Entertainment
Review: Cameron Crowe eulogizes rock’s golden age in charming memoir
Book Review
The Uncool
By Cameron Crowe
Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster: 336 pages, $35
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Cameron Crowe’s charming new memoir is an elegy for a lost time and place, when rock ‘n’ roll culture was still a secret handshake and the music press wasn’t just another publicity tentacle for giant corporations to shill their product (excepting the fine writers at the Los Angeles Times, of course). In fact, the “music press” as a concept is vestigial at best now, the internet having snuffed it out, but when Crowe was writing his features in the 1970s, primarily for Rolling Stone, only a handful of print publications allowed fans to glean any insight about the musicians they admired or to even see photos of them.
Crowe was one of those fans. He spent his adolescence in Palm Springs, a town with “a thousand swimming pools and the constant hum of air conditioners,” in a basement apartment near the freeway. A loner and a nerd raised by a former Army commanding officer and a strong-willed, whip-smart mother who had firm ideas about how young Cameron should conduct himself. Any humiliations Crowe might have suffered as an uncertain teen were for his mother merely speed bumps on the journey to self-actualization, ideally as a lawyer. She had a wealth of Dale Carnegie-esque aphorisms to pump up her young charge, such as “put on your magic shoes,” or “Mind is in every cell of the body. Thoughts are everything.”
“She hated rock and roll,” Crowe writes. “Rock was inelegant, and worse, obsessed with base issues like sex and drugs.”
(Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster)
As we have seen in the 2000 film “Almost Famous,” Crowe’s autobiographical account of his early years, young Cameron cared little about sex or drugs, music being his only lodestar. When his family relocated to San Diego, Crowe found himself in a conservative town with virtually no outlets for music except the local sports arena, where he witnessed his first big-time rock show accompanied by his mom: a post-comeback Elvis, knee deep in Vegas schmaltz, bounding onstage “in a glittering white jumpsuit …. striking karate poses.” A week later, mom and son witnessed Eric Clapton, full of fire with his band Derek and the Dominos. “I understand your music,” Alice Crowe finally conceded. “It’s better than ours.”
San Diego had little pockets of cultural insurrection that Crowe sought out like a moth to flame. When his sister Cindy nabbed a job with the local underground paper called the Door, Crowe wedged his way in, not because he had any interest in radical politics: his hero Lester Bangs, the iconoclastic rock critic whom he had read in Rolling Stone and Creem, had contributed work there.
As he does so often in this book, Crowe pulls the reader in with his keenly observant eye that would serve him so well in his second career as a filmmaker. The Door’s editor Bill Maguire “had a healthy girth, an open shirt with a silver pendant, and rippling brown hair. The kind of character Richard Harris used to play, most of the time with a goblet in his hand.” Maguire and his staff are hippie idealists, wary of sullying their political mission with trivialities like record reviews. But Crowe talks Maguire into letting him weigh in on a James Taylor record, and Crowe’s career is launched. He is 14.
Cameron Crowe, who started his music journalism career as a teen, pulls the reader in with his keenly observant eye that would serve him so well in his second career as a filmmaker.
(Neal Preston)
Crowe would encounter no such resistance as he worked his way into Rolling Stone, whose owner Jann Wenner gladly accepted record company advertising to keep his counterculture publication afloat. Crowe had found his professional home, filing long, admiring features with some of the era’s most important acts.
Crowe’s Dec. 6, 1973, cover story on the Allman Brothers was meant to atone for an earlier profile on the band written for the magazine by Grover Lewis, a brutally honest and often unsavory portrait. Crowe’s do-over feature, in contrast, is anodyne and respectful; the band is even given room to refute some of the facts Lewis included in his story.
Far more interesting is the stuff Crowe left out of that piece that he has now put into his memoir. To wit: Shortly after their perfectly lovely afternoon together, Gregg Allman, clearly in a drug-induced psychotic state, calls Crowe to his hotel room and demands that Crowe physically hand over the tapes of their interview, or else face legal consequences. “How do I know you aren’t with the FBI?” Allman asked Crowe. “You’ve been talking to everybody. Taking notes with your eyes.” It’s hard to imagine Crowe’s mentor Bangs not leading with that scene.
