Looking Back at Almost Famous (2000) and the Journalism Dreams of My Youth

Today’s issue of Dust On The VCR is another subscriber request! This film was chosen by Kevin Pearsall, one of my closest friends in the whole wide world. Kevin and I have a particular connection when it comes to music (we’ve been to countless shows together) and writing (we were both English majors and college newspaper staffers). In fact, we covered two Bonnaroos together—he took the photos, I wrote the words. He claims that he chose today’s film because he’s been on a Cameron Crowe kick lately, but after revisiting Almost Famous for the first time in over a decade, I know that he somehow knew I needed to reconnect with it and he did this for me. So thank you, Kevin. Anyway. Want to request a film for a future issue? Subscribe to the paid version!

Reader, do you ever think back to your senior quote? I do it often. I spent my underclassman years carefully contemplating what I would choose to be immortalized in the pages of my high school yearbook.

And frankly, I remain unembarrassed by what I chose, because it’s a pretty accurate reflection of what I was at age 17: a clueless dork who thought being in a band was an attainable career. That’s why my senior quote comes from Almost Famous, specifically the scene where William, our teenage hero journalist, is interviewing Jason Lee’s character, the lead singer of Stillwater:

“Rock ‘n roll is a lifestyle and a way of thinking. And it’s not about money and popularity, although some money would be nice. …And the chicks are great.”*

I fell in love with rock ‘n roll in elementary school, dug deeper to discover the music that I could really connect with in middle school, and found friends to make our own music with in high school. Our band played every local gig we could get—Cave 9, The High Note Lounge, that church on Lorna Road, heck, we played the Alpine Ice Arena—and we even hit the road a bit to play shows in places like Gadsden and Marietta.

It’s no wonder, then, that I loved a movie like Almost Famous. And looking back at it a couple decades later, I can see why: I watched the film through William’s eyes.

I was too young and too uncool for the sex and drugs, but the rock ‘n roll was everything. The idea of creating art, taking that art from city to city, connecting with hundreds or even thousands of people each night, and getting paid for it? I would’ve signed on the dotted line no matter what it took. I saw myself in Stillwater’s shoes, believing that maybe if we just stuck with it and kept playing, we’d eventually make it.

It’s funny, then, that I wound up in William’s shoes instead.

Turns out my band wasn’t good enough to make the cover of Rolling Stone.** I wouldn’t have been brave enough to forgo a college degree for a serious commitment to music anyhow. But thanks to an understaffed student newspaper at my liberal arts school with an open position for an arts and entertainment editor, I was writing about music (and movies, and theatre, and visual arts). And thanks to a connection at The Birmingham News and a features editor who was willing to throw a few assignments at a 19-year-old kid, I was getting paid to write about all of those things.*** And I did that off and on for a decade, reviewing concerts and plays and music festivals, often cranking out 600 words late at night to hit a morning-after deadline.****

Now that my freelance journalism days are behind me—and my dreams of a music career are buried deep in the Alabama dirt—I see Almost Famous not through William’s eyes but those of Cameron Crowe, its creative mastermind.

Crowe was, of course, drawn to this sort of story because it’s partially about his own life as a teenage music writer. But I think there’s more to it. I’m sure it’s intoxicating being in a famous rock ‘n roll band, but there’s something quietly compelling about being the one observing and reporting in the margins—the one who’s telling the story instead of living it.

Because that’s how some of us create our own art, isn’t it? A magazine feature isn’t exactly “Stairway to Heaven,” but it’s storytelling all the same. The Hold Steady once said “These dreams, they seem to cost money, yeah, but money costs some dreams,” and I think that’s true, but it didn’t feel like a concession when I hung up my bass and picked up a pen—it felt like a trade.

Maybe Cameron Crowe provided more of a spark for my right brain than I realized back in high school. But at the very least, he taught me that writers can be rock stars too.

*Did I include this last line despite having exactly zero girlfriends in high school? You’re damn right I did.

**Our lead guitarist and chief composer did, however, make it to the pages of The New York Times with a different band many years later. I had nothing to do with it, of course, but I’m proud of him.

***Shouts out to Tom Arenberg for passing my name along even though I’d missed the internship deadline by multiple months, and shouts out to Alec Harvey for seeing enough promise in my clips to give me a shot.

****I did eventually do some magazine writing too. R.I.P. Birmingham Magazine.

Almost Famous is now streaming on Showtime and DirecTV, and it is available to rent elsewhere.