The title of The Uncool refers to rock critic Lester Bangs’s assessment of Cameron Crowe, whose adventures as a music journalist were loosely depicted in his 2000 movie, Almost Famous. Long before he became a film-maker, the teenage Crowe travelled around the US interviewing some of the biggest rocks acts of the era, among them Gram Parsons, Led Zeppelin, David Bowie, the Eagles and the Allman Brothers Band. Crowe’s memoir reveals him as the perennial outsider who, unlike his interviewees, cared little about sex, booze and drugs and who lacked a certain savoir-faire. Yet rock stars liked having him around, enjoying his sincerity and the fact that he was more admiring fan than dispassionate reporter.
Crowe is the reader, delivering a warm and vivacious narration that conveys the wide-eyed astonishment of his youthful self as he is thrust into the orbit of his heroes. He also paints a vivid picture of an era in which bands weren’t protected by gaggles of PR representatives and a writer could spend 18 months with an artist – as Crowe did with Bowie in the mid-1970s – to write a single profile.
The book draws to a close shortly after Crowe conducts a filmed interview with Tom Petty. With the video director gone awol, Petty instructs Crowe to pick up the camera and start shooting. In doing so, Crowe stumbles on what turns out to be his ideal medium: “I’d been a music journalist, translating time and space for others to savour. This was an exercise in cutting out the middleman. It was like writing without a pen.”
• Available via 4th Estate, 9hr 18 min
Further listening
Softly, As I Leave You: Life After Elvis
Priscilla Beaulieu Presley, Headline, 10hr 30min
In the follow-up to her 1985 memoir, Elvis and Me, the actor and activist tells of life after her tumultuous marriage, her screen career (on Dallas and the Naked Gun movies) and the grief that followed the deaths of her daughter and grandson. Read by the author.
Absolutely and Forever
Rose Tremain, Penguin Audio, 5hr 24min
Jane McDowell reads this tale of life and thwarted love in the 1950s. After 15-year-old Marianne falls in love with a handsome young man bound for Oxford, her plans to settle down with him are thwarted and she is forced to take a different path, enrolling at a secretarial college in London.
