Where teen rock journalist became ‘Almost Famous’ – Cameron Crowe recounts San Diego past

For Cameron Crowe, all roads lead back to San Diego.

He was onstage Thursday night at the Magnolia in El Cajon, speaking with actress Kate Hudson before a packed house to celebrate his new memoir “The Uncool.” She’d just asked him why he chose this time to look back on the moments that took him from teenage rock journalist to Oscar-winning filmmaker. 

Crowe spent most of the 1970s writing cover stories for Rolling Stone while most of his peers were still in high school or college. Then came the movies: Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Say Anything, Singles, Jerry Maguire,” and finally 2000’s Almost Famous, a semi-autobiographical tale of his almost mythical time on tour with the Allman Brothers when he was 16. 

Two decades later, the movie was revived as a musical theater production, and premiered at San Diego’s Old Globe Theatre in 2019.

Returning to his hometown for the musical helped crystallize Crowe’s thoughts about telling his life story on the printed page. 

“I used to live half a mile away across from the Old Globe Theatre,” he told Hudson. “It was now 2019, and we were doing a musical about the year 1973, almost across the street from where I lived at the time. And then right next to that was the radio station KPRI, where I met (legendary rock critic) Lester Bangs. And I thought, you know what? I want to start writing about this feeling. Because it was a huge happy/sad feeling.

“I started thinking about, what makes your taste in music? Well, your experiences in life, and where you heard the songs that you fall in love with, and when they happened in your life. That’s what makes music so great: It’s a living diary of you,” he said. “It’s the difference between ‘I like this song,’ and the realization that ‘I AM this song.’ It made me have the feelings I had and make the choices I did. So I wanted to write a book that told the stories of what made me fall in love with music.”

Crowe’s hourlong conversation with Hudson was illuminating, insightful, thought-provoking, endearing — and yes, both happy and sad. 

That push-pull has always been central to Crowe’s work, both onscreen and in his writing. Hudson, initially recruited for a smaller part in Almost Famous before she took on the co-starring role that earned her an Oscar nomination, helped Crowe reminisce about their experiences making the film, including iconic scenes shot at the San Diego Sports Arena (now Pechanga Arena).

Some of the most poignant discussion involved the late actor Philip Seymour Hoffman, who portrayed Bangs brilliantly in Almost Famous. A brief discussion of Joni Mitchell, the subject of a forthcoming Crowe film, led to talking about a scene in Almost Famous with Mitchell’s song “River,” in which the music elicited a deep emotional response for Hudson. 

The song triggered a beautiful filmmaking moment, but “it didn’t always work that way for everybody,” Crowe said, before describing an unsuccessful gambit to evoke a response from Hoffman.

“He’s in San Diego doing his scenes, and he was doing the scene where he’s listening to Iggy (Pop) in the KPRI studio. And I put on ‘I Wanna Be Your Dog’ in the middle of his take. I guess I didn’t know him well enough, because he said, ‘Cut!’ And I’m like, ‘I think the director is supposed to say ‘cut.’ And he said, ‘What makes you think that the music you’re playing during my scene is better than what I have in my head?’ And I’m like, ‘NOTHING. You will not hear music again from me.’ He was right.”

Crowe is sure Bangs would have appreciated Hoffman’s performance.

“I don’t know what Lester’s opinion would have been of me writing about him and honoring him and feeling so much mentorship from him,” Crowe said. “But I do know that he would have LOVED Philip Seymour Hoffman. Those two? A house afire. They would’ve left and maybe never come back.”

Crowe began the evening onstage himself, reminiscing about his youth in San Diego and homes where he lived with his parents in Mission Valley and downtown. He recalled writing memorable articles about such legends as Kris Kristofferson (who he interviewed at El Torito) and Jim Croce. He also recalled “driving an endless circle” around Fiesta Island, pulling over at various spots to write. 

He then read a 20-minute portion of a chapter from “The Uncool” that details his experiences on tour with the Allman Brothers in 1973, a sequence of events so remarkable that they begged to be made into a movie. And so he did, a quarter-century later.

He praised Hudson, whose new film Song Sung Blue comes out next month, for bringing such passion to her role as Penny Lane in Almost Famous.

“Penny Lane is the spirit of all that we love about music, and that’s what you brought to the story,” he told her.

Crowe and Hudson took several questions from the audience in the final 20 minutes. 

One crowd member asked Crowe what he considered “the quintessential San Diego question: KPRI or KGB?” — referring to two radio stations that loom large in the city’s cultural history. 

Crowe hedged his bets.

“I’m gonna cheat and say KGB in the day and KPRI at night,” he said, then smiled back at the theater full of faces from his old hometown. “We are definitely in San Diego right now.”