Crowe was covering rock music at a time when publicists had not become the human guardrails they are today, insulating their clients from anything that doesn’t celebrate them. There were no record company representatives present when Crowe sat in the lobby of an El Torito restaurant in Mission Hills with Kris Kristofferson, whose wife Rita Coolidge was waiting for the singer with her family in the bar (underage Crowe wasn’t allowed inside). Or when Crowe went long with David Bowie, interviewing him on and off for a year and a half while Bowie was making his 1976 album “Station to Station.”
Camped out with his wife Angie in a Beverly Hills mansion on North Doheny Drive, Bowie is affable and candid, despite subsisting on a diet of red peppers, milk and cocaine. “Over the months, I became acclimated to the normality within his insulated lifestyle,” Crowe writes. “Oh, sometimes there might be a hexagon drawn on the curtains in his bedroom or a bottle of urine on the windowsill.” While showing Crowe the indoor swimming pool, Bowie remarks that the only problem with the house “is that Satan lives in that swimming pool.”
Such weird scenes inside this once-mysterious world have been totally effaced, now that every musician can curate his own image on social media. Reading “The Uncool,” which touches on Crowe’s Hollywood career without delving too deep into it, reminds us of what has been lost, the myths and mystique that fueled our rock star fantasies and gave the music an aura of magic.
Weingarten is the author of “Thirsty: William Mulholland, California Water, and the Real Chinatown.”
Entertainment
Bob Spitz proves the Rolling Stones are rock’s greatest band in magnificent new biography
By early 1963, the Station Hotel in London had become an epicenter of the burgeoning British blues scene. On a blustery, snowy night that February, the Rolling Stones’ classic early lineup took the stage for one of the first times, dazzling the audience with ferocious renditions of blues standards like Muddy Waters’ “I Want to Be Loved” and Jimmy Reed’s “Bright Lights, Big City.”
Multi-instrumentalist Brian Jones, the band’s founder and leader, synchronized guitars with Keith Richards, who favored a distinctive slashing and stinging style. Drummer Charlie Watts, the group’s newest member, a jazz aficionado and an accomplished percussionist, propelled the music forward with a rock-solid beat.
Anchoring the rhythm section with him was bassist Bill Wyman, who was recruited more for his spare VOX AC30 amp that the guitarists could plug into than for his musical skills. The stoic bassist proved a strong and innovative player. Together, he and Watts would go on to form one of rock’s most decorated rhythm sections.
Ian Stewart’s energetic boogie-woogie piano style rounded out the sound. Months later, manager Andrew Loog Oldham kicked him out of the band for being “ugly,” although Stewart continued to record, tour and serve as the band’s road manager until his death in 1985.
This April 8, 1964, file photo shows the Rolling Stones during a rehearsal. The members, from left, are Brian Jones, guitar; Bill Wyman, bass; Charlie Watts, drums; Mick Jagger, vocals; and Keith Richards, guitar.
(Associated Press)
Fronting the group was Mick Jagger. Channeling the music like a crazed shaman, Jagger shimmied and sashayed, owning the stage like few lead singers have before or since. By the end of the night, the Stones had the crowd in a frenzy. Although only 30 people had made it to the gig because of the treacherous weather conditions, the hotel’s booker had seen enough: He offered the Stones a regular gig.
“The Rolling Stones had caught fire. The music they were playing and the way they played it struck a chord with a young crowd starved for something different, something their own… It was soul-stirring, loud and uncompromising,” writes Bob Spitz in “The Rolling Stones: The Biography,” his magisterial work that charts the 60-year journey of “the greatest rock and roll band in the world.”
Spitz, the author of strong biographies on the Beatles and Led Zeppelin, as well as Ronald Reagan and Julia Child, captures the drama, trauma and betrayals that have kept the Stones in the public’s consciousness for more than six decades. It’s all here: The Stones’ evolution from a blues cover band to artistic rival of the Beatles; the musical peaks — “Aftermath,” “Let It Bleed” and “Exile on Main Street” as well as misfires like “Dirty Work”; Keith’s descent into a debilitating heroin addiction that nearly destroyed him and the band; the death of the ‘60s at the ill-fated Altamont free concert; Marianne Faithfull, Anita Pallenberg, Bianca Jagger, Jerry Hall and other lovers, partners and muses; the breakups, makeups and crackups; and perhaps most important, the unbreakable bond between Jagger and Richards at the center of it all.
