Books

Cameron Crowe
The Uncool

Few could say that at 21 they were “washed up”, but Cameron Crowe truly was. At 15, the journalist and filmmaker became Rolling Stone’s youngest contributor, a gig he landed thanks to an obsession with rock music and his persistence in getting published. With wide-eyed gawkiness, he chased rock stars, building a fleeting but fabled adolescent career in music journalism that later inspired his film Almost Famous. That career produced some of the discipline’s most acclaimed interviews, even if it all ended as adulthood began.

The Uncool: A Memoir is a spirited retelling of Crowe’s salad days, which he spent gaining the confidence of Led Zeppelin, the Eagles, Bruce Springsteen and others to write resonant stories about the intoxicating force of rock music. Crowe started with album reviews at an alternative newspaper before his callowness aided him to new heights at Rolling Stone. Patience, perseverance and naivety helped Crowe build rapport with rock’s many elusive – and reclusive – artists of the period. After years of rejecting the magazine, the Allman Brothers Band finally relented and gave him an interview. David Bowie, who famously avoided the press, befriended Crowe and allowed the young writer to interview him many times during a dark period of deteriorating mental health and drug abuse.

Like most journalists, Crowe wants his subjects to do the talking. One is his mother, whose support helped to nourish his ambitions through his many moments of self-doubt, including abandoning music journalism. Her pithy truisms, such as “doubt is the devil”, open most book chapters, serving as guideposts to staying honest in his self-portrait.

Jann Wenner, the co-founder and editor of Rolling Stone, once admonished Crowe for filing copy that didn’t reflect the writer’s point of view. His draft profile of Led Zeppelin portrayed the band only through their own eyes. It was a criticism that stung, but he later heeded his editor’s advice. Reading Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Crowe learnt a valuable lesson: “The best writing … is personal, and it takes a stand”.

The Uncool shows this belated teaching in action. Crowe writes a deeply personal ode to his two early loves – rock music and his mother – underlining the forceful influence each had in shaping his becoming. With earnestness and much heart, his memoir depicts a young journalist orbiting the heady world of rock stars, trying to document their artistry and vulnerabilities while attempting to understand his own.

4th Estate, 336pp, $36.99

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on November 15, 2025 as "Cameron Crowe, The Uncool".

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