The Uncool

To watch things fall into place for me might have caused resentment in other fathers. Not James Crowe. Success, he explained in an interview I discovered years later, given to his hometown paper on the eve of his own death by heart attack, was defined by something he learned from his own dad. Did you bring joy to your community? Did you put something back into the world?

Normally a man of few words, Henley had written a lengthy speech as finely tuned as the best of his songwriting. “So we took turns,” he said. “Sometimes I was the designated scribe, the person whose job it was to document and hold the lantern while Glenn did the digging. Sometimes he kept the notes and held the lantern while I did the digging. What were we digging for? The stuff. Details and clues and images, invention, fresh ideas and melodies and intuitive understanding of people. And I can tell you the holder of the lantern doesn’t even know what his partner is digging for half the time. But he knows gold when he sees it. But like an actor or a novelist, you study dialogue. You listen to how people really talk and you learn little by little to take someone’s five-minute speech and make it into one sentence without losing anything.

The only problem with this house,” he said, “is that Satan lives in that swimming pool.” It was as if he were pointing out a pesky problem with termites. “I’ve seen him!

That night, my schoolteacher mother succumbed to the power of rock and roll. And even when a tie-dyed Romeo in front of us offered her a spoon of cocaine, she chose to ignore it. It was an unforgettable night, if only for what she said quietly as we walked to the car. “I understand your music,” she said. “It’s better than ours.

Did you enjoy Bob Dylan?” my mom asked as we filed out of the gymnasium. “It was so good!” My sister agreed. “Well, someday the Republicans are going to ruin all of this,” my mom said, “for everybody.

The Birchers,” my mom rumbled. She was never one to squander an opportunity to teach. “Watch out for the John Birch Society. One day they’ll take over. They’ll disguise themselves as Republicans and put all the teachers in jail!

Sometimes the story isn't the one you came to write but the one that finds you instead.

Music was already more than music. It was a door that opened for three minutes. Sometimes way longer. In the forbidden world there was no judgment. Only your own thoughts and secret desires, slashing through the atmosphere. And when the song was over, the door clanged shut again. There was no choice but to scramble back to the beginning. Sometimes I would listen to one song twenty or thirty times in a row. There had to be other people like me. I just hadn't met them yet.

It was a strange itch of not belonging that my favorite music scratched. This was the world of the happy/sad.

She was a seeker who collected the best ideas of all the philosophers she’d studied and brewed them into her own blend of strong-minded positivity.

You gotta have ‘The Attitude.’ When you have The Attitude, you don’t live or die with anybody else’s opinion. You control every situation if you have The Attitude. If that girl can’t smell your qualifications, move on! That’s The Attitude!

Did you bring joy to your community? Did you put something back into the world?

You have two options. You can stay the same and protect the formula that gave you your initial success. They’re going to crucify you for staying the same. If you change, they’re going to crucify you for changing. But staying the same is boring. And change is interesting. So, of the two options,” she concluded, “I’d rather be crucified for changing.

Here’s the thing,” she said forcefully. “You have two options. You can stay the same and protect the formula that gave you your initial success. They’re going to crucify you for staying the same. If you change, they’re going to crucify you for changing. But staying the same is boring. And change is interesting.

Nothing beats the sound of the human voice.

Sometimes the best conversations are the silent ones.

I will never stop marveling at the power of people’s memories and their ability to turn a gaping wound into a tall tale with a punch line.

I learned that over time the details fade. What lasts is the way someone made you feel.

It also struck me, even sitting there in his office: Here we were, two guys writing our stories about inclusion and popularity and cliques. Two guys with robust opinions and a supposed knowledge about culture, and what was happening and what wasn’t, both with no other place to go on a warm Saturday night. A secret meeting of the Uncool. “Good luck,” I said. “You too,” said Hughes.

I silently pledged to never dismiss my heroes so easily. Just because you went to the Troubadour in a bathrobe didn’t mean that you were finished. I think it was that night that I brewed a philosophy about fandom. If you were a true fan

Sometimes the story isn’t the one you came to write but the one that finds you instead.

always felt that a favorite song has a mind of its own. It arrives just when you need it

Maybe we’re all just one Little League grand slam away from immortality.

Mind is in every cell of the body. Thoughts are everything. —ALICE CROWE

Life is 10 percent what happens to you and 90 percent how you react. —CHARLES SWINDOLL

Put some goodness into the world before it blows up. [ -- Alice Crowe, Cameron Crowe's mother]