Cameron Crowe is playing a recording for me on his phone. It’s audio of him and David Bowie performing a song called “Audience.” They wrote it together, around the time Crowe, now sixty-eight, spent eighteen months on the road with Bowie in 1975, when he was on his way into Station to Station. I don’t know how many people have heard this tape, I wonder aloud. Crowe says you can count them on one hand, me now included. Doing so, he’s broken “every personal rule.” He’s gone ahead and told his secrets to the one person you don’t tell your secrets to.
Look, I’m sure the bloggers of the aughts saw Almost Famous and felt a tingle, but I’m of the generation after them, the last crop of writers before the Almost Famous-to-music-critic pipeline practically got memed into a catch-all for wannabe journalists with an itch for writerly stardom but no scratch to even buy a voice. I owe a lot to Crowe, because his work was couched into my living before I’d even discovered the world Almost Famous dared to write a person like me into—that feeling that “we were all exactly where we belonged,” as he writes in 2025: Dad let me watch an uncut version of Fast Times at Ridgemont High when I was certainly too young and too impressionable. Before I wanted to be a rock writer, I understood what hearing the Cars’ “Moving in Stereo” meant. I knew the power of music as a vehicle for remembering. Crowe’s waving the flag for the shit he cared about… it turned me onto a lot of good stuff that was absent from my parents’ tape-decks: Thunderclap Newman, Clarence Carter, Poco, Cat Stevens.
And, hey! Maybe I did take acid in college so I could be a “golden god,” but I ended up just leaving my breakfast in the john instead. Most writers around me have their own connections to Almost Famous. The first paper I ever wrote in undergrad was about a concert, because I wanted to submit myself to a place beyond the “vast, benign lap of America.” I don’t know that I’m “made for this” line of work or ever will be, but Cameron Crowe and his teenaged, print-magazine decorations at least promised me that there’s no aging into this art. It’s never too early to say you love something, even if you’re fifteen, twenty-seven, or forty years old. There ain’t much money in any of it, but you should still tell somebody about that music you fell asleep to, or that music that got you thinking about a once-tucked-away part of yourself.
When Crowe’s writing got hot fifty years ago, he built a template every school-taught reporter has since fought to resist. He let Joni Mitchell offer corrections to his story about her in 1978; he shit-talked the magazine employing him, albeit respectfully, to Led Zeppelin in order to get interviews out of them, especially Jimmy Page, in 1975. In academia, you’re taught to never put yourself in a piece and to never inflate the importance of the subject. You’re the enemy and you should embrace that. Never cross lines and always keep it professional, the headmasters probably said. But I wouldn’t really know. I skipped journalism school to get a creative writing degree at a mid-level liberal arts college. I’m not a reporter or anything of that kind, anyways. I’m just telling a story, either my own or somebody else’s. And Crowe taught me how to do that first, when I read his piece on the Eagles in issue #196 of Rolling Stone and cluttered up the pages with yellow highlighter, pulling out passages I could only dream of writing on my own. The way he witnessed the “hairy-chested rock” world and translated it for everyone else… I ached for that. Crowe’s voice was like the tempo flip in “Over the Hills and Far Away.” Through him, I didn’t learn how to love music deeply, I just learned how to speak up about it. But maybe that’s the same thing.
In my home office, the white walls are camouflaged by a film of various hangings: autographed photos of wrestlers, signed vinyl records, shelves of action figures and other trinkets, and concert souvenirs. They remind Crowe of his own collection, which includes a drawing David Bowie gave him, backstage passes, and too many setlists, many of them signed. Think William Miller’s desk at the dawn of Almost Famous. Behind me are two Rolling Stone magazines framed, one of which is issue #284 featuring Neil Young on the cover—a story written by a 22-year-old Crowe. He notices it behind me, saying, “I think they messed up there, because they called him ‘The Last American Hero,’ but he’s from Canada.”
Paste: They could have put “North American.”
Crowe: “The Last North American Hero” would have been an awesome line.
Crowe has a memoir coming out next week, an orange book called The Uncool. The pages scale the entirety of his ordinary beginnings—when he was a baby-faced SoCal kid watching Bob Dylan play in a gymnasium, contributing to the San Diego Door, befriending cranks like Lester Bangs, submitting his writing about Humble Pie to Creem, and graduating high school in 1972 at age fifteen—through his days of tailing folks like Jerry Garcia, Jim Croce, Gram Parsons, and Fleetwood Mac for tell-all stories. Stories of his family, including the suicide of his sister Cathy, are sown into the memoir, too. Not only is it a snapshot of a part of his childhood we’ve only seen fictionalized, in the bookending segments of Almost Famous in 2000, but it’s him putting personal touches on a time in his life where he shared the stories of others almost exclusively.
