A Tale of Two Rock Critics – Guardian UK

In 1973, two young music journalists were starting their careers on opposite sides of the Atlantic. One was the 15-year-old Cameron Crowe, who bunked off school to become a Rolling Stone reporter. Years later, he became one of Hollywood’s most sought after film-makers. The other was 21-year-old Charles Shaar Murray, newly signed to the NME. On the eve of the UK premiere of Crowe’s film biography of those days, they relate their very different experiences.

Cameron Crowe

Music is still my first love. In a lot of ways, making the movie is an exercise in getting to the point when you can be in a dark room with all the records and putting the music on the movies. I never grew up studying movies or wanting to go to film school. I loved movies, but to me it was all about music.

Doing a film portrait of 1973 was something I talked about for a long time. Initially, I wanted to write about Lester Bangs, who was a real vivid character of the day. I got side-tracked with a bunch of projects after Jerry Maguire; then a friend of mine said, what are you screwing around with these other ideas for? You’re either going to do your script about 1973 or you will have talked about it and never done it. It’s the kind of the thing someone says to you at the perfect time and it’s like a dagger. The truth was, I kept all the artifacts from those days, all my old articles and all the touring room lists and all the backstage passes – they’ve all been in boxes that have never been put away. I’ve been living among the boxes for 27 years, and it was time to write the script and capture that thing that was still gnawing away at me.

It was down to my mom that I got into journalism so young. Like the character of Elaine in the movie, she was a teacher who believed in an accelerated childhood. She decided I was going to be the last kid she was going to have, and she was going to try her theory out on me. In essence, it was to go to summer school, and acquire as many course units as possible, so you would graduate early, and see the world and start your career. If you were going to take time off, her theory was to put all the summers together, and take your vacation when you graduate high school before you go to college.

So I went to school every summer; I was the pale, egghead student. Then I discovered rock music, courtesy of my sister. Just like my mom’s worst fears, rock ‘n’ roll came in through the window, underneath the door, all around her, and it changed both my sister and me. I was making phone calls, and getting assignments from editors who didn’t know how old I was. Her plan of the accelerated educational programme gave me the confidence to do all that stuff. By the time I came to her and said, you never let me have a summer, but now I want to go on the road with the Allman Brothers, she sort of gritted her teeth and let me do it.

My first exposure to music magazines came via a shop in San Diego where they sold Zap Comix and rock magazines. There was a guy who worked there would let me look, even though you were supposed to be 18 – it was like porno. I thought the guys that wrote for them were the greatest people – they might have trashed the music, but respected it and lived the rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle. There was an underground paper in San Diego, the San Diego Door, and my sister used to go out with a guy who worked for them. On the condition I wouldn’t tell mom, they took me to a meeting. I wanted to do record reviews for them – and when I asked, of course they said no. Music was the tool of the corporations. Then they thought, we need the advertising from the record companies. Next thing, they told me about another guy who sent in record reviews to them – and it was Lester Bangs.

In the movie, William is constantly trying to define what’s real and what’s not as the Stillwater tour continues. Lester Bangs is the only guy who says that it’s all a dirty industry. Yet these people – the band, the groupies, William – are all kidding themselves that they’re part of a family when they’re really part of an industry. It’s more of an industry as it goes on. But this film is filled with contradictions, more than any of my other ones. People are continually contradicting themselves. Even Lester is a contradiction. In the longer version of the movie – our first edit, which we’ll put out when the movie goes to DVD – Lester’s jealous because the kid got an assignment at Rolling Stone.

In 1973 I went into the offices of Rolling Stone in San Francisco for the first time. Before this I had been a freelance journalist working on the end of a phone to music editor Ben Fong Torres. I’d done my first piece for them in January of that year, an interview with Poco, with Richie Furay. They paid me $350 for it. A few months later, Jann Wenner, Rolling Stone’s editor, wrote me, saying: “You may turn out the youngest Rolling Stone man ever…”

The Allman Brothers Band was my first major assignment for Rolling Stone. So much of it became the movie. I was 15. My mom still thinks I’m gonna go to law school. She still says: you left home when you were 15 and never came back; if I’d known who Led Zeppelin were then I’d have never let you do it. At the time I used to say: “Listen to Stairway to Heaven! These are intelligent, committed, enthusiastic gentlemen!”

