Cameron Crowe doesn’t traffic in regrets, except maybe one. He almost cast David Bowie in “Almost Famous” — the Oscar-winning 2000 movie loosely based on his life as a teen journalist on the road with a rock band — but didn’t.
His original plan, Crowe told The Post in an exclusive interview, was to cast Bowie as Rocky Fedora, “a Peter Frampton–type character who’s working with this British, Brian Epstein–style publicist named Russell De May.”
But then the script evolved. Side characters muscled forward, the ensemble swelled, and Rocky vanished.
“I still feel bad about it,” Crowe lamented. “It was really tough to lose that character, and to lose Bowie.”
In his wildly entertaining new memoir, “The Uncool” (Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster, out Tuesday), Crowe describes meeting Bowie in the mid-’70s when he was just 18, and being invited to spend long stretches around the singer in Los Angeles as he chased the sound that became “Station to Station,” the 1976 art-rock opus featuring hits like “Golden Years.”
The lifestyle was famously spartan and unhinged — Bowie was surviving solely on milk, red peppers and cocaine at the time — while the art was laser-focused.
“I don’t know how that could ever happen today,” Crowe says with a laugh. “Somebody as famous as Bowie telling a kid, ‘Spend a year and a half around me and hold up a mirror.’ There was no assignment. I was just winging it.” By night, Crowe watched Bowie assemble the Thin White Duke in real time; by day, he slipped into a kind of domestic sitcom with Angie Bowie and their son in a nondescript Beverly Hills rental.
There were surreal moments aplenty. “Sometimes there might be a hexagon drawn on the curtains in his bedroom or a bottle of urine on the windowsill,” Crowe writes. “He might cheerfully take me to the edge of the indoor swimming pool adjacent to his bedroom. ‘The only problem with this house,’ [Bowie told him], ‘is that Satan lives in that swimming pool.’ It was as if he were pointing out a pesky problem with termites.”
Digging through his old tapes for the book, Crowe even found a moment he’d forgotten, a kind of on-the-spot collaboration. Bowie demonstrated the William Burroughs cut-up method for songwriting, and told the teenager to throw words at him until a melody snapped into place.
“It was participatory journalism to the max,” he recalled. “The song had a ‘Space Oddity’ feel. Never ended up on a record, but it was good.” His months with Bowie ultimately became a 1976 Rolling Stone cover story.
Crowe’s journalism career reads like a greatest hits of American rock music. A Palm Springs–born, San Diego–raised prodigy, he blew past grades and graduated high school at age 15. When his peers were still cramming for midterms, a teenage Crowe was crisscrossing America with a notebook, filing meaty features on Fleetwood Mac, Lynyrd Skynyrd and Tom Petty — whom Crowe helped introduce to a national readership with Rolling Stone’s first big feature on him in 1978. His youth and unassuming personality helped to get him past the velvet rope into whatever counted as the real room.
With Led Zeppelin, that “room” could be the least expected place in town. After arena blowouts during their “Physical Graffiti” tour, the band would slip past the autograph hunters and reappear somewhere fans weren’t looking. As Crowe writes, they often found refuge in “a gay bar just around the corner. Fans combing the streets looking for the band never realized they could find Jimmy Page and Robert Plant dancing together, unbothered, to a song by Gloria Gaynor or the Average White Band.”
Meanwhile, young Crowe used the gay bar’s bathroom as a newsroom, “making notes on little pieces of paper, often to the soundtrack of cocaine-sniffing patrons and sometimes sex on the other side of the stall door.”
He even briefly lived with the Eagles, at a rented house off Mulholland that singer Glenn Frey dubbed the “Eagles’ Nest.”
“I was six feet away, with tape recorder on, as they wrote ‘Lyin’ Eyes,’ ‘One of These Nights’ [and] ‘After the Thrill Is Gone,’ ” he writes. The access got so familiar that Frey gave him a nickname: C. C. Writer.
There were other rites of passage. Kris Kristofferson helped the underage reporter into bars with his movie star charm — “I’d really appreciate it if ya made an exception,” the singer told one bartender —before heading onstage at San Diego’s Civic Theatre.
Lee Michaels, riding high off “Do You Know What I Mean,” pressed a gift into the kid’s hands: “a gallon-sized mason jar packed with freshly grown purple-and-green-flecked marijuana.”