A year after graduating, Crowe went on the road with the Allman Brothers Band for three weeks after they put out Brothers and Sisters, penning a cover story for Rolling Stone that would make him the magazine’s youngest-ever contributor. His old place of part-time employment ran a piece on him a coupla weeks ago, where he said that “looking back can be dangerous.” I press him on it, the sepia-toned mist of this “back in my day” phantasm that he fears: “My memories of that time are so present and vivid, more vivid than two weeks ago—maybe because you’re a younger person and you imprint so heavily, or maybe I just gather details because ‘forever a journalist,’” he explains. “But there was so much in the stories behind the stories that was gonna get lost. I go there when I hear music.”
Every time Crowe listens to Lynyrd Skynyrd, he’s teleported back to 1973 when, as a “little guy,” fate landed him on a fishing trip in Hawaii with Ronnie Van Zant. “And this guy was so vital and hungry—a hero!” Crowe remembers. “The Wikipediaization of so many people boils it down to the point where you think, well, in 200 years it’s going to be ‘There were the Beatles and Taylor Swift, and they did everything. There was nobody else.’” Rather than “get lost in the past,” The Uncool plucks the people out from behind the curtain, gives them a stage, and, as Neil Young would put it, confronts “the danger” head-on. “Don’t get calcified by staying in that one place,” Crowe adds. “I wanted to introduce people to people they should meet, including people that they think they know.”
Reacting to Crowe’s curriculum vitae of interviewees, it’s hard not to view it as anything but a who’s-who of rock and pop history. And sure, trying to convince a cereal-eating Jimmy Page to do an interview on an airplane was a lesson in elevator pitching, but an even harder lesson, he says, was what he refers to as “the Allman Brothers incident.” He writes about it in The Uncool, how, the night before he was set to leave the band’s tour, Gregg Allman had a “late-night vision that the FBI could possibly be using me to investigate his band” and demanded Crowe turn over his tapes. You can see the fictional version of that, and its consequences, unfold in Almost Famous, when Stillwater denies William’s story and, catatonically, he runs into his stewardess sister at the San Francisco airport. Allman eventually returned the tapes to Crowe with an apology note.
“I really felt humiliated and bullied by Gregg,” he admits. “I had a really hard time reading through it in the audiobook, because a lot of that stuff came back to the surface. I felt like it was emotionally violent. It was not a bus tour anecdote, it was a very scary time. Sometimes, the bliss of ‘Going forward, I’m following my instincts! Everything’s coming my way’… You slam into a wall and you can’t go deeper down than what happens after that. You’re like, ‘Everything I was about was bullshit. My dream, that people are really kind of cool and will always throw an arm around you, is bullshit.’ Life is dark. All of the bad things I’ve ever heard? All of it’s true. And then it turns around, but you carry scars from that. That stuff is as meaningful as the giddy highs.”
It was the combination of dreams and scars that he wanted to catch. That’s what he loves about music, and about writing and film—that “life will scare you and it will also throw you a lifeline,” he says. “And in that journey is all the great feelings in life and music. That’s what I love writing about. The Allman Brothers Band—a band I loved—bringing me into their group, and then the guy saying to me, the night before I had to leave [for] home, ‘You must be a cop. You are sixteen, what gives you the right to be here? You’re underage and I’m taking all the tapes. I’m gonna tell everybody about you! And by the way, my dead brother is in that empty chair right next to you. He’s there laughing at you’… I fucking cried my ass off in the elevator leaving that room, and I never forgot it. I’m glad that I got to see Gregg Allman and look him in the eye and have that moment. I thanked him for Almost Famous and he said, ‘You’re welcome.’”
Paste: The final scene in Almost Famous, with William and Russell: Had you hoped that would have been what a reconciliation between you and Gregg would have been like? Was that your dream of making things right with him?
Crowe: Yeah, yes. I’ve never been asked that.