Although Spitz unearths little new information, he excels at presenting the Stones in glorious Technicolor. Spitz homes in on the telling details and anecdotes that give the band’s story a deep richness and poignancy.
Take “Satisfaction,” the Stones’ 1965 classic and first U.S. chart topper. The oft-told story is that Richards woke up in the middle of the night, grabbed the guitar that was next to his bed, and recorded the iconic riff and the phrase “I can’t get no … satisfaction” on a cassette recorder in his Clearwater, Fla., hotel room before falling back asleep. But as Spitz notes, the song initially went nowhere in the studio. That is until Stewart purchased a fuzz box for Richards a few days later, which gave the tune a raunchier sound that perfectly matched Jagger’s lyrics of frustration and alienation. A classic was born.
Piercing the Stones mythology
Spitz’s deep reporting often pierces the mythology surrounding the band. Contrary to the popular belief of many fans, for instance, Jones bears much of the responsibility for the rift with his bandmates and his tragic demise.
The most musically adventurous member of the group — he plays sitar on “Paint It Black” and dulcimer on “Lady Jane” — Jones wasn’t a songwriter. That stoked his jealousies and insecurities, along with frontman Jagger stealing the spotlight from him. A monster of a man, Jones impregnated multiple teenage girls and physically and emotionally abused several women, including Pallenberg. Perhaps that’s why she left him for Richards. Over time, Jones made fewer contributions in the studio and onstage, becoming a catatonic drug casualty. The Stones fired Jones in June 1969 but would have been justified doing so a couple years earlier. He drowned in his pool less than a month later.
Author Bob Spitz
(Elena Seibert)
Similarly, Stones lore has long romanticized the making of “Exile on Main Street” in the stifling, dingy basement of Richards’ rented Villa Nellcôte in the South of France, where the Stones had decamped to avoid British taxes. In this telling, Richards, deep in the throes of heroin addiction, somehow managed to come up with one indelible riff after another built around his signature open G tuning — taught to him by Ry Cooder — leading the band to create one of the best albums in rock history. That’s not entirely accurate, according to Spitz.
Yes, Richards came up with the licks for “Rocks Off,” “Happy” and “Tumbling Dice.” But it’s equally true that a strung-out Richards missed myriad recording sessions, invited dealers, hangers-on and other distractions to Nellcôte, and repeatedly failed to turn up to write with Jagger. Far from completing the album in the druggy haze of a French basement, the band spent six months on overdubs at Sunset Sound in Los Angeles, where Jagger contributed many of his vocals.
Beatles vs. Stones
One of the more interesting themes Spitz develops is the symbiotic relationship between the Beatles and Stones, with the Fab Four mostly overshadowing them — until they didn’t.
John Lennon and Paul McCartney wrote “I Wanna Be Your Man” and gave it to the Stones, whose 1963 rendition, with Jones on slide guitar, became the group’s first UK Top 20 hit. The Lennon-McCartney songwriting partnership inspired Jagger and Richards to begin penning their own songs. In early 1964, the Beatles came to the U.S. for the first time, making television history with their appearance on “The Ed Sullivan Show” and playing Carnegie Hall. A few months later, the Stones kicked off their inaugural American tour at the Swing Auditorium in San Bernardino. In 1967, the Beatles released “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” a psychedelic masterpiece. The Stones responded with “Their Satanic Majesties Request,” a psychedelic mess.
The Rolling Stones: The Biography cover
As the Beatles began to splinter, Spitz writes, the Stones sharpened their focus. The band released “Beggars Banquet” in late 1968 and “Let It Bleed” the following year, albums every bit as innovative and visionary as “The White Album” and “Abbey Road.” For the first time, the two groups stood as equals.
When the Beatles broke up in 1970, the Stones kept rolling. With Jones replaced by virtuoso guitarist Mick Taylor — whose fluid, melodic style served as a tasty foil to Richards — they produced what many consider their finest works, “Sticky Fingers” and “Exile on Main Street.” More impressively, the band, with Taylor’s successor, Ronnie Wood, has continued to dazzle audiences with incendiary live shows, touring as recently as 2024 behind the late-career triumph “Hackney Diamonds.” The Beatles, by contrast, retired from the road in 1966 and devoted their energies to the studio.
