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WHOLE LOTTA ROADIES

Cameron Crowe's Almost Famous considered
The Independent on Sunday, January 2001

MOST people who see Cameron Crowe’s new film, “Almost Famous”, will see a sharply written, beautifully acted, frequently hilarious and thoroughly charming rites-of-passage tale, infused with a faintly titillating but never gratuitous degree of old-school rock’n’roll bacchanal. A few, however, will watch “Almost Famous” with spasms of deluded nostalgia and mortified self-recognition tying knots in their innards. They are people who, like Cameron Crowe, or his chief protagonist, budding rock journalist William Miller, or me, have ever written about music and the people who make it.
  “Almost Famous” tells the story of William Miller, a 15-year-old ingenue (played by newcomer Patrick Fugit), who finds himself on tour with mid-table early-70s rock group Stillwater, at the behest of Rolling Stone magazine. This sounds far-fetched, but Crowe really was 15 when he began writing for Rolling Stone at the same period, and though Stillwater never existed, hundreds like them did – denim-clad hairies aiming to emulate the financial, creative, narcotic and sexual excesses of Led Zeppelin, as later documented in Stephen Davis’s “Hammer Of The Gods”. The book still has a lot to answer for, defining as it does the parameters of touring as childish prankery (Zeppelin pioneered the sport of dropping televisions off hotel balconies) and mindless exploitation (infamously typified by the story involving a bizarrely co-operative groupie and a fish).
  If “Almost Famous” is as popular as it deserves to be, it may well lead impressionable youth to contemplate a career – almost certainly the wrong word – in rock journalism; it has, at least, caused a few people to ask me if the film’s depiction of the job, and the itinerant rock’n’roll lifestyle, are accurate. Though I maintain that Rob Reiner’s immortal satire “This Is Spinal Tap” is the purest truth about touring that anyone will ever distil, Crowe has got an awful lot right: the anxious glances at a malfunctioning tape recorder as one struggles to stay focused through some halfwitted singer’s self-aggrandising blather, the despair as one anticipates the process of turning the base metals of a rock band’s vanity, stupidity, and paranoia into gleaming golden prose. Crowe also shows a deft touch with the internal dynamics of a touring party – the in-jokes, the cabin fever, the incessant petty squabbles, the redeeming comradeship.
  A fair bit doesn’t ring as true, though this not necessarily Crowe’s fault. I toured with rock bands twenty years later than Crowe, mostly for the recently deceased rock weekly Melody Maker, and things had changed. At no point, for example, do we see Crowe’s barely fictional alter ego William deal with a record company press officer – he turns up, joins the tour, and goes everywhere the band do. This rarely happens now. Though I’ve been lucky with a few bands who’ve been generous with time, access and drinks riders (notably U2, Radiohead and The Cure), most “tour” stories involve the journalist being taken to a couple of gigs by a record company PR, and booked an interview in a hotel room sometime in between (more typical assignments have included the three days I once spent in Seattle’s Four Seasons hotel, waiting to be granted a 23-minute audience with Pearl Jam).
  “Almost Famous” notes rock’s changing values by getting Philip Seymour Hoffman to play the late, justly legendary, American rock critic Lester Bangs as a ghost of Christmas past. Bangs, recently the subject of an excellent biography (“Let It Blurt”, by Jim DeRogatis), died in 1982 aged 33, having consumed opiates as enthusiastically as he consumed music. He remains one of the better arguments for rock journalism as a valid literary form – some of his best is collected in the book “Psychotic Reactions & Carburetor Dung” – and in “Almost Famous” he balefully warns his young charge that rock is already dead, a dollar sign driven through its heart. Nonetheless, the rock milieu of “Almost Famous”, by today’s standards, seems remarkably innocent of corporate corruption.
  Other anomalies are probably more attributable to the different journalistic cultures of America and Britain. At the preview of “Almost Famous” I attended, there were sharp intakes of breath at the moment Rolling Stone offer to pay William a thousand dollars for three thousand words (in 1973, remember) and underwrite his bills. You’d be lucky to get that out of a British magazine even now, and travel and expenses for rock writers are almost always paid by record companies. There was also audible incredulity at Rolling Stone’s initial spiking of Miller’s piece on Stillwater because it contained “fabrications”. Had we had any such regime at Melody Maker in my time (1990-96), we’d have struggled to publish a paper most weeks, and many of the events that made up the magazine’s mythology would never have happened: the occasion we rubbished a major band’s new album, only for it to transpire that the journalist who wrote the review had, for reasons too complicated to explain here, only heard it once, down a telephone recorded onto a Walkman (the band found out, and didn’t speak to us for years); the Glastonbury festival review in which one of our writers wrote vivid praise of the performance by The Flaming Lips, who we subsequently discovered had cancelled a week previously (we told pedantic readers, when they wrote in to complain, that they didn’t know the journalist in question like we did, and that if he said he saw The Flaming Lips, then there was every chance that, as far as he was concerned, he had).
  Which brings us, more or less, to the drugs and sex components of the rock’n’roll trinity. “Almost Famous” does not stint on either, boasting one scene in which Stillwater guitarist Russell Hammond (a terrific Billy Crudup), stands atop a house, as fried as a truck driver’s breakfast, and proclaims himself “A golden God.” Drink and drugs are still major parts of touring life, especially in a band’s early days before they’ve dared start taking the idea of stardom seriously and/or started bleeding from places they shouldn’t. This goes largely unreported, either because the band won’t share their stash with the journalist, or because they have. Another Melody Maker colleague once arrived for work somewhat the worse for a weekend in Amsterdam with The Butthole Surfers – after spending the editorial meeting threatening to thump the Features Editor for no adequately explained reason, he repaired to the pub and fell asleep, waking an hour later believing he was still in Holland, loudly informing bemused lunchtime punters that they were “clog-wearing Dutch bastards”, demanding to know where they’d been “when the skies were dark with Dorniers,” and offering to take matters outside (he did, but nobody went with him).
  “Almost Famous” also neatly dissects the dichotomy at the heart of the relationship between groupies and their objects of worship – the former see themselves as muses, the latter as a ready source of massage for the ego and other things. Depressingly, it is still the case that any clown who can hold a guitar the right way up rarely wants for female attention, although it’s doubtful, given increasingly ravenous venereal diseases and media, that many of today’s acts live up to the orgiastic standards established in the era of “Almost Famous” by The Who, The Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin – “Hammer Of The Gods” contains one unsavoury scene involving Zeppelin drummer John Bonham, a young woman, a Great Dane, and a quantity of baked beans. To my lasting relief, I’ve never witnessed anything like that, but then nor, contrary to Crowe’s implicit boast in “Almost Famous”, have I ever had a tour assignment enlivened by a troika of young women who looked like Anna Paquin. I’d be a good deal less bitter about this if I’d managed even one.
  If “Almost Famous” is to have an effect beyond making people happy for a couple of hours, it’s to be hoped that it might serve as a reminder of what rock journalism can and should be about. It is a field in which, Lester Bangs notwithstanding, Britain has always set the standard, though evidence for this has recently devolved from the weeklies (of which only the NME remains) to the monthlies (Mojo and Uncut especially). As things stand, there is not a magazine in Britain that would send a writer on tour with an up-and-coming band for two weeks, much less offer one the freedom to write a modern equivalent of one of Bangs’ epic and exhilirating diatribes. Frank Zappa once made the smug but annoyingly quotable quip that “Rock journalism is people who can’t write interviewing people who can’t talk for people who can’t read,” and it would be a shame if the battle to prove him wrong had been lost.

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