{"id":6302,"date":"2025-10-29T15:01:00","date_gmt":"2025-10-29T15:01:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/cameron-crowe-questlove-the-uncool\/"},"modified":"2025-10-29T15:01:00","modified_gmt":"2025-10-29T15:01:00","slug":"cameron-crowe-questlove-the-uncool","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/cameron-crowe-questlove-the-uncool\/","title":{"rendered":"Cameron Crowe, Questlove Nerd Out At \u2018Uncool\u2019 Book Event"},"content":{"rendered":"<div>\n<figure><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/static.spin.com\/files\/2025\/10\/IMG_0693-scaled.jpg\" width=\"2560\" height=\"1364\" alt=\"\"><figcaption>The Roots&#8217; Questlove and Cameron Crowe on Oct. 28. 2025, in New York (photo: Jonathan Cohen).<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>Writer\/filmmaker Cameron Crowe celebrated the release of his Avid Reader Press memoir, <em><a href=\"https:\/\/cameroncrowebook.com\/\" target=\"_blank\">The Uncool<\/a><\/em>, last night (Oct. 29) with an event at New York\u2019s Symphony Space, during which he read an Allman Brothers Band-focused chapter from the project and also sat for a conversation with Roots drummer and fellow music nerd Ahmir \u201cQuestlove\u201d Thompson.<\/p>\n<p><em>The Uncool<\/em> focuses largely on Crowe\u2019s southern California upbringing and how his complex family dynamic and unique experiences as a teenage rock\u2019n\u2019roll journalist equally inspired his beloved 2000 film <em>Almost Famous<\/em>. One of the most gripping segments, which he read aloud last night, details his time on the road with the Allman Brothers Band, whom he profiled for a 1973 <em>Rolling Stone<\/em> cover story shortly after the death of founding member Duane Allman.<\/p>\n<p>More from Spin:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>\n\t\t\t<a href=\"https:\/\/www.spin.com\/2025\/10\/mumford-and-sons-new-album\/\">Mumford &amp; Sons Confirm Second LP In A Year<\/a>\n\t\t<\/li>\n<li>\n\t\t\t<a href=\"https:\/\/www.spin.com\/2025\/10\/are-you-there-jimi-hendrix-its-me-ken-the-ghost-hunter\/\">\u2018Are You There, Jimi Hendrix? It\u2019s Me, Ken the Ghost Hunter.\u2019<\/a>\n\t\t<\/li>\n<li>\n\t\t\t<a href=\"https:\/\/www.spin.com\/2025\/10\/tame-impala-deadbeat-tour-debut\/\">Tame Impala Deliver \u2018Deadbeat\u2019 Debuts At Tour Opener<\/a>\n\t\t<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Many of these real-life adventures, including a Greg Allman cocaine-induced episode of psychosis that led him to briefly confiscate hours of Crowe\u2019s interview tapes, made their way into <em>Almost Famous<\/em>, which has found new life as a stage production in recent years. Talking with Thompson, Crowe touched on the delicate balance between passion and professionalism in his younger days of chronicling the biggest names in music, including then-reclusive stars such as David Bowie and Led Zeppelin whom hadn\u2019t granted interviews in years.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cSome of the editors at <em>Rolling Stone<\/em> kind of challenged me for a time, like, why don\u2019t you spend some time and write about somebody that you don\u2019t really admire? See what that\u2019s like,\u201d Crowe recalled. \u201cI took an assignment to write about Bachman-Turner Overdrive. I don\u2019t know if I treasured it, but I went on the road with them for a little bit. Bob Seger was opening for them\u00a0 and I don\u2019t think he was thrilled about it.  They were committed guys, but I\u00a0just thought\u00a0they\u00a0were really full of themselves, and so I quoted them being full of themselves. The story came out and I think they loved it. But I thought, I\u2019d rather spend time interviewing Pete Townsend of the Who and get to see some Who shows. For better or worse, I just wanted to spend the time learning about the people that I really cared about.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Asked by Thompson if he would have secured some of these iconic interviews if he were merely a run-of-the-mill 20-something fan, Crowe replied, \u201cI was a pleasant change from some of the people that had come before me, like the guy who wrote about the Allman Brothers [for <em>Rolling Stone<\/em>] and looked down his nose at them. [He] didn\u2019t know why they were worthy of that kind of coverage, and there was a band playing their hearts out. And yeah, they were southern, but come on, man. Don\u2019t play that card on them. That kind of prejudice was still in the air. You know this, because you\u2019re amazing at it. If you listen well and care, people will tell you their stuff, and that was why I was able to get some of the interviews I was able to get.