Cameron Crowe on ‘The Uncool,’ a Memoir of His Teen Rock Journalist Years, and How Patti Smith Inspired Its Prose — Also: What to Expect From His Joni Biopic

For much of the world, he had us at “Jerry Maguire,” or his “Fast Times at Ridgemont High” script, or “…Say Anything.” But for a select portion of his fandom, filmmaker Cameron Crowe really had us at the hello that was his early journalism career. Crowe first came to a kind of fame as a leading rock journo for Rolling Stone who just happened to be an emotionally intellectual teenager at the time — the time being one of rock ‘n’ roll’s golden ages in the 1970s, when he was tagging along on tour or in the studio with Led Zeppelin, David Bowie, Lynyrd Skynyrd and just about every other major rocker of the period. It’s an era he mined for semi-fiction in the movie and stage musical “Almost Famous”; now he’s telling the even truer stories, and plenty he never got to before, about in his splendid new memoir,…