Almost Famous

I watched Almost Famous again last night, one of the best movies about rock and roll ever to come out of Hollywood. That's no surprise because it was written and directed by Cameron Crowe, who was there during the period the movie covers, 1973, and based the movie on his experiences that year when he was a precocious fifteen year-old writing for Rolling Stone magazine. I also turned fifteen in 1973, so Crowe and I are contemporaries, and while I was not involved up close with the music as Crowe was, I was smitten by it and was involved in the lifestyle; I read Creem and Rolling Stone, I read Lester Bangs (played by Philip Seymour Hoffman in the movie), and I read Crowe. I went to the parties and the concerts - at a certain point in my mid-twenties I counted up my ticket stubs, which I kept in a shoe box, and figured I had attended one show per week during the previous ten years. My serious record collecting was just beginning in 1973 but it would grow to a thousand over the coming years, with my brother, whom I lived with during the period, adding another five hundred or so. Having established my bona fides, I'm here to tell you that Almost Famous gets it right. If you want to know what those years felt like for those of us who were young and obsessed with rock and roll, watch Almost Famous.

In the movie, the Crowe character's love of rock and roll is sparked by the case of albums his sister leaves him when she escapes home and their obsessive mother to become a stewardess. He opens the case and flips through the records: Pet Sounds, Wheels of Fire, Tommy, Led Zeppelin II, Get Yer Ya-Ya's Out, Blue, Blonde on Blonde, some of the most ubiquitous albums of the era. I own most of them. The soundtrack includes songs by The Who, Simon and Garfunkel, Rod Stewart, Joni Mitchell, Little Feat (a terrific band who I saw many times live, and who were more popular in the DC area than most of the country), Neil Young, Deep Purple, Steely Dan, The Allman Brothers. Now, I didn't love all of these bands - Deep Purple were pretty much no talents and Steely Dan were always highly overrated in my book - but their music was everywhere; you couldn't escape it. You also couldn't escape the type of music played by the band the Crowe character follows on tour for most of the movie, Stillwater - there was dozens of bands with a similar sound, and I hated most of it, but it was there, on the radio, at parties, at friend's houses. The point is, the movie is spot-on when it comes to the catching the zeitgeist of the era, the spirit and the artifacts.

Two favorite scenes. Early on, Lester Bangs is being interviewed by a local radio station. He is flipping through their record stacks and comes upon a Doors record. "The Doors? Jim Morrison? He's a drunken buffoon posing as a poet." Bingo.

And then the best scene in the movie, in the bus after the band has had an argument and everyone is tense. Tiny Dancer comes on the radio and soon one of the band members starts singing along. Then someone joins in, and then someone else. Before long the entire band and crew are singing along to the song, joyously, the argument forgotten. If you were of age in 1973 and involved in the music scene like we were, this scene captures what it was like. We had dozens of moments like this, moments of community, moments when everything else was left behind and all that mattered was the music. Almost Famous is a great film, a minor classic.