Crowe says the catharsis was telepathic—poignant, even. I don’t rewatch Almost Famous as routinely as I did ten years ago. But whatever I thought I knew then about human connection went moot after watching those concluding scenes. Crowe wrote Almost Famous because he wanted to “capture that feeling of ‘we’re all in it together, and music is the glue,’” before elaborating that “we listen to it all differently, but we’re here because we wanted to get close to a feeling that changed our lives, and that will always be a memory that we’ll share, along with the coat that she left behind.” At the absolute beginning, though, he wanted an excuse to make a film that David Bowie could act in. But, it turns out that Almost Famous was meant to be a story about family and loving music. Crowe didn’t think it would be successful. By most metrics it wasn’t, grossing $47 million on a budget of $60 million. Almost Famous got made because Jerry Maguire was a hit. For the coming-of-age, blank-check follow-up, Crowe put together a cast of mostly nobodies. The biggest star, Frances McDormand, had won a Best Actress Oscar for Fargo two years earlier. Philip Seymour Hoffman was still a coupla years away from stardom and an Oscar victory of his own. But that was a good thing, Crowe says, because it was “a perfect storm. A star would have fucked it up.” But he did have Billy Crudup, who’d spend six weeks learning how to play guitar and courageously slip into the role of Russell Hammond.
The Stillwater cover story, titled “Stillwater Runs Deep!,” eventually got written by Crowe as William Miller and you can read it on Rolling Stone’s website, or in the Almost Famous LP box set that came out a few years back. And there they are, those famous words beneath Neal Preston’s shot of the band: “I am flying high over Tupelo, Mississippi, with America’s hottest band… and we are all about to die.”
Paste: Do you think you ever wrote another lede as good as that one?
Crowe: No. The lede for the Allman Brothers story was pretty good, but it was a collaboration with Ben Fong-Torres and another writer, so I can’t really claim that.
Crowe takes me back to that first day of shooting, with Philip Seymour Hoffman and Patrick Fugit in San Diego (a scene that, by Crowe’s own admission, offended the hell out of Lou Reed): “It was on the street where I’d actually met Lester Bangs and had the same conversation,” he recalls. “I’m listening to it on the headset and getting a chill, and I couldn’t believe that life had given me the opportunity to make a movie about this stuff.” He called up David Geffen, who’d co-founded DreamWorks with Steven Spielberg and Jeffrey Katzenberg five years earlier, and said, “I’m here, it’s the first day of filming, and I’m just pinching myself because I don’t know how I got here, where I’m able to do this and summon these things.”
Geffen’s response?
“Jerry fucking Maguire!!” he told Crowe and then hung up. So much for sentimentality.
Glenn Hughes from Deep Purple did go to Crowe’s house like Russell does in the film, but it wasn’t to right a wrong like his fictional stand-in. “To have one of those people that you’ve listened to come into your room and look around and see your records and stuff, I remember that felt like: terrifying and inspiring at the same time.”
Paste: Will’s first true experience with rock and roll is through the Who’s Tommy. Was that the same for you, or was it winning Iron Butterfly tickets from a radio station?
Crowe:Tommy was the fully-realized, mysterious [experience]. It’s a concept album and the packaging is really ornate and cool. I’d read Pete [Townshend]’s writing about the band in Rolling Stone. But going back to that first thing that tweaks you in a certain way, there was a radio station in the desert, KREO. They had a contest where, if you called in when you heard a certain noise, or just the thing that they stuck into a song, and were the first called, you’d win. They had that harmonic piece from “For What It’s Worth,” which I didn’t know that Neil [Young] played. I always thought [Stephen] Stills played it. That little harmonic hook, and the DNA that built from hearing that sound—and the fact that, later, I realized it’s Neil—that was huge. And it still is huge. And it’s so funny, the things that break through and get your attention. Sometimes you see a movie, or something, and it’s somebody who comes in for one scene, and you just lean in and you remember a random moment. It makes you go, “I want to follow that person’s career. I want to watch this movie again for that one moment.” It can be the smallest thing, and then you get to treasure that for all-time. That’s my favorite part of it, how the music you love becomes a souvenir in a diary later. A clue to who you were.
The title of Crowe’s memoir feels apt enough. Not only is “the uncool” a phrase that’s followed him for decades now, most prominently in Almost Famous and as the URL for his personal website, but it’s a phrase that reminds him of being in school, finding Hunky Dory, and loving the song “Changes.” “I would carry it in and play it for my English class,” he recalls. “It doesn’t seem like it’s going to be a universal thing, but then you meet people that love music, at a concert or something, and you’re like, ‘Wait, there’s a bunch of us and they’re all similarly disconnected, too, where they were supposed to cooler than they were, but they found this little hamlet over here to live in.” Todd Rundgren used to make Crowe and his friends feel that way, too, because “music introduces us and makes us know that we’re in the same club, so that we have a club,” he says. “That world made me think it was okay to be an outcast in school, because it punched a ticket into another place where I really belonged. I felt that there were people like that besides me, and that’s what Lester’s thing was. It’s a badge of honor; it resonated. Somebody wrote to me recently that the book should have been called ‘To Begin With… Everything,’ which I was like, ‘That’s a pretty fucking good idea’…
Paste: Some people would surely be like, “Well, that’s a little on the nose, don’t you think?”
