The Uncool

By: Cameron Crowe

Libby audiobook 9 hours

Read by the author

Published: 2025

Genre: Memoir

Wow! I had heard part of an interview on the radio and requested the movie Almost Famous as well as this audiobook. We enjoyed watching the movie together and now I've been able to hear the author's story firsthand. Wild!

I wasn't aware of Cameron Crowe but am now fascinated! He started writing for Rolling Stone magazine as a teenager. He met and interviewed some phenomenally huge stars before he even turned 21. Then he went on to write Fast Times at Ridgemont High (which I may need to re-watch, as it's been more than a few decades . . . ). He wrote and directed other movies with which I'm familiar. Wild how much this man has done and I didn't really know who he was.

It was fun to hear his story and recognize how pieces of his memoir made it into the movie . . . the Stillwater band in the movie was an amalgam of The Allman Brothers and other groups he toured with. It still blows my mind that they welcomed him in to their backstage world and their hotel rooms. His mom is a pretty important character in both his memoir and the movie. His oldest sister didn't make it into the movie and the info about her life was heart-rending.

This is well-written and a delight to listen to, even though I'm not a huge music person. 

I keep looking up these articles and not reading them . . . so I'll leave a note here. It's easy to find them online. Rolling Stone December 7, 1973 about the Allman Brothers and February 1974 about Led Zeppelin.

 

<Above posted 12.6.25. Below added 6.25.26.>

 

I had requested the book so I could look at the photos. (The ebook version, which I got after listening to the audiobook, wasn't conducive to being able to enjoy seeing them, so I returned it and waited for the print book.) This was published in 2025 and is 320 pages long plus acknowledgments and other stuff.

 

I started re-reading the book . . . and kept renewing it. And I just have too darn many books to read right now! So I'm going to add some notes on the post-its I put in and return it to the library. I may very well get this one to re-read when I don't have so many other books on my shelf! He's quite a talented storyteller.

 

Page 1: "Mind is in every cell of the body! What you say will make it so." She lived on aphorisms. "Now, I want to hear you say, 'The play is going to be great.'"

 

Crowe is referencing his mother, of course. I love that he starts his story close to present time. I love that his life story has now begotten a movie, a play, and a book. I wish his mother had been able to see that stage production. I'm more likely to talk about self-fulfilling prophecies or attitude has a lot to do with outcome . . . but I love that his mom's sayings were such a part of his story.

 

Page 2-3: The more I explained these foreboding events to my aging mother, the more she defended her predictions of greatness like they were the beaches of Normandy. 

 

I love how he expresses things! It feels as though I know his mom.

 

Page 4: She'd just separated from her second husband, Gary, a few months earlier. He was seventeen years younger than she was, but they had a chemistry only they truly understood. How anybody could leave their wife at ninety-seven, I still didn't know. The play had become her obsession, followed only by her fear of being put in an assisted-living facility.

 

Oh, how sad! To have lived so much life and then to be afraid of being "put away" at the end of it. My mother was adamant about not going to a nursing home. I wonder sometimes what my aging journey will look like.

 

Page 11: What she didn't warn me about was that skipping grades in these key adolescent years would create serious land mines in my life, and they weren't academic. 

 

His recollections of older kids taunting him about not having pubic hair . . . painful. His mom meant well and he clearly was quite intelligent and capable, but being significantly younger than your peers in school can be incredibly challenging.

 

Page 17: My mom would often blame problems on sex. The sex drive. The corruption of a society that used sex to sell everything. Sex in songs. Sex on television. If there was a problem, sex was never far behind as the cause.

 

Again, I feel as though I know his mom. The sixties and seventies definitely had the "sexual revolution" happening . . . His mom cracks me up, but I'm glad my mom wasn't this uptight.

 

Page 32 has a picture of Cameron with his sisters Cathy and Cindy. It is so incredibly sweet. The movie focuses more on his experiences, his sister Cindy, and their mom. Dad and Cathy are not as much a part of the movie (in my recollections). But in the book, they have a more prominent place. I love that he has vivid memories of his sister.

 

Page 33: Dates were the fruit the town was known for. They grew on date palm trees that lined the streets and flourished in the blinding hear. Everything in Indio was tied to that sticky-sweet missile-shaped fruit. Dates made me squeamish. They were the exact color of the American cockroach, a fact that seemed to bother no one in Indio but me.

 

I liked when he made me laugh. I thought he was going to say they looked like turds. 

 

Page  36: They had removed her body from the house while I was asleep.

 

His big sister Cathy had committed suicide by overdosing on barbiturates. How tragic. How life-changing for them all. How awful for him to be "protected" but not able to say goodbye. 

 

Page 37: "You're my last chance to be a good mother," my mother told me a few years later in a rare conversation about Cathy. "When you lose a child, you seek purpose and reason."

 

Wow. That's a lot to expect of a kid. The emotional load was huge!

 

Page 310: I still hear my mom's voice all the time. She's still teaching. It's in her voicemails and in the many notes and faxes and letters and emails. I kept everything. She was a world-class packrat. I am but an amateur who lives in her shadow. Like any true packrat, I never throw things away. I just move them into different piles.

 

Oh my! I completely understand this! Although I decided to blog the book and return it, I did go through and look at all the pictures one last time. Often, they seemed out of context and I had to read a few paragraphs to "place" them. This passage caught my eye. I'm really striving to decrease my stuff. I've gown up with much too much packrat activity. Those last two sentences ring true.