Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Welcome to All There Is. Wherever you are in the world and in your grief, I'm glad you're here. You're not alone. My guest is Cameron Crowe. He wrote and directed amazing movies like Say Anything, Jerry Maguire, Vanilla Sky. He wrote the screenplay for Fast Times at Ridgemont High and also wrote and directed Almost Famous.
He got an Academy Award for the screenplay for that film, which is based on his experiences as the youngest contributor ever for Rolling Stone magazine. It's an amazing story. Cameron graduated high school at 15 and started writing for Rolling Stone, interviewing rock legends like Bob Dylan, David Bowie, Joni Mitchell, The Who, and a lot of others.
He's now written a memoir about his childhood called The Uncool. It's a great read. And as soon as I finished it, I knew I wanted to speak with him for this podcast. Cameron experienced loss early on. He was just 10 when one of his two sisters, Kathy, died by suicide. She was 19. That's where we began our conversation.
When you were growing up, after your sister Kathy's suicide, in your family, was it talked about?
Anderson, it was aggressively avoided. It was more than not talked about. It was a hairpin turn whenever the subject got close.
At one point, you did have a conversation with your mom. You tried.
I tried. I would try often. And sometimes I'd get like 30 or 40 seconds in before the emergency brake got pulled by her throwing her hands up and saying, I can't talk about this. I don't want to. Don't make me talk about it. Don't make me talk about it. And then you just feel like you're this wicked person for delving deeper.
A lot of the stuff that's been talked about in your amazing interviews, it's the things we bury and how they fester and how they never go away. You think they're gone. You think you've outlived them. And they're there. When you open yourself up to all the questions, then you've got a shot at getting them answered. But what was amazing is that Kathy...
And even my dad, who died at a pretty young age, 65, there were so many conversations that we had never had. And what I found was, and I don't know if you found this to be the case, but people leave clues behind. Sometimes. often on purpose. They leave clues behind, the songs they loved, the books they loved, the photos they loved. Usually it's not a diary, it's the little things.
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Chapter 2: What personal loss does Cameron Crowe discuss in this episode?
Brutal. And I knew him as a real estate man. But I met him as a soldier writing the book, which was amazing.
And you said that in writing the book, you found yourself in conversation with Kathy.
I did. I had a really wonderful conversation with Kathy because, again, if you dig, if you look for these crumbs, I found a piece in a small local newspaper from Palm Springs where she had been part of like a weekly book club. And she came in with this book and said, this is the best book I've ever read. and was effusive about how it spoke to her.
So the book was called The Fairy Doll, and I couldn't go fast enough to find this book. And I read the book, and it was a thinly veiled account of her own feeling like she was not a part of most of the lives of the people who judged her because she was bipolar and painfully so at a time when people really didn't have room in their hearts or minds for that kind of situation.
So she had found a book where...
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Chapter 3: How did Crowe's family handle the topic of grief after Kathy's death?
where the salvation for that feeling of being left out and pushed away from crowds and friendship was music. That was the theme of this book. There was a sound that delivered this young girl who was ridiculed by all the people around her. There was a sound that gave her a transcendent feeling. And I read this and I'm like, well, this fits exactly with the way Kathy was with me.
Her key to salvation was music.
You write in the book about Kathy, you said there were periods when she was just gone from us, even when she was sitting right there at the table. It was confusing and scary for a kid. The house felt different, like something fragile had cracked and we were all tiptoeing around it. When Kathy was institutionalized, it changed the energy of the house completely.
There was a silence that hadn't been there before. My parents were worried in a way that felt permanent. I didn't really understand what was happening. I just knew something was broken and nobody could explain it in a way that made sense to me.
Yeah, yeah. What was Kathy like? Kathy was a deep feeling romantic. And so am I. And so much of what I learned about her underlined the things that made me kind of who I am and the choices that I made. And so that was an example of an older sister coming through the mists of time, loss, grief,
being expelled from huge parts of her life when she walked the earth, coming back to speak so clearly and so eloquently to me about music.
You write that somewhere around first grade, Kathy came home. And you said it with the words that changed everything. The kids are teasing me about not being normal, she said. My parents' lives had become a quest for Kathy's diagnosis. Her emotions could swing wildly from sweetness to sadness. What's wrong with Kathy, I asked.