Crowe: But I think that’s okay, because not everybody knows the nose.
The Uncool features a lot of deeply sympathetic writing about Southern California, a region “infused with more soul than a lot of people give it,” Crowe says. “The pockets outside of LA, writing about Yucapia, these places in the Inland Empire, Riverside—sometimes a place where you lived is synonymous with the way you appreciated the music, and the music comes back to you when you go back there.” For him, Riverside is a smoggy town with palm trees and strip malls. It’s not DTLA or Hollywood, but more like San Bernardino, and the people living there are the people who went to gigs in San Diego. “I wanted to write about that Southern California, because Martin Scorsese writes about his places with such care and loving detail,” Crowe acknowledges. “I can do that, I want to do that. This is what it’s like to venture outside of Orange County and Los Angeles and into these other places. Time and place is super important.” Like Neil Young giving you a weather report, Crowe knows the face of a blank page well: “It’s pretty scary if you think about it too much. But it’s also inviting, if you have a tip for yourself.”
Crowe got his start writing for his school’s newspaper and then the San Diego Door, the publication Lester Bangs left to edit Creem. In the early seventies, Bangs and Crowe had already started corresponding with each other. What Crowe remembers first about his Detroiter mentor is his “easy ability to lend a hand to somebody that clearly didn’t have the experience.” Crowe reckons that Bangs never went looking for somebody to mentor, but that he found joy in “bringing people up.” “I was lucky enough to be that person,” he elaborates, “but I was also very excitable. I tried to entertain him, probably to an obnoxious degree.” He would do an English voice until Bangs flashed his “I’m gonna eat you alive” face back at him. Maybe Bangs felt bad for Crowe, he tells me. “Before he died, I had a conversation with him where I knew he was going to write a book about Blondie, and I think he was disappointed that I’d written about the most famous people of the era, pretty much. To Lester, I think that was tipping over the edge into the corporatization of rock. I felt compelled to impress him with how I was not that, but he died shortly after.”
Crowe wrote about everyone, except Marvin Gaye. That was his white whale. “I loved What’s Going On,” he tells me. “As a little guy, that really spoke to me. And I love all the Tammi Terrell duets. I knew from Ben Fong-Torres’ big story on Marvin in Rolling Stone that he was kind of garrulous and maybe a little high on weed and just intensely interesting and wounded. I really, really wanted to interview him.” Gaye had been living in Belgium for a good amount of time, but Crowe knew a few dudes who’d done interviews with him. “He was living on Outpost Drive in Hollywood, near where I was living. They had their big stereo equipment, and they came up there to record the interview, and there was Marvin. He smoked a joint and he was really thoughtful, answering their questions. Then he closed his eyes and fell asleep, and they had to pack up their equipment and go. I love that story.” Twenty years later, he gave that story to Stillwater in a now-deleted scene from Almost Famous, when a disc-jockey named Quince falls asleep while conducting a radio interview with the band. “I think you’re always going to get some kind of adventure writing about Marvin,” Crowe says. “And that’s something I’ve really missed out on getting.”
Paste: So, Stillwater… How big do they get after they get the Rolling Stone cover?
Crowe: Probably medium-sized. I always thought Russell [Hammond] gets plucked for another band. And [Jeff] Bebe continues doing the band and touring, maybe having a Spin Doctors period of relevance—a little blip that still sticks around for summer shows.
Paste: What do you make of what Ben Fong-Torres said once about you, that you were the writer who covered the bands that hated Rolling Stone?
Crowe: Or the bands ignored by Rolling Stone. [Laughs] If you’re Richie Blackmore in Deep Purple, you haven’t seen a lengthy, 4,000-word thought-piece about Machine Head. So [Fong-Torres] is like, “Okay, I’m gonna take this steak and stick my fork in it and throw it across the room, so that it hits the wall because it’s too well done. Have fun writing about that.” And that was great.
