The one role Billy Crudup cherishes the most: “I think that will always be with me”
Despite the fact that movies and songs have grown largely apart over the decades, it’s still a wonderful thing when you’re watching a film and a song comes on you don’t know, and you make a mental note to look it up immediately afterwards.
It’s happened to me on plenty of occasions, but possibly most memorably while sitting in a cinema seeing Almost Famous, starring Billy Crudup.
A semi-autobiographical love letter to rock and roll by Cameron Crowe, it remains one of the finest films about music, escapism and adventure ever made, and contains the song that jumped out at me during the joyous coach ride midway through, with the fictional Stillwater band getting over a bad falling out simply by singing along to ‘Tiny Dancer’ by Elton John.
Now, you might well think, with some justification, that I should have been aware of this song before the year 2000, when the film was released, but the truth is, growing up, Elton John was desperately, horrifically not cool, standing as a Disney singing, tantrum-throwing male diva who was about as mainstream as it got. However, Almost Famous changed that completely, sending folks scurrying back to his earlier albums, especially Madman Across the Water, the 1971 record that featured ‘Tiny Dancer’ as its opening track.
And the film itself was manna from heaven for anyone who ever loved guitar music and harboured dreams of becoming a writer, which saw Crowe imbuing the two hours with every bit of love he had growing up for bands like The Who, The Rolling Stones and Creedence Clearwater Revival as he desperately tried to get Rolling Stone to notice him as a wannabe teenager. Then there was Stillwater themselves, the band who, up until the last moment and an exchange of differences, was to have been led by Brad Pitt, but instead had the then-unknown Crudup cast as their lead singer.
There was widespread recognition of just what a special film Crowe had put together almost immediately; the film was nominated for three Oscars, including a ‘Best Screenplay’ win for Crowe, and Kate Hudson won a Golden Globe award for her magnetic performance as the flighty, damaged groupie Penny Lane. Perhaps the only surprise was that it didn’t do anywhere near as well as hoped at the box office, despite rock fans everywhere lining up to see it, making a sizable loss in cinemas.
Many years later, Crudup was asked by Collider if the movie remains as special to him as so many others, and he enthusiastically responded, “Of course! Can you imagine if that wasn’t true? Everybody who was a part of that holds that film in high esteem, and for no other reason than Cameron Crowe is a wonderful human being. To be able to spend six months with him, he built this magical recreation of his childhood.”
Indeed, Crowe literally poured his heart and soul into the project, using his wife Nancy Wilson from the band Heart to co-write songs for Stillwater while bringing in the likes of Peter Frampton and Pearl Jam’s Mike McCready to play on them. Crowe also managed to get the famously reticent Led Zeppelin to allow the use of their music in the movie after he flew to the UK with a copy for a private screening for Jimmy Page and Robert Plant. As for the story, he was entirely inspired by his days as a teenage scribe at Rolling Stone, the counter-culture magazine that changed music publishing forever, which had him regularly travel with groups like the Allman Brothers, reporting back on the carnage that he witnessed.
Crudup added, “He [Crowe] made that rather risky lifestyle seem downright folksy, and that’s because of the way it sat with him, in his memory. That’s the way he carried all of those artefacts with him. So, yeah, I think that will always be with me. I went and saw the musical just before it closed, and I sat next to Cameron. It was a bit of an acid trip, seeing a bit of your former life played out in front of you, but it was also really magical because it brought back so many of those great memories.”
