Memoir an elegy to rock's heyday

Cameron Crowe's 'The Uncool' benefits from his eye for detail as a rock writer.

- MARC WEINGARTEN

CAMERON Crowe was covering rock in the 1970s, when publicists weren't guardrails for clients.

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." As we have seen in the 2000 film "Almost Famous," autobiographical Crowe's account of his early years, young Cameron cared little about sex or drugs, music being his only lodestar.