Cameron Crowe’s first meeting with David Bowie was a stroke of pure luck if there ever was one.
He was a young writer on assignment when he first mentioned to the musicians he was profiling — friends of Bowie — that he wanted to interview the singer himself. They promised they’d relay the message.
Some time later, sitting in his bedroom, his phone rang. It was Bowie calling from a train. He’d be in Los Angeles in a few days, he told Crowe, and was game to be interviewed when he arrived in the city.
“I was ready for it to be over at that point,” the Almost Famous writer-director recalled to reporters Tuesday, speaking on a panel for his upcoming Showtime series Roadies, about a traveling rock band crew, “but sure enough when he got to Los Angeles, and he called me and said, ‘Come up here. I’m staying at this house. Let’s meet and let’s spend some time together.’ And I spent six months straight with David Bowie at that time.”
Crowe would take short breaks to go back to his native San Diego, but primarily he was with Bowie who at the time was between albums (Young Americans and Station to Station), press shy, and experiencing what Crowe now called “kind of a wile period in his life.”
Crowe, who yesterday penned a tribute to Bowie on his site, saw him through all of it.
“Thank goodness I kept notes on every aspect to it. There were no limits. Everything was discussed. He said, ‘Ask me anything. Watch me create, watch me produce, watch me sad, watch me happy,'” he recalled. “And it was an incredibly vital experience because he said, You can do this story for whoever you want.’ Everybody wanted this story. It was a great help for my career.”
His takeaway, though, is what sticks out bright in his mind today: “He was always obsessed with music and art and never the business.”
“The thing I just wanted to say — I’ve had the last couple of days to think about it — [is that] David Bowie’s impact is so huge in that he presents himself now as a role model to artists who may need to remember that it’s not about branding, it’s about a restless need to be creative and to continue being creative,” he said. “David Bowie was the anti-branding artist.”
He continued: “For a young musician — or artist of any kind, anybody — it’s great to look to Bowie and see that seismic effect he had on people, not because he kept doing the same thing that worked again and again but because he always shifted up and served the gods of creativity. That’s what I got from him then and today.”
Crowe’s show Roadies will premiere on Showtime later this year.