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Crowe and Thompson also touched on their mutual memories of shopping in record stores as kids, their love of novelty hits such as \u201cYummy Yummy Yummy\u201d by Ohio Express and what they\u2019d save from their memorabilia collections in the event of an emergency (Thompson said his life-spanning hard drive of music and <em>Soul Train<\/em> episodes, while Crowe named two autographed Marvin Gaye albums and the coat Kate Hudson wore as Penny Lane in <em>Almost Famous<\/em>).<\/p>\n<p>The chat wound down with Crowe providing an update on his long-in-the-works biopic of Joni Mitchell, whom he also named as his favorite interview subject of all time. \u201cMy feeling is you don\u2019t have to cram,\u201d he said when asked how such a film could encompass the entire life of someone as prolific as the nearly 82-year-old Mitchell. \u201cYou don\u2019t have to do just a slice. You do what is true to the power of the person that you\u2019re doing a film about, whether it\u2019s someone famous or not. A lot of biopics are storytelling from a distance. Sometimes they\u2019re not alive. Sometimes it\u2019s kind of a Wikipedia-ization of their life.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIf you can do something like <em>Control<\/em>, which was a movie about Ian Curtis and Joy Division, it gives you the feeling of the band,\u201d he continued. \u201cIf you don\u2019t even know the band, the elixir works. That\u2019s a so-called biopic that is also kind of a storytelling gift that\u2019s also a body rush, because you can use the music. And for me, doing a movie like that on Joni gives you the body rush of seeing that person from the inside out as opposed to looking in. [It\u2019s also] because of her participation and opening her life up to us and allowing me to interview like crazy. She keeps all of her stuff \u2014 all her instruments, all her houses. Her Laurel Canyon house, she\u2019s still the landlady of! So, we\u2019re gonna use all of it and it\u2019s gonna be from her life looking out, using all of her music. I want to subvert the genre and have somebody that\u2019s never heard of Joni Mitchell see her story and feel the music and go, I want to know more about this person. And [for] the people that love her [to say], that guy gets it.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Crowe\u2019s <em>The Uncool<\/em> promo tour continues tomorrow in Nashville alongside Sheryl Crow and will then visit Chicago (Nov. 1 with John Cusack), San Diego (Nov. 13 with Kate Hudson), Seattle (Nov. 19 with Eddie Vedder), Los Angeles (Nov. 20-21 with Luke Wilson and Judd Apatow) and San Francisco (Nov. 22 with Machine Gun Kelly).<\/p>\n<p>To see our running list of the top 100 greatest rock stars of all time, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.spin.com\/2021\/07\/the-greatest-rock-stars-of-all-time\/?utm_source=yahoo&amp;utm_medium=bottomlink&amp;utm_campaign=yahoolink\">click here<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div style=\"margin-top: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px;\" class=\"sharethis-inline-share-buttons\" ><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Roots&#8217; Questlove and Cameron Crowe on Oct. 28. 2025, in New York (photo: Jonathan Cohen). Writer\/filmmaker Cameron Crowe celebrated the release of his Avid Reader Press memoir, The Uncool,&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2682,6,24,4117],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6302","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cameron-crowe","category-news","category-pushly","category-questlove"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6302","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6302"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6302\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6302"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6302"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6302"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}