Was anyone ever so young?

Cameron Crowe's teenage kicks

We dismiss teenagers as soon as we cease to be them. We don’t care to speak their language; our script is ready-made – and useless. First we tell them none of their experiences will matter once they’re in the real world. Next we tell them that what today feels like everything really means nothing. Finally, we tell them that these years are the best of their lives. That done, we turn away, as from a song we can no longer bear to listen to.

The music journalist and filmmaker Cameron Crowe has never been one to forget adolescence. For his first film, Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982), Crowe drove around his neighbourhood in San Diego asking high schools to let him masquerade as a student; he was 22 years old when he enrolled in one of them. At the end of the year, the students threw the contents of their lockers into a dumpster. Crowe gathered up the notes, poems and pictures, and took them home. Now Crowe is 68 and has published a new memoir, The Uncool, which reflects on a life spent seeking the juvenile wisdom we all too easily grow out of.

It may be that Crowe is better equipped than most of us to stomach studying adolescence because he missed his own. Crowe was born in California in 1957. His determined mother skipped him ahead in school grades, so he was always junior to his classmates by years. (The “Where are your pubes?” school locker-room scene came from his own childhood.) As soon as he graduated – aged 15, in 1972 – he was off around America. Crowe had started writing for rock magazines in his early teens and by the time of graduation was being published in Rolling Stone magazine. A year out of high school, he wrote the cover story: a profile of the Allman Brothers Band on their 1973 tour.

That tour inspired Almost Famous, the film Crowe would eventually direct about his years following bands as a music writer. Still his defining work, it struggled at the box office but won him a cult fandom on home-video release as well as the 2001 Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. It was, he writes in The Uncool, an “almost exact replica” of his own upbringing: 15-year-old student William Miller skips class to follow a band named Stillwater on their 1973 tour. Along the way, he falls for a kind-hearted groupie (also underage) named Penny Lane, played by Kate Hudson. Even now, 25 years later, fur-trimmed jackets like the one she wears still sell online as “Penny Lane coats”.

The Uncool is a memoir of the life that made the film, then of the life the film made. Crowe begins his book with his experience of adapting Almost Famous for the theatre in 2019. From there he spools back to the life events that formed his work. The Rolling Stone magazine co-founder Jann Wenner presses a copy of Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem on him. He meets his hero, the rock critic Lester Bangs, at a radio station; as in the film, Bangs is DJing and plays Iggy Pop. We learn that the Miller family closely resembles Crowe’s; the rock stars and roadies in the film are composites of famous figures, plenty of whom appear in the book. Most of all, the book lets Crowe dwell on the sound and feel of his Seventies youth.

Crowe comes across as the ideal scholar of modern adolescence. Perhaps this is because his youth culture is still ours, and for him it was actually still young. From muumuu dresses to bell-bottom jeans to waterbeds, the casual furniture of Crowe’s milieu still feels like being young. There is a joke in Almost Famous about Mick Jagger “[still] trying to be a rock star at age 50”. The punchline, meant for the year 2000, still lands directly today: the Rolling Stones toured North America last year and Elton John headlined Glastonbury in 2023. No new youth culture has supplanted the one of Crowe’s early years. Crowe writes that great songs never “outstay their welcome”, that they always leave the party in the end. But the great songs are all still with us. There has not since been a revolution quite like the package of electric guitar, seven-inch vinyl and transistor radio. Growing up in desert flatlands and then next to the amps backstage, Crowe was able, literally, to feel more of those vibrations than anyone else.

By now, Crowe has written ten movies (plus three documentary films), eight of which he also directed. More than the Tom Cruise films (Jerry Maguire, Vanilla Sky) and the unloved recent works (Aloha, We Bought a Zoo), the teen movies define his popular image. He is known for feel-good romantic comedies with fantastic soundtracks. The single most enduring and expressive frame in his work is the high-school student Lloyd Dobler (played by John Cusack) in Say Anything standing in the road outside his girlfriend Diane Court’s (Ione Skye) house, holding his boombox over his head, playing her a love song.

But Crowe insists his films are dark too. The only venom in The Uncool is reserved for a woman who retells a traumatic story as a glib anecdote. Crowe seethes that he will “never stop marvelling” at the way people “turn a gaping wound into a tall tale with a punchline”. Plainly he intends his films to represent “all the complexities and fallibility and mistakes and heartbreak” found in his favourite songs and in his own life. In real life, Crowe had a headstrong mother who insisted “no drugs” and a “smoky, independent” older sister who worked as a flight attendant. But he had “another sister” too. Almost Famous is powered and completed by an empty turquoise chair at the Miller family table. When the film starts, William is 11. When Crowe was ten, his sister Cathy’s body was ushered out of their house while he slept. She had died by suicide aged 19.

Cathy never grew beyond adolescence. Crowe remembers her as an “awkward but sincere” teenager with a “romantic sense”. She introduced him to his favourite emotion, the one all his art seeks: what he calls “happy/sad”. It came when she first asked her parents: “Am I not normal?” It also came when he confided his first crush to her and she made him ask out the girl, who rejected him. He felt “like a hero, even for losing”, “part ache, part exhilaration”.

As a journalist, too, Crowe was reluctant to flatten feelings. His colleagues believed that their job was to tear down the mirage of stardom and expose the ordinary people behind it. Crowe understands that “mystique” amounts to little more than not being seen – in Almost Famous, David Bowie is hurried through a lobby with his face concealed – but part of him still wants to let it stand. Of all his articles, he is proudest of an interview with Joni Mitchell where he broke the cardinal rules of rock journalism: he “sinned” by letting Mitchell edit the piece and thereby control her image. At one point in the interview, Crowe asks if Mitchell had a moment when she knew she was no longer a child.

Of course, much more than reading revealing interviews, what really destroys mystique is growing up. One of the essays in Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem, “California Dreaming”, laments how “we forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget”. Another, “Where the Kissing Never Stops”, praises Joan Baez as an artist who tries “to hang on to the innocence and turbulence and capacity for wonder, however ersatz or shallow, of her own or of anyone’s adolescence”.

Crowe asks us to let all years be formative. If he advocates any stance, it is something like a chosen naivety, a rejection of the steadiness age offers in order to risk pain for feeling. He wrote in 1974 that the singer-songwriter Jackson Browne had “clever innocence”. And in a recent interview he spoke about loving the age before one has “built up layers of leather-like skin”, when “you really felt things”. He doesn’t quite urge us to reinhabit the uncool state natural to us before we are 18, where a single song could change our lives, but he urges us to remember “those hugely emotional days, when everything seemed possible or nothing seemed probable”.

Awkward but sincere as they must be, our teenage selves are easy and tempting to forget. But we would be wiser to stay in touch. It is only their language, after all, that has words like Diane’s to Lloyd in Say Anything: “I need you… Everything else means nothing to me. If I hurt you again I’ll die. I love you.” No other sentiment is so innocent or so clever. Such speech does not make us happy in a simple way; it makes us happier and also sadder. But, as Lester Bangs once wrote, “these are contradictions that refuse to be resolved, which maybe is what most of life eventually amounts to”.

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Hope you liked that folks. It was first in this week’s mag, What Keir Can’t Hear. If you like you can tell those mofos that you want more Monaghan in the magazine at at letters@newstatesman.co.uk. There is loads of great stuff in the NS lately, and a new Christmas subscription deal here.

Yesterday I had out an interview with Kate Clanchy, a poet who was cancelled. I hope I did it in a careful way. If you like, you can read that here.

Thanks again, as ever, and I hope you have a nice weekend.

All my best
George

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