Like the movie it presents in fully realized soundtrack form, this collection of music is nothing short of a miracle. <\/p>\n
Almost Famous<\/i> is every rock writer\u2019s fantasia come to life, the barely-fictionalized tale of writer\/director Cameron Crowe\u2019s coming-of-age as a 15-year-old Rolling Stone<\/i> stringer interviewing rock stars in the ordinary yet epochal year of 1973. It won an Academy Award for Crowe\u2019s warm, witty, wise and powerful screenplay, but it wouldn\u2019t have been half the movie it is without the music he wove through the entire story like a golden thread of memory.<\/p>\n
What some readers will recognize and others may be unfamiliar with is that most of the time, the process of acquiring permission to use someone else\u2019s songs\u2014whether in recorded form for a movie soundtrack, or written form for a book\u2014is like wrestling a greased pig that\u2019s just had a haba\u00f1ero enema. There are a hundred different reasons it can fail. Crowe, of course, had one distinct advantage: he\u2019s on a first-name basis with many of the people who wrote the songs that ended up in his film. When the time came to land his biggest fish\u2014his old pals Led Zeppelin\u2014he approached the task with the requisite dramatic flair, flying in a custom cut of the scenes in which the songs would play to personally screen them for Jimmy Page and Robert Plant. <\/p>\n
Of course, at the time he was only acquiring the rights to include the songs in his movie. He was able to get permission to compile 17 of them into the soundtrack album issued at the same time in 2000, but that release covered less than half the songs used in the movie, and only one of the original tunes crafted by Crowe\u2019s then-wife Nancy Wilson of Heart for his fictional band Stillwater. A supplementary EP of the six Stillwater tunes created for Almost Famous<\/i> was released as part of the 10th anniversary director\u2019s cut DVD edition of the film, but that still didn\u2019t come close to covering all the musical bases that made the movie such a brilliant recreation of that distinctive moment in rock and roll.<\/p>\n
Through some combination of demands from the movie\u2019s fervent following and Crowe\u2019s own fondness for what is in essence the story of how he became himself, the film\u2019s creator resolved to deliver a very special 20th anniversary package to the fans that would remedy this situation. Personally, I\u2019ve never been a big fan of super deluxe sets with price tags over $100; they\u2019re so rarely worth the money and so often end up as trophies on a shelf rather than being actively enjoyed. But anyone who knows me at all knows that I am number one with a bullet on the chart of this release\u2019s target audience: an idealistic middle-aged rock writer with a weakness for nostalgia and a collector\u2019s completist habits, who also ranks Almost Famous<\/i> as his favorite movie of all time. <\/p>\n
So, yeah: just take my money<\/i>.<\/p>\n
They did, and I\u2019m here to tell you I don\u2019t regret a penny.<\/p>\n
The packaging on this release, it must be said, is spectacular. From inside a sturdy 10.5\u201dx12.5\u201d slipcase emerges an authentically textured 1973 high school binder with preprinted Crowe doodles and scribbles including \u201cTHE WHO,\u201d \u201cBLACK SABBATH,\u201d \u2018LESTER BANGS,\u201d and across the upper middle, \u201cLED ZEPPELIN.\u201d Flip it open and inside the front pocket flap is a newsprint recreation of the Rolling Stone<\/i> cover story that Crowe\u2019s doppelganger William Miller writes in the film, complete with centerfold montage of Stillwater concert photos, a series of cleverly faked, era-appropriate ads, and a pair of 1973 album reviews. Tucked into the same flap is a large, folded poster of Stillwater. Flipping through the binder, you get mocked-up tickets from two of the shows that appear in the film, followed by a superb 40-page concert-program-formatted booklet featuring dozens more photos and deeply affectionate and charming personal reminiscences from Crowe, much of the cast, and many members of the crew. <\/p>\n
And then you get to the music: five CDs\u2019 worth.<\/p>\n
The first, second and third discs intersperse every song that appears in the film with key snippets of dialogue from it, for a genuinely immersive experience. And what a soundtrack: Simon & Garfunkel, The Who, Iggy & The Stooges, Todd Rundgren, Jethro Tull, Yes, The Beach Boys and Joni Mitchell\u2026 and that\u2019s just on disc one. Disc two brings on board Rod Stewart, Little Feat, The Raspberries, The Seeds, Allman Brothers Band, The Guess Who, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Led Zeppelin, Neil Young & Crazy Horse, Fleetwood Mac (pre-Buckingham and Nicks), and Deep Purple, before finishing with the movie\u2019s epic singalong to Elton John\u2019s \u201cTiny Dancer\u201d\u2014heard here in a new mix that incorporates the cast\u2019s bus ride singalong. On disc three you get, ho-hum, MC5, Steely Dan, David Bowie, Cat Stevens, Jimi Hendrix, more Zeppelin, Free, more Elton, Stevie Wonder and\u2026 can I stop now? I think I can. You get the picture.<\/p>\n
The gold is in the way the snippets of dialogue (tracks with titles like \u201cDon\u2019t Take Drugs,\u201d \u201dIncendiary,\u201d \u201cI Am A Golden God\u201d and \u201cWhat Do You Love About Music?\u201d require no further explanation for anyone who has watched the movie) are interwoven with the music selections Crowe used to populate his cinematic universe. The other bit of magic comes in Crowe\u2019s song choices. The acts may be big ones, but the songs are almost all deep cuts, songs that fans like Penny Lane would have loved as their own special treasures, rather than the familiar radio hits embraced by the masses. The rightfully revered \u201cTiny Dancer\u201d sequence in fact features one of the few hit singles present on the soundtrack.<\/p>\n
The first three discs include a couple of Stillwater tracks that appear in the film; disc four re-presents in full all six of the original Stillwater songs recorded for the movie\u2014all sturdy takes on heartland rock that wouldn\u2019t feel out of place at a Bob Seger or Allman Brothers show\u2014and adds unreleased bonus tracks galore in the form of seven demos and the full renditions of three backstage acoustic jams glimpsed briefly in the movie. Disc five re-presents the original motion picture score composed by Nancy Wilson, previously unreleased in album form, here further augmented with 14 unreleased outtakes from the score.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s a pirate\u2019s booty of music and moments and dialogue and sensory impressions from a film that feels imprinted on my soul. So, yeah, let\u2019s cut to the chase: if any album I\u2019ve ever reviewed is an \u201cA,\u201d it\u2019s this one, based not as much on the quality of the music found here\u2014which is terrific\u2014as on the quality of the emotions that the whole experience of reliving this film still gives me. <\/p>\n
I wrote the first of the 999 album reviews that preceded this one four years before Almost Famous<\/i> came out, and yet I can\u2019t help feeling that the former would not and could not exist in a universe in which the latter did not also. I wrote an entire book<\/a> attempting to explain the reasons why I choose, again and again, to write about music, but the Cliff\u2019s Notes version could be reduced to just four words: Go watch Almost Famous<\/i>.<\/p>\n Thanks, Cameron.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":34412,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"tags":[],"artist":[10702],"rating":[5646],"class_list":["post-46251","review","type-review","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","artist-music-from-the-motion-picture","rating-rating-a"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/46251","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/review"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=46251"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/46251\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/34412"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=46251"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=46251"},{"taxonomy":"artist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artist?post=46251"},{"taxonomy":"rating","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rating?post=46251"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}