Hundreds of books have been written about the Rolling Stones, but few sparkle quite like Spitz’s. For anyone who loves or even likes the Stones, it’s indispensable.
Like most of the band’s biographers, Spitz gives short shrift to the post-“Exile” period after 1972. He curtly dismisses 2005’s strong “A Bigger Bang” and 2016’s “Blue & Lonesome,” a back-to-basics album of blues covers, as “adequate endeavors that signaled a band living on borrowed time.” That critique is both off target and under-developed. Spitz ignores the band’s legendary live album, “Brussels Affair,” recorded in 1973, or why the band waited decades before officially releasing it.
These are small quibbles. Spitz has written a book worthy of its 704-page length; another 50 or so pages covering the later years would have made it even stronger. To quote the Rolling Stones: “I know it’s only rock ‘n roll, but I like it, like it, yes, I do.”
Marc Ballon, a former Times, Forbes and Inc. Magazine reporter, teaches an advanced writing class at USC. He lives in Fullerton.
‘4’, the opening track on Richard D James’ (Aphex Twin) self titled 1996 album is a piece of music that beautifully balances the chaotic with the serene, the oppressive and the freeing. It’s a trick that James has pulled off multiple times throughout his career and it is a huge part of what makes him such an iconic and influential artist. Many people have laid the “next Aphex Twin” label on musicians who do things slightly different and when you actually hear their music you realise that, once again, the label is flawed and applied with a lazy attitude. Why mention this? Well, it turns out we’ve been looking for James’ heir apparent in the wrong artform. We’ve so zoned in on music that we’ve not noticed that another Celtic son of Cornwall is rewriting an art form with that highwire balancing act between chaos and beauty. That artist is writer, director and composer Mark Jenkin who over his last two feature films has announced himself as an idiosyncratic voice who is creating his very own language within the world of cinema. Jenkin’s films are often centred around coastal towns or islands and whilst they are experimental or even unsettling, there is always a big heart at the centre of the narrative. A heart that cares about family, tradition, culture, and the pull of ‘home’. Even during the horror of 2022’s brilliant Enys Men you were anchored by the vulnerability and determination of its main protagonist.
This month sees the release of Jenkin’s latest feature film, Rose of Nevada, which is set in a fractured and diminished Cornish coastal town. One day the fishing boat of the film’s title arrives back in harbour after being missing for thirty years. The boat is unoccupied. And frankly that is all the information you are going to get because to discuss any more plot would be unfair on you and disrespectful to Jenkin and the team behind the film. You the viewer should be the one who decides what it is about because thematically there are so many wonderful threads to pull on. This writer’s opinions on what it is about have ranged from a theme of sacrifice for the good of a community to the conflict within when part of you wants to run away from your roots whilst the other half longs to stay and be a lifelong part of its tapestry. Is it about Brexit? Could be. Is it about our own relationships with time and our curation of memory? Could be. Is it about both the positives and negatives of nostalgia? Could be. As a side note, anyone in their mid-40s, like me, who came of age in the 1990s will certainly find moments of warm recognition. Is the film about ghosts and how they haunt families? Could be…I think you get the point.
The elements that make the film so well balanced between chaos and calm are many. It is there in the differing performances between the brilliant two lead actors George MacKay and Callum Turner. It is there in the sound design which fluctuates from being unbearably harsh and metallic, to lulling and warm. It is there in the editing where short, sharp close ups on seemingly unimportant factors are counterbalanced with shots that are held for just that little bit too long. For a film set around the sea, it is apt that it can make you feel like you’re rolling on a stomach churning storm one minute, or a calming low tide the next. Dialogue can be front and centre or blurred and buried under static. One shot is bathed in harsh sunlight whilst the next can be drowned in interior shadows.
Rose of Nevada is Mark Jenkin’s most ambitious film to date yet he has not lost a single iota of innovation, singularity of vision or his gift for telling the most human of stories. It is a film that will tell you different things each time you see it and whilst there are moments that can confuse or beguile, there is so much empathy and love that it can leave you crying tears of emotional understanding. It is chaotic. It is beautiful. It is life……
Rose of Nevada is released on the 24th April.
Mark Jenkin Instagram | Threads
Released through the BFI – Instagram | Facebook
Review by Simon Tucker
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