Book Review: Cameron Crowe's 'The Uncool' Is An Outstanding Memoir
When I was fourteen, I came up with the idea of starting a non-profit organization that worked within the music industry. People thought I was insane. I thought that I was insane. Fast forward to a year later, I’m fifteen and standing backstage in San Francisco’s Regency Ballroom, rubbing elbows and chatting with bands that only months prior I had been singing into a microphone in my suburban bedroom. From that night, I knew that there was absolutely no way I could back to a sense of normalcy in my life. Jump a few years later, I began the website that you’re reading this review on. My life has consisted of going to shows (sometimes a hundred a year), photographing bands, reviewing concerts and albums, and doing multiple interviews a year.
I write this preamble to the review of Cameron Crowe’s new memoir, The Uncool, because right around the time I started doing all of this, my Aunt and Uncle told me, without any exaggeration, “You need to watch this movie called Almost Famous. It’s you.” One day, I sat down to watch the film that wouldn’t quickly become one of my favorites, spawning multiple rewatches. I saw a lot of myself in William Miller. Watching Almost Famous for the first time was the equivalent of Miller’s first listen to The Who’s Tommy; I saw my future unfolding before my eyes. The years would go by, and I’d have countless tours, hundreds of hours of traveling to shows, just to chase that one moment, that one interview, that one photo, that one moment that felt like something bigger than myself. Even on my worst days, that feeling is what drives me to pick up the phone for an interview or get in the car to go to a concert.
The Uncool is the book I’ve been waiting years for, without even knowing it. Crowe, a former teenage rock journalist for Creem and Rolling Stone, who would go on to write the script for Fast Times at Ridgemont High and write/direct numerous films, including Jerry Maguire and the semi-autobiographical Almost Famous, spends over 300 pages recounting the stories that made up his teenage years. The book details how out of place he felt as someone who skipped grades, always feeling behind amongst his peers in high school, yet thriving with a tape recorder in hand, sitting in a dusty green room with the likes of (at the time) up-and-comers like The Eagles and Lynyrd Skynyrd. It details growing up with a mother who believed rock music was the work of evil, yet never once discouraged her son from going out on the road. She even recounts, after taking him to a Cream show in their hometown of San Diego, that she gets why his generation likes rock so much - the music is better than theirs.
Crowe’s highly anticipated memoir details the chain of events that led him to become a rock journalist, inspired by a fateful meeting at a local San Diego paper and reading countless album reviews from Lester Bangs. All of the pieces that made up the band Stillwater in Almost Famous - the scrappy rock act opening for Black Sabbath - are composited from various moments in Crowe’s young journalist career, and hitting the road with bands like the Allman Brothers Band and Led Zeppelin. It’s fun to connect the dots and see what comes from where, while remaining emotional, heartbreaking, and poignant all at the same time.
Perhaps I’m a little biased, given what I wrote at the beginning of this review, but The Uncool may very well become one of my favorite books after another re-read. It does a better job than I ever could of explaining why music journalists do what they do, despite constant rejection, lost dollars, and sleepless nights. At the same time, it paints a portrait of a young American family, and what happens when destiny calls out to you from the confines of suburbia: are you going to play it safe, or are you going to answer the call? Obviously, Crowe answered the call; he has cover stories from Rolling Stone’s heyday and an Oscar on his mantle to prove it. But The Uncool is a memoir told from an incredibly unique point of view, one that gives a glimpse into music journalism in the 1970s and what happens when you mix those experiences with adolescence. I couldn’t put it down once I started.
The Uncool is out today via Simon and Schuster. Get it wherever you purchase your books. Crowe will be heading out on a book tour, which kicks off this Thursday, October 30th, in Nashville, TN. The tour will conclude in San Francisco, CA on November 22nd, with Crowe discussing the book and his career with moderator Machine Gun Kelly. More information can be found here.