The “rejects” of Rolling Stone, so to speak, would confide in Crowe, confessing their problems with the magazine to him. His response was always the same, that he’d never taken a full-time job there. “I would always say, ‘Well, I’m not the magazine. I write for the magazine. If I chose records simply by what Rolling Stone thought were really great records, I wouldn’t have a good record collection at all,’” he recalls. It’s a spiel he used to regale Jimmy Page on an airplane, and it’s the spiel that got him an interview with Jimmy Page in a New York hotel room just a fistful of hours later, in the afterglow of watching a rough cut of Kenneth Anger’s Lucifer Rising, which Page had scored the music for, and listening to a bootleg tape of a Canadian Joni Mitchell interview. Page never returned the tape.
But not everyone could be won over like Page. Steve Miller, thinking Crowe was just a no-nothing teenager, treated him like dirt. “I gave up pretty quickly, because I was offended,” Crowe reveals. “He called me out in front of a whole bunch of people and made sport out of me and my age, and I was just like, ‘Fuck this, it wasn’t even my idea. This was an assignment that I took because they needed somebody to write the story.’” Miller lost out on the cover of Rolling Stone because of that, which Crowe says he’s sorry about, because he still likes Miller’s music. “He was just a dick to me,” he puts it, plainly, before offering the man some kudos: “He did say something great recently, which was, ‘Every song should have five hooks, not one or two.’ I was listening to one of those Steve Miller songs on John Mayer Radio the other day and he’s right, there’s like five hooks in all of these songs… ‘Jet Airliner,’ ‘Take the Money and Run.’” But the Steve Miller saga was a lot like trying to get Harrison Ford to show a lick of interest in answering your question, Crowe says, because “it’s a pretty brilliant way of being able to keep your stuff close, to just leave it as a sword to be pulled out of the stone by one person somewhere, sometime.”
His biggest writing catastrophe didn’t happen at Rolling Stone but at New York Times Magazine in the late seventies, when he was “twenty-one and washed up” and assigned to write a story called “College Mood.” “I had not gone to college, but I decided I would take that assignment and go and drop in on various college campuses,” he remembers. “I did it for ten days, and I came back and they completely laughed it out of seriousness. It was like, ‘You don’t really understand the college experience. What, were you on Mars and never knew what college was truly like?’ That’s probably the worst rejection ever, and I probably deserved it. Everybody isn’t meant to write about everything at any given point. I probably still couldn’t write about the college experience, which is a little bit of a regret. I never got the pea coat, huddled in a dorm room hallway experience. I see it in movies, and I always go, ‘Damn, that looks cool.’”
Paste: It never happens like it does on-screen.
Crowe: Winona Ryder carrying a JD Salinger book? Never happened to me.
Crowe always had a hard time with first-person writing. One of his colleagues, Charles M. Young, started doing it well for Rolling Stone, but he was on an island. “There were other writers that were lesser who would put themselves in and it would always be like, ‘Okay, I’m gonna see your version of this person, but really what we’re seeing is their reaction to you, and I’m not interested in you,’” he says. “First-person writing can come off really indulgent, so I never did it.” But then he got goaded into doing it, for his article “How I Learned About Sex” in 1975, a story about his mother giving him the birds-and-bees speech in a laundromat. “I found out that, in the right way, [first-person writing] can be glorious and it can be an editor, because, then, you’re working only from the stuff that you know is true.” Getting back to that place for The Uncool uncorked a lot of remembering for Crowe.
When he wrote the Led Zeppelin cover story, Jann Wenner, whom Lester Bangs called a “self-serving, ass-kissing heap of guano,” handed Crowe a copy of Slouching Toward Bethlehem so he could learn a thing or two from Joan Didion’s profile of the Doors. The Rolling Stone editors also never paid Crowe a compliment for his generational Joni Mitchell story in 1978, which he still finds maddening to this day, considering how much of a disbeliever Mitchell was in the magazine, thanks to it crowning her “Old Lady of the Year” and charting out her dating history seven years prior. But “How I Learned About Sex” got a good laugh out of the room when the pages hit the table. The editors told Crowe, “We’ve been waiting for you to take a step like this.” And it really did define a way of writing that was first-person but never felt like Crowe was gorging on his own self-importance. “It’s like, ‘Okay, I gotta tell you this. But I’m gonna be immediately sorry that I did.’ And I loved it. Sometimes, when you just say, ‘Fuck it! I’m gonna write what I feel like writing,’ it generally is the best. It’s the big ride, and every time you take it, it’s fresh for me. When it becomes a thing that you’ve actually finished and you look at it, that’s the thrill.” Or, as Jeff Bebe would have probably put it: “That’s the fucking buzz.”
