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Cameron Crowe is looking back on his unlikely — and unparalleled — time with David Bowie.
In an interview with PEOPLE for this week’s print issue, the writer and director, 68, recalls the 18 months he spent alongside the rockstar, who died in 2016 at age 69. He also looks back on the period in his new memoir The Uncool, out on Oct. 28.
Crowe, who was working as a young reporter for Rolling Stone at the time, met Bowie while he was writing about Rolling Stones member Ronnie Wood. Though Bowie notoriously did not do press, Crowe and the musician hit it off. The “Ziggy Stardust” agreed to an interview, and became one of his most impactful assignments.
“David Bowie, over time, feels like somebody that just challenged me as a young artist when I wouldn’t have even thought the word artist would be involved in my life,” Crowe says. “He said, ‘Be an artist and hold up a mirror to me.’ I don’t know that he ever even looked fully in the mirror, but he gave me the mirror to cover him for a year and a half.”
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Bowie gifted Crowe with unprecedented access to his life at home and in the studio, as he recorded his 1976 album Station to Station. The singer even gave him the first pages of his unfinished autobiography.
“He was trying to get inside the purpose of what you asked and what you were really asking, and what he could suggest as something that you could read, that would give you more information, or listen to something that you might not have ever heard,” Crowe says.
When Crowe met Bowie again in 2006 for another Rolling Stone interview, he recalled how the musician’s views of that time were different from his own. It was a dark point in Bowie’s life that he claimed not to remember, Crowe says.
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“The very same time that he was stamping my passport as somebody to write a big profile, I think he was doing something that ultimately he was going to want to wipe from his emotional resume later,” Crowe says. “I think he was searching — he was seeking — and it led him into some very dark places that could have easily made him one of those guys that died way too young. And he knew it. He’s smart enough to know it.”
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“When I talked to him, I felt like he needed to sweep me and that whole time period away to truly move on. And this is the guy who was the best at reinventing himself.”
Crowe notes that one of his goals with The Uncool was to share the real stories behind some of the iconic people he’s worked as a journalist and filmmaker.
“[I wanted to] introduce people to friends that really helped me, and were vivid characters that otherwise would be swept away in the natural mists of time” he says. “So I gathered a bunch of friends and some heroes together.”
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This was especially true of Bowie, Crowe says.
“The Wikipedia-ization of Bowie sometimes leaves behind the warmth of this dude,” Crowe says. “This guy was really, really generous emotionally. [He] wanted to make sure how I was getting home, [saying] ‘Let me give you a ride, and let me write a song with you to show you how I write songs.’ I thought it was important to tell the story of that side.”
The Uncool will be published on Oct. 28 via Avid Reader Press, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, and is now available for preorder, wherever books are sold. Crowe will also kick off a book tour beginning Oct. 30 in Nashville.