The thing is, when I first got out there on the road and was writing about the Allman Brothers and Led Zeppelin and the Who and Lynyrd Skynyrd – and Neil Young; it wasn’t the version of rock we think of today. It wasn’t the penthouse-suite, we’re-so-removed-from-our-fans, let’s-all-be-rich-and-happy… The whole fat rich rock star thing happened later. ’73 was, for me, always the year where it felt like the last moment before rock became a little less personal, a little more global. What I saw was the time before the period that’s been captured in the movies in a kitsch way. A lot of that stuff came later. To me, there was a great feeling of us against the world in most of these bands. Then, all of rock music sold about the same as one Shania Twain album now, so it was a little more personal; these guys seemed to be in it for the feeling they got on stage, and hopefully girls and acclaim after that. Being too young for the girls and guys I was going to school with, it was the wildest thing to be taken in by Pete Townshend, for example. Of course, it didn’t occur to me at the time that a lot of the motivation would be to get a good article out of me. But to me it was a very committed thing – it was a 70s without mirror-balls and without a lot of the faux grooviness that has been portrayed in the media. By the end of the 70s, it was a much different thing, and you had bands like the Eagles and Fleetwood Mac selling tens of millions of records.

The interesting thing about the bands were that a lot of them were British – they were the remnants of the British Invasion. At the time there were a few albums that had gotten deep acclaim, that were loved deeply and were thought of as really powerful serious pieces of music. Who’s Next, Led Zeppelin 2, Derek and the Dominos’ Layla – these were albums that defined that period. But hard rock felt more American. American kids just went nuts for hard rock. Even Townshend said at the time – like with Won’t Get Fooled Again – these are American youth anthems that we had no idea had such power over the audience. Led Zeppelin never took an ad on any of the tours I was on. It was all word of mouth. And they never had singles. It was all a private thing. It’s kind of like Metallica now.

Then there was the Zeppelin tour I went on; that also contributed a lot to the movie. As many people probably know, Rolling Stone tore into all of their albums. So Jimmy Page said that he’d never talk to Rolling Stone, even though Rolling Stone always wanted to put them on the cover. The LA Times sent me on tour with them, and to convince them to do Rolling Stone, I stuck around on the tour with them. And as in the movie, a couple of days turned into a long three-week tour. My eyes got blood-red because I didn’t get any sleep. One by one, they all said they’d do it; except for Page, who kept saying: “In another city, I’ll make the decision.” Of course, that becomes the focus of the movie, too, as Russell Hammond continually plays the same game with William.

By the end of the 70s I started to burn out on journalism. I was taking on too much and taking too long with stories. I didn’t know how much further I could go. I wanted to interview Marvin Gaye, but he wasn’t doing any more interviews, and I really wanted to do a Rolling Stones story for Rolling Stone. That was when I started on Fast Times at Ridgemont High. Having exhausted rock journalism and having kind of hit a wall, I wanted to write this book that would be about high school and the experience I didn’t have, because of my mom skipping me all those grades. I took to it immediately, because I thought it was almost more rock than rock, to write about the high school experience. Ironically, I found this entire school year was about the fact that Led Zeppelin was going to come to town; and everyone was gearing up for Zeppelin. And then Bonham died, and the tour was cancelled, and it really did change lives. The original title of Fast Times was Stairway to Heaven. I was still writing about rock, but from a different perspective.

Celebrity journalism is different now. The story the kid files at the end of the movie, he’s been the mediator a little bit, and left some of the warts out, but left quite a few of them in, and made his moral judgment on the band, and wrote about what he saw. Now, though, pieces don’t get as long, the access is way different, and way cut down, all this stuff happens in a hotel room on a junket for 30 minutes. It’s a different environment. There are a number of times where the bands or musicians I was writing about back in the 70s – Neil Young for example – would say: write about what you see. Part of that is that they wanted to see their life mirrored back to them; it’s therapy in a way. They want to get your perspective on what’s going on – how do I appear to the outside world? Of course, you never appear the way you think you do, so whenever you hold up a mirror to somebody, they’re going to see things that bother them.

