And Now A Thousand Years Between...

I remember first reading a review in a magazine and didn't think anything of it. Then I read the review that Friday morning in the Fresno Bee which gave it an "A-". I was impressed as well as nonplussed, considering it was a Cameron Crowe film. He'd recently put out "Jerry McGuire" which was not that great though it contained a couple of quotable lines. The most commonly plugged image was a kid standing outside with a group of adults in the background boarding a small airplane. What exactly was the film trying to say?
I came home from work, the beginning of my second year of teaching. I had an amazing group of students in an honors government/economics course, along with my first AP United States History class. I had just spent a week in San Diego with my brother and his wife, partly for vacation, partly for an AP teaching conference in order to prepare myself for this brutal course. I was tired and I had a ton of work to do that weekend, let alone that night. My best friends called my wife and I, saying that they were going to the film. There really wasn't a question of whether I was going; we were. It was Cameron Crowe. What the hell, I thought; at least we'd go out to a late dinner after the movie.
We piled into the theater, sitting relatively close, in our typical order of wife-husband-wife-husband, and the lights dimmed and the previews aired. I thought the opening credits were cool, with an open desk drawer with a ton of concert memorabilia that I recognized. Seeing the cast, I was curious, having known a couple of actors. The beginning, with the Chipmunk Song and a couple of very familiar scenes in San Diego had me paying close attention, still not quite sure of what was going to happen. A couple of very funny lines and then a critical scene: the older daughter moving out of the house "in order to become a stewardess". She wanted her mother, an over-bearing but wise type, to listen to her life, which was, apparently summed up in a single rock and roll song. The stylus dropped onto the vinyl lp and soon the opening harmonies of Simon and Garfunkel's "America" moved out of the hi-fi speakers and throughout the theater and soon, I thought to myself, we've got something. Then, the plot moved along four quick years with The Who's "Sparks" spinning and my friends and I all looked at each other like children just watching their favorite superhero stepping out, in costume, ready to defeat the villain. From there, the film blurred by in what seemed like a half-hour, with memorable performances by the cast, an amazing array of rock and roll history thrown into a fictional story and a nostalgic, sentimental and deeply personal love story by a director who truly loved his music history. As the chords of Led Zeppelin's "Tangerine" rang out across a blackened screen, giving the viewers the chance to remember their own life's lost loves, I couldn't believe what I had just seen. "Almost Famous" had just wisked me back to the summer preceding my birth, when the mythology was still current event and the gods still delinquent musicians. And yet,

The very next morning, I let my wife sleep in VERY late as I bee-lined it to Best Buy to purchase two albums, the film soundtrack and The Who's Tommy, which, unanswerably, I had not only not owned but had never heard (!). The next night, I won a radio station contest and was able to scoop up several special edition promotional film posters. Later that month, Kate Hudson was on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine (four of them, four of us...) and the autumn of the year in which I supported a presidential candidate truly for the first time in my adulthood (sorry, former students, still not tellling) was consumed with dissecting the film and the stories that went into the semi-autobiography of Cameron Crowe. I'm not sure there are many other movies I've see more, other than Forrest Gump, Star Wars or maybe Annie Hall than AF. I went on to spend hundreds of dollars in filling in my music collection hinted at from the film. I revisited Crowe's movies (still avoiding JM) and have come to love most of them. And yet, there's still nothing like "Almost Famous". So, in my blubber-fest, I'm going to wrap this up, pour myself a strong one, turn off the Giants game and put on "Almost Famous". And think back to a simpler, more innocent time of my own life (and the nation's; can anyone remember 9/10?) and say thank you to a silly little film (and LOTS of music) that has touched me so much that it hurts.