Cameron Crowe recalls Bowie’s silence on old memories

A few years back, Cameron Crowe had an idea. It’d be a movie. Something funny and romantic. There’d be some music. He told his son William about it, presenting to him his latest big love story. Crowe, damp and with freshly showered hair over video from his home in Los Angeles, takes a pause, as if gearing me up for a punchline. “Eventually (my son) says, ‘Hmm... I don’t know... it’s very Cameron Crowe, isn’t it?’” William, a screenwriting major in university, volunteered some suggestions. “Why don’t you set it in futuristic Japan? And no one can walk on the ground anymore, and there are spaceships flying around, but everyone’s listening to Eighties music. The whole story would work in that context, too.”

Crowe, meanwhile, was still stuck on the first thought. “Very Cameron Crowe?” he gasped. “What the hell are you talking about?” But, really, he got it. He’s a creature of habit. Crowe’s films — Gen X touchstones including Almost Famous, Say Anything and Jerry Maguire — are about earnest dreamers; overgrown teenagers (or literal teenagers); the flawed if always palatable. His films have a habit of suddenly becoming pop videos, their soundtracks holding just as much importance as the camera lens or the boom mic. Phoebe Cates disrobing to The Cars in Fast Times at Ridgemont High (Crowe wrote the screenplay). Jonathan Lipnicki being adorable while Bruce Springsteen growls softly about secret gardens in Jerry Maguire. John Cusack holding up that damn boombox as it plays Peter Gabriel in Say Anything.... You wonder if the only reason “Crowe-ian” hasn’t joined the lexicon alongside “Lynchian” or “Hitchcockian” is because the word sounds so, well, silly.

Anyway, ask him now to unpack it a little, this “very Cameron Crowe” thing, and its definition pours out of him immediately. “A friend of mine said this recently: ‘You have an unironic view of your characters. You love them, and you don’t judge them. You put them out there so people can hang out with them and make their own minds up about them’.” Crowe flashes one of those lopsided smiles of his. “And I guess I do kinda value the wounded optimist.” Crowe is also a filmmaker whose life story is so fascinating that it’s basically a movie unto itself. And it’s why no one found it annoying when, 25 years ago, he actually turned it into one.

Almost Famous was a semi-autobiographical take on his maddeningly starry adolescence, when he became — through a mix of good fortune and raw ability — the youngest ever contributor to Rolling Stone magazine. By the age of 15, he’d already begun trailing some of the biggest rock stars of the Seventies across the US, profiling acts such as Led Zeppelin, the Eagles and Deep Purple. He was the rare journalist who didn’t go away Van Morrison, spent 18 months on the road with David Bowie, and got famously inhibited stars — among them Joni Mitchell and Gregg Allman — to spill the beans. Crowe has now recounted this time in his life in The Uncool, a warm-hearted memoir as lively, sentimental and plain envy-inducing as the movie it inspired back in 2000.

The young Crowe undoubtedly had a way with people, insinuating himself backstage to grab moments of time with Black Sabbath or Yes, first at the San Diego newspaper The Door, then at Rolling Stone. “I was basically this annoying kid with an orange bag asking too many questions,” he laughs. “But that’s how many doors got opened.” He often wonders in the book why his interviewees would give him the time of day. “Why me?” he asks himself, as Bowie opens up his life to him over the course of a year and a half. “What convinced him to take me — a journalist! — along for the ride?”

It’s a question he’s still asking himself. “I’m not sure why it happened the way it happened,” he says. “What I can tell you, though, is that when I’ve been making movies, you’ll sometimes see someone show up, like someone who knows a crew member or a cast member, and they’re just so interested in being there.” He laughs. “There’s no real agenda. They’re just so happy to be close to the flame that it’s kind of inspiring. You like having that person around, so you’re like, ‘hey, come with us to the next location’.”

Crowe was, most of all, a fan of the people he interviewed. It was an approach that some of his mentors had problems with, notably the legendary rock critic Lester Bangs — played with gentle magnetism by Philip Seymour Hoffman in Almost Famous. He warned the young Crowe, “don’t make friends with the rock stars — they’ll ruin you.” Crowe took it a little to heart — few of his subjects became actual friends — but he spoke to his interviewees with empathy and real reverence, which often proved effective in getting them to open up. “It helps to have somebody who’s emotionally cheering for you,” he says.

It’s funny, and sort of depressing, to be a writer in 2025 speaking to Crowe, who got unprecedented access to legends at a time in which writers, interviews and print magazines were still prized and respected.