The main effect of my Rolling Stone career was that I felt like I had a place in the world. I could write about this thing that I loved so much; and as rough as it was, and caught in the middle as I was, I guess it was my persona back then. I ran into Stephen Stills at a football game a year and a half ago, and he introduced me to his wife. Here’s how he introduced me. “This is Cameron. He was a fan who always got caught in the middle between wanting to be friends with us, and wanting to please Rolling Stone, who didn’t like us as much as he did.” I thought: wow, what happened to the power and mystery of journalism and writing? That was the role I played: the fan who had several masters to serve – one of which was…me.

Charles Shaar Murray

1973 as a rock and roll Annus Mirabilis? Six thousand miles away from the old Rolling Stone office in San Francisco, it felt more like a fancy-dress party somewhere in Teenage Wasteland the morning after the revolution didn’t happen. For 15-year-old Cameron Crowe, torturing his mom with Led Zeppelin and the Allman Brothers Band it may have seemed as if a depoliticised version of the rock’n’roll hippie dream was still in full effect, but John Lennon had already announced that “the dream is over”, and within the shabby confines of New Musical Express’s funky, down-at-heel offices in Long Acre, it was – in the words of Bryan Ferry – “time to try for something new.”

I’d arrived at the NME the previous summer, just before turning 21, having been headhunted from OZ and IT – the Brit underground press – and bringing their agenda with me. This meant being FOR sex, drugs and freaking out the squares by any means necessary, and AGAINST racism, corporate rock and Emerson, Lake & Palmer. By this time, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin and Jim Morrison were dead, the Beatles had broken up, the Rolling Stones were wearing their cynicism on their (album) sleeves, Bob Dylan was off somewhere being gnomic and incomprehensible, Sly Stone was sinking into hard-drug decline, and radical idealism was sprawled bleeding outside Kent State university or locked up with the Black Panthers. In America, nevertheless, it was still possible to pretend that the 60s were still alive: in Britain it wasn’t.

My generation of British rock writers had drawn an enormous amount of inspiration from the likes of Rolling Stone, which had in its first few years blasted a path for an entirely new kind of rock writing, but then settled into woozy complacency. The most inspiring of the pioneers were Greil Marcus – who brought critical rigour, piercing insight and vaulting intellectual ambition to the milieu – and Lester Bangs, whose infectious passion and furious irreverence towards established proprieties and standardised verities struck a chord with every would-be iconoclast.

It was Lester’s next port of call, Detroit’s Creem magazine, that provided us with our most enduring American model. Creem was edgy where Rolling Stone was mellow; satirical where Rolling Stone was sycophantic; fun where Rolling Stone was, let’s face it, dull with a capital DUH. Creem’s photo captions (many of them written by Lester, as we later discovered) were either surreal jokes or sardonic digs at their subject. Where the British pop weeklies of the era treated their readers like besotted teenyboppers and their rockier equivalents addressed their punters as if they were aspiring roadies, Creem talked to you as if you were smart, adventurous and passionately committed to the music as a source of both fun and redemption. As we were, or thought we were.

NME’s ethos was straightforward: power to the people. The people in question being our readers, who had first call on our loyalty. We despised the record industry, gave not even two hoots for the sensitivities of our publisher or the profits of their shareholders, and relentlessly satirised even favourite musicians like Bryan Ferry – whose ludicrous clothes and fragile ego inspired us to seek endlessly for new ways to misspell his name. (The most memorable included Brain Fury, Biriyani Ferret, Byron Ferrari, Brown Furry and Brawn Fairy.) Americans had no idea what to make of us. Taking the piss out of the stars verged on lèse-majesté, if not outright sacrilege.

Of course, the intrinsic differences between the British and American rock scenes were massive. America was a very big, very wealthy country where supergroups lurched around a circuit of huge arenas playing to vast crowds stuffed full of drugs. Britain was a small country with very few enormodomes and considerably lower disposable incomes. Which meant that the biggest of the British bands – Led Zeppelin, the Who, the Rolling Stones – followed the dollar and effectively became American groups: as remote from UK audiences as the Allman Brothers (who never played Britain until after guitarist Duane Allman, their star attraction, had croaked) or the Grateful Dead. Nowadays, MTV can carry a new trend all over the US almost in real time, but in the early 70s the sheer size and scale of the place meant that change occurred with agonising slowness; whereas in tiny little Britain the speed of pop-cultural events was exhilaratingly accelerated.