In The Uncool, Crowe writes about indulgence, encountering it for the first time while interviewing Steve Marriott, and admitting that he participated in it a time or two, including having a Pimm’s cup with Ronnie Wood and planting seeds from Bob Marley’s weed in his own backyard. I mean, he wrote about rock and roll at a time when rock musicians were closer to their drug dealers than their own bandmates. Coke’s presence was getting more and more usual especially, when he was sitting down with Humble Pie, Yes, and David Bowie, the latter’s rail-thin physique accessorizing their time spent together. But Crowe always, for the most part, maintained that, to get a story done, you have to be present for one purpose: the assignment. Almost Famous gets into that, about whether or not you can trust the person writing about your band while they’re chumming it up with you and your party favors. “The people that try and join the band and be party animals—you lose the trust of the people you’re writing about first, and you get eye-rolled behind your back,” Crowe says. “I’ve seen it so often. You never want to be that person, and they don’t want you to be that person. That’s like a drop in the solution that changes everything to a different color.”
Paste: In The Uncool, you write about Bowie giving you a ride home from the Station to Station sessions. You write about him giving you parts of his life to make your writing better, to give your voice something more. Do you think that some of the artists who affected you felt affected by you, too?
Crowe: Maybe some, but not all. When Glenn Frey died, a couple close friends of his—I think it was even Don Henley—said, “I like how you write about Glenn. I can really feel him when I read what you write about him.” I was really jazzed about that, because I wanted to introduce people to that guy.
The Uncool ends around the time Rolling Stone left San Francisco for New York City in ‘77. Crowe remained in Los Angeles, knowing the magazine’s relocation and his decision to stay put would not only affect his amount of assignments, but that a new crowd of writers would come in and eventually take his place. “People were saying, ‘Oh, Rolling Stone’s gone corporate and it’s going to be different,’” he says. “And it did feel a little different when they went to New York. The stakes rose for them. They did a gotcha piece on Elton John, like ‘Elton John’s gay!’ That was a cover that they did. It felt like the band had gotten too big and were starting to play differently.” But Crowe still hung in there, palling around with the next generation of Stone editors. Soon enough, he’d pen Fast Times at Ridgemont High and see the book’s rights get picked up by Universal Pictures before a single copy hit the shelf.
Paste: At what point did music writing become something you could say no to?
Crowe: I felt like it said no to me first, and that was when I started writing Fast Times. But it also opened the door to learn about screenwriting, which is a lifelong process and always tough. But when it all works and you get something on the page, and when the actors come in and do it, and you’ve got music that works with it… Whoa, that is a physical thrill. It’s the coolest. It’s messing with the biggest soundsystem ever. If people go to the theater, they’re sitting there, listening to your radio station. The intoxicating thing about being able to make a movie using music is the random shit that people love most.
Crowe’s memoir takes place in a period of rock journalism that could afford its own excess, when editors would fork over thousands of dollars just to get one story over the line—even if that meant hitching Crowe to a figure like Bowie for nearly two years, or picking up room-service tabs on his criss-crossings of North America. Music criticism is practically unrecognizable now, thanks to staff jobs vanishing and a collapse in readership across the board. But good rock journalism somehow finds a way, because it’s never been about the money, although some money would be nice. No, good rock journalism is about people giving a shit. It’s about writing just to fucking write. A half-century’s passed since Crowe thought he was the lamest passenger on Led Zeppelin’s plane. Now, we’d have all killed for his seat. I don’t reckon that Crowe’s outlived his own “uncool” title, but that he’s totally reclaimed it. His work preserves what didn’t get lost in all those gross, heavy, penniless decades and never will: There’s nothing quite like sharing what you love with everybody, anybody. There’s nothing better than, as a wise woman once said, loving some silly little piece of music, or some band, so much that it hurts. I’d say that’s pretty cool.
Paste: How many times do you think you’ve found your artistic voice in your life?
Crowe: That’s my favorite kind of writing. “How I Learned About Sex” was slamming into the wall, and finding that wall was who you were. That kind of writing, it’s confiding. It’s us talking. It’s being one person, not a zillion people.
The Uncool is out October 28. Get tickets to one of Crowe’s upcoming tour dates here.
Matt Mitchell is Paste’s music editor, reporting from their home in Los Angeles.
