Cameron Crowe wrote profiles and cover stories for Rolling Stone magazine when he was as young as 16. This put him in the company of bands like the Eagles, the Allman Brothers Band, Lynyrd Skynyrd and Led Zeppelin — but only after taking the bus, since he was too young to drive.
To interview Kris Kristofferson at an El Torito, the pair had to sit in the lobby because Crowe, 15, wasn’t allowed in the bar.
He felt out of place in another way. His mother skipped him to first grade at age 5, and he also skipped fifth grade, meaning that the baby-faced student graduated early at 16.
Crowe’s first-ever concert was similarly ahead of his actual age. On Feb. 25, 1964, his mom took him and a sister to the UC Riverside gym to see Bob Dylan.
Crowe was 7.
The delightfully odd story has been a talking point of the press tour for Crowe’s memoir, “The Uncool.” You might know him as the writer-director of “Jerry Maguire,” “Almost Famous” and “Say Anything…” and writer of “Fast Times at Ridgemont High.”
His mother, Alice, was a school counselor and teacher.
“My mom, who was interested in anything academic, saw this little piece in the newspaper about a protest singer named Bob Dylan coming to the local gymnasium,” Crowe told CBS’ “Late Night” host Stephen Colbert last October. “So she said, ‘I’m going to take you to see this protest singer, who is speaking about politics and important things.’”
“What town is this, I’m sorry?” Colbert interjected.
“This is in Riverside, California,” Crowe replied.
Tingle!
Careful readers will already know about this show. It was the subject of a column here in February 2021. I’m a Dylan fan who was startled to learn that he’d appeared in the Inland Empire so early in his career.
And here it turns out that third-grader Cameron Crowe was in the audience. Getting a head start on the days when he was Rolling Stone’s youngest writer, he was almost certainly the youngest person in the audience at his first concert.
Cameron Crowe, the screenwriter-director of such movies as “Almost Famous” and “Jerry Maguire,” has published a memoir, “The Uncool,” about his years writing about rock music. He was born and raised in Riverside County. (Leonardo Munoz/AFP via Getty Images/TNS)“We sat on this cold gymnasium floor,” Crowe reminisced to Colbert, “and this guy kind of came out jauntily with loose Levi’s and a big white shirt and it was Bob Dylan and he had just written ‘The Times They Are A-Changin’.’”
Rock music was forbidden in the protective Crowe household. In fact, four years later, when Simon and Garfunkel were on “The Smothers Brothers Show,” Crowe’s mother wrote letters of complaint to the network and the sponsors.
I repeat: Simon and Garfunkel.
Crowe cited Dylan’s Riverside concert on Terry Gross’ “Fresh Air” talk show on NPR last October as well, reader Kate Kirsh alerted me.
Riverside officialdom might wish their city were getting national publicity for something contemporary, not from six decades ago. But then, to have hosted a young Dylan — when he was, dare I say it, a complete unknown — is a bragging point.
The future City of Arts and Innovation was on it early.
In “The Uncool,” Crowe says more about the show. The gym was three-quarters full. His mother brought a blanket to put between them and that cold gymnasium floor.
Minutes before the concert, Cassius Clay, later to become Muhammad Ali, had beaten Sonny Liston in an upset in the boxing ring. Dylan opened by singing his anti-boxing song “Who Killed Davey Moore?”, dedicating it to Clay.
“I loved his sense of humor,” Crowe writes. “Soon we were all on his side. The chilly gymnasium had become the gathering of a tribe. It was that rare feeling that we were all exactly where we belonged.” He thought: “So, this is what a concert is like.”
What you’re probably wondering is how a young Cameron Crowe happened to be in Riverside.
I read “The Uncool” to find out.
Crowe was born in 1957 in Palm Springs, where the family — Alice and James, who sold real estate — lived on Pasatiempo Road in the El Mirador neighborhood. He was the youngest child with two older sisters, Cindy and Cathy. (That’s enough counting Crowes.)
They moved to Indio in the mid-1960s, he writes, where he and his sisters bought records at Custom Classics, listened to local radio station KREO and attended the Date Festival.
Before that, in 1964, he briefly attended school in Mexico while his mother took a university course. And there may have been a stop that year in Riverside.
Kirch, a Riverside native, told me Crowe joined her third-grade class at St. Francis de Sales Catholic school in 1964 after the school year was underway. A Riverside residency would make sense in light of their attending the UCR Dylan concert.
Crowe does say he attended Catholic schools and also that an aunt and uncle lived at March Air Force Base. I might have liked to pin some of this down for posterity, but my email to the book’s publicist did not receive a response.
It happens. Major media outlets bring heat. Compared to them, I am a cold gymnasium floor.
Anyway, Crowe writes in “The Uncool” that he lived in Riverside County until age 13, when the family moved to San Diego. As rock critic Lester Bangs later told Crowe, being from San Diego automatically made them both uncool.
That first year in San Diego, 1969, Crowe got his mother to take him to two concerts, one representing the past, the other the future.
The first was Elvis Presley. His 47-minute concert included scarf throwing, karate kicks, impressions of John Wayne and Richard Nixon, and occasional singing. Mother and son had no idea what to make of it.
The second, a week later, was electrifying: Derek and the Dominoes, led by Eric Clapton.
His mother saw the light.
“I understand your music,” she told him on the way back to the car. “It’s better than ours.”
More Dead
My cautious caveat here Wednesday that the Grateful Dead performed in the Inland Empire “twice that I’m aware of” was wise. Readers Ethan Horan of Redlands and JP Morgan of Riverside each emailed to say the band performed here five times, not two.
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Bob Weir dies at 78; Grateful Dead played San Bernardino twice A steal: Lou Brock signed baseball given to fan in Pomona (me) Reading for pleasure continues to fall, but some defy the trend Yet another ‘last’ meal at Cole’s French Dips, still open in DTLA ‘Jesus was a refugee,’ declares church’s Nativity display in ClaremontThe Dead were at San Bernardino’s Swing Auditorium on four occasions: Dec. 13, 1969; Feb. 26, 1977; Jan. 6, 1978; and Dec. 12, 1980. Morgan attended the latter show. I had cited only the 1977 show and 1982’s US Festival, just outside San Bernardino in Glen Helen.
More to be grateful for.
David Allen writes Friday, Sunday and Wednesday from life’s cold gymnasium floor. Email [email protected], phone 909-483-9339, and follow davidallencolumnist on Facebook or Instagram, @davidallen909 on X or @davidallen909.bsky.social on Bluesky.
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