrd's tour manager and his first girlfriend, ended when Cameron fled their New York apartment. In October 1977, the Skynyrd plane crash killed the band's leader, Ronnie Van Zant, and others. Mary Beth would have been on the flight if not for her New York promotion.

Feeling washed up at 21, Cameron enrolled undercover at a San Diego high school to document the adolescence he had skipped. The resulting book, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, became a film that launched his career as a screenwriter and director. An embarrassing personal essay about his romantic failures, which editor Tim Cahill declared "the best thing you've ever written," became the template for his confessional writing voice.

The memoir returns to 2019. Alice, now using a wheelchair, insisted Cameron not cancel a fishing trip, but she skipped her doctor's appointment. While he was away, she suffered cardiac arrest and stopped breathing for nine minutes. Actress Anika Larsen, who played Alice's character in the musical, sang three songs to her in her coma. Alice died just before midnight on September 11, 2019.

The musical opened days later. Cameron attended every performance, greeting former counselees of Alice among the audience. Cindy attended with her three daughters and told Cameron, "I spent a long time feeling like I'd lost my brother." Singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell traveled from Los Angeles for the official opening, sitting in the three seats Cameron had reserved for Alice.

Researching his family's early years, Crowe discovers that Cathy's favorite childhood book was The Fairy Doll by Rumer Godden, about a girl dismissed as "different" who gains confidence through a fairy doll's guiding sound, a "ting," only to discover the ting was within her all along. Cameron recognizes that the pop songs Cathy loved were her ting, her emotional beacon. Music, he writes, was the shared language for all three siblings.

The memoir closes with New Year's Eve 1973. Cameron returned home to find his father in pajamas, carefully tending to a tape recording of an Allman Brothers Band concert. The act of taking his son's passion seriously marked the moment Cameron's path was set. Alice's ashes are spread throughout Broadway's Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre, where the musical eventually moved. Cameron's daughter, Vivienne, was serenaded in the womb by Beach Boys singer-songwriter Brian Wilson singing "Surfer Girl," Cathy's most beloved song. The memoir ends with James Crowe's lifelong belief: "Nothing beats the sound of the human voice."