Not everyone was charmed. When Crowe met Lou Reed in New York, the greeting was a single sound effect — “a small hissing sound,” Crowe writes.
courtesy of Petty Legacy LLC
In “Almost Famous,” one of the most bruising turns is when the fictionalized Stillwater band’s frontman claims the teenage reporter’s quotes are fabricated and nearly tanks the kid’s career. That moment wasn’t pure invention. It was a softened version of something stranger. In the early ’70s, Crowe joined the Allman Brothers Band on tour at their peak and sat down with Gregg Allman in San Francisco.
What started as an interview became an unburdening. “The room changes when deep truths are being spoken, when raw honesty is in the air,” Crowe writes. “It was no longer an interview. It was Gregg Allman’s confession.” The singer spoke frankly and openly about topics that were usually off limits, like his two recently deceased bandmates (including brother Duane) and the murder of his father.
A few hours later, it all flipped. At 2 a.m., Crowe was hauled back to Allman’s suite. Allman had discovered that the young reporter was just 16, and he was outraged. “How do I know you aren’t with the FBI?” he said, according to Crowe. “You’ve been talking to everybody. Asking questions. Taking notes with your eyes. Making tapes. I could have you arrested.”
Allman pointed to an empty chair. “My brother is sitting right there, right now,” he said, referring to Duane, who’d died in a motocycle crash in 1971. “And he’s laughing at you.” Crowe surrendered his tapes, and spent four days convinced he’d blown the biggest shot of his life, before they were returned.
Crowe’s own mother was memorialized in the film’s overly protective, big-hearted mom, played by a young Zooey Deschanel. His real-life mother, Alice, was a college teacher and “unstoppable force,” he said. She put him in on an accelerated track with school that made him something of a consummate outsider — the perfect perch for a journalist and later a film writer and director.
She died in 2019, and Crowe still remembers her fondly. “She had intellectual curiosity to her last breath,” he told The Post. “I think about her hourly. She was a remarkable woman.”
Even triumphs were met with her steady hand. The night he won a screenwriting Oscar for “Almost Famous,” Alice told him lovingly, “It’s not too late to go to law school.”
Steven Spielberg was the wind at Crowe’s back. He devoured Crowe’s 172-page screenplay for “Almost Famous” in a single weekend and phoned with the verdict: “Shoot every word.” Crowe almost did, but one scene that got away still needles him.
“Neil Young had a part and he had been costumed and everything,” Crowe told me. The plan was for Young to play the estranged father of Stillwater guitarist Russell Hammond, showing up at a concert with a new, much younger wife who flirts with Russell while Dad remains oblivious. The day of filming, “in a slightly heartbreaking moment,” the rocker called and said he’d decided not to do it.
Crowe found a measure of closure with a few of the giants who shaped his early life. With Bowie, it arrived over the phone in 2006, when Rolling Stone asked Crowe to revisit their landmark story.
Bowie told him he’d tried re-reading the piece that morning but “couldn’t finish it,” calling the mid-’70s “one of the worst periods of my life” where he had “too much time on his hands and too many grams of amphetamine or PCP or cocaine, and maybe all three, in his system.”
Another circle closed in 2015. Crowe drove to Del Mar, Calif., to see Gregg Allman play an afternoon set at the fairgrounds. The former “sleek rock god,” now in his late 60s, carried himself “like a biker on a pit stop,” Crowe writes.
He watched Allman flip through old photos with his “weathered and tattooed hands,” pausing on one with his late brother Duane, onstage at the Fillmore East. “I … I can’t,” he said softly, before closing the Pandora’s box of memories.
They took one final photo together, and Cameron noticed that Allman “stood up straighter, puffed his chest out a little,” he said. “The rock star in him was taking up residence. Not much had changed in four decades, except everything. It was showtime.”
He’s not done telling music stories. Crowe is quietly at work on a docu-drama about Joni Mitchell’s life, and he’s careful not to spill too much of his plans. But at the suggestion that Rocky Fedora could make a guest appearance, he brightened.
“I like that!” Crowe exclaimed. “He’d make a great Easter egg. Who knows, he might just pop up again. I think Bowie would approve.”
[Notigroup Newsroom in collaboration with other media outlets, with information from the following sources]