The Allmans may have been the bees’ knees for Rolling Stone’s readers, but as far as the NME was concerned, cosmic cowboys with cocaine crusted in their walrus moustaches were last decade’s thing. For us, 1973 was about the science-fiction glam-rock of David Bowie and Roxy Music, and the hypnotic new groove filtering over from Jamaica. Our taste in Americans ran more to proto-punks like Iggy Pop and the late, lamented MC5 than to hayseed millionaire hippies like Crosby, Stills & Nash, and our midnight turntables were more likely to be spinning Bob Marley’s Burnin’ or Iggy’s Raw Power than any Mellow Mafia mumblings from LA. We spent the first half of the 70s willing punk into existence, though, for some of us, when it finally arrived it wasn’t quite what we ordered.

So: Golden Age of what, exactly? Well, if 1973 represented anything of that nature, it was the golden age of promotional expenditure and all the concomitant opportunities to bite the hand that fed us. In those days, record companies seemed to have unlimited amounts of money to blow on dumb stunts to promote dumber records, and we considered it our revolutionary duty to make sure that they spent as much of it as possible on entertaining us. Coaches would be chartered to schlep several dozen lurching, reeling hacks to see risibly useless bands at Bristol Colston Hall. Beer, wine and non-vintage champagne would flow as press officers, prettily accoutred in the latest company T-shirts, sauntered down the aisles dropping large chunks of hash and fresh packs of Rizla papers into passengers’ waiting hands. No conceivable album was so inconsequential a cultural event that it didn’t arrive bundled with T-shirts and badges, or wasn’t marked by a launch party. Sometimes the bands would actually perform, which was irritating but often unavoidable.

Indicate that you might, under certain circumstances, be prepared to write a 400-word concert review of some dodgy combo and the next thing you knew another press officer would be flying you to Amsterdam, buying you a stupefyingly expensive dinner, taking you on a tour of the red light district and uncomplainingly parting with corporate wedge to buy you a wrap of overpriced cocaine. Then you’d get home, slide behind the typewriter for 15 minutes and slag the band off. Oh how we laughed!

The time-honoured institution of the press junket was the vehicle through which I met, albeit on different occasions, both Cameron Crowe and Lester Bangs. The teenage Crowe was the very soul of amiability: relaxed and confident beyond his years, as well he might be, considering that he was a top writer for a major publication and made considerably more money than any of us did. Bangs, despite his fearsome reputation, was a genial bear of a man and, on his visits to NME, was sufficiently sober to converse perceptively, charmingly and – bogglingly enough – quietly.

As rock writers go, Bangs and Crowe could not have been more different. Crowe, despite his considerable talents, was essentially a fanboy: a “friend of the stars” who rarely upset the applecart by expressing a controversial opinion. He had the kind of presence which relaxed his subjects, made them feel protective towards him, encouraged them to open up. This is a considerable asset for an interviewer, make no mistake, and it paid off, big time. Lester, on the other hand, was essentially a critic, ranter and raconteur: a grimy prophet howling in the wilderness. His celebrated interviews with Lou Reed were knockabout classics of the genre – someone, incidentally, should adapt the transcripts of those interviews into a screenplay entitled Lester & Lou before anybody here gets significantly older – but his scabrous attacks on the second-rate (especially the expensively-hyped second-rate) and passionate hymns to the transcendent power of loud, filthy noise forever barred him from the first-class lounge where publishers, performers, record companies and journalists smoothly network and conspire against the public interest. The world needs a lot more Lesters – it’s a dirty job but somebody’s got to do it – though comparatively few are prepared to pay the price. Lester paid it, in full, dying in 1982 at the age of 33. He died a stupid death after living a stupid life, but leaving behind him a body of work which virtually defines its genre.

Cameron Crowe, on the other hand, will be remembered primarily for his movies. Though possibly not this one.

Courtesy of The Guardian – Cameron Crowe/Charles Shaar Murray – October 20, 2000