My parents, who were probably as confused about her condition as I was, would struggle to explain it to me. They used the phrase emotionally disturbed. It was a kind explanation for the doctors in Los Angeles had also diagnosed as schizophrenic.
I remember going through the hallways of these spotless hospitals and doctors' buildings in L.A. They were searching for a diagnosis on my sister. And I just remember the drives home, Anderson. Everybody was so distraught. And there was nobody that kind of bent down and said, look, I know what you're going through. Let's look to find some kind of comfort for this young girl.
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Chapter 4: What insights does Crowe share about conversations with his sister Kathy?
I mostly listened to it, but with my dad, The last time I talked to him, I didn't listen to it. So it was the one time I never told him I loved him in a million conversations. And of course, it was the last time. So say it.
When you talk about feeling, Kathy, now, is it a good feeling? It's not tainted?
It's another great question. It's a beautiful, close feeling. Like I picked up a cue from her and got it just the way she wanted me to get it. It's that sparkle between people when you've made a great connection. And I felt that before, just as a little kid to an older sister. But it's the adult-to-adult connection that I feel we finally got to make.
Through music, through emotion, through being able to write about it, just listening to you read some of the stuff right there, I go right back to the searching. I wanted to meet her. I wanted to know her better.
And she gave you the gift of music. She introduced you to the magic of it.
She did. She said that thing that nobody had said to me before in her own deeply personal way, that when words fail you, ride music it'll take you a long way and it has it's taken me Everywhere I've been able to go. Making movies is a musical experience most of the time for me. And I can go back to music as a diary and as a souvenir for the way I felt in a certain time.
And music was what allowed her to introduce herself to me as an adult. And I go back to what you and Patti Smith were talking about, the sacred wounds. are not painful necessarily. The sacred wounds can be treasures. And these sacred wounds I have for my sister and my dad and my mom and friends beyond my family, it keeps the conversation alive with people that understood you and vice versa.
And I think you do that in these conversations, Anderson. You keep the lines of communication open without emotional censorship. It's really important.
We're going to take a quick break, but before we do, I just want to play what Patti Smith said to me about sacred wounds in an earlier podcast that Cameron just spoke about.
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Chapter 5: How does music play a role in Crowe's memories of Kathy?
of the concert hall where this great event has happened. I feel like so much of my life I've done that. I've gone back and danced among the trash of the empty concert hall because it's just, it's a place where deep feeling resides. The people that we love and care so much about who made such an impression on us are still there.
And if we open up to them, they're so often there to meet us at that crossroads.
She had taken you to a record store prior to her death.
We lived in the desert. We lived in Indio. And Indio was a windswept town where nothing happened except the date festival. once a year. Like dates. Like dates.
Which, as you point out in the book, are the color of cockroaches.
The color of cockroaches. Anderson, thank you for picking that out. You tend to pick out my favorite lines in this book. Yes. But yes, they had a festival for dates. And the way you got records was to go to this place called Custom Classics. that was both a music store and also records if you ordered them.
So she took me to my first record store and showed me that it was a portal to so much and so much feeling.
She took you because you wanted to impress a girl, and she suggested buying some music for this girl, and you bought Silence Is Golden.
The Tremolos. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The silence is golden. But when I did give the record, the girl was so impressed she called over her boyfriend, who would pat me on the head and thank me for being their little mascot and invited me to come along on the date that I'd suggested. Wow. But I can tell you this is the power of music. Whenever I hear that Tremolos record, I ache, baby.
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Chapter 6: What reflections does Crowe have on the impact of his sister's mental health?
Had she been born later, there would have been a diagnosis. There would have been a path for her. But if you subscribe to that idea, there's a paper-thin wall between you and the person that you lost. Our relationship has never been better.
You still have a relationship with her, you feel?
I really feel it. I really feel it. And I feel like my mom had to exit the stage for it to truly happen. I wish I'd been able to talk to my mom about it, but I don't think that ever was going to happen. That was how much that loss remained untold. unmet with her.
That idea that you can still have a relationship with someone who's died was revolutionary to me and I learned it from a documentary filmmaker named Kristen Johnson who made a film about her dad who recently died from Alzheimer's. She brought up that idea and I literally did not understand the word she was talking about.
That's how like deeply buried I was but I now understand that and I have a deeper relationship with my dad now than I did before and I know him in ways I never did before.
No doubt. The other thing is when you become the age of the parent, ooh, you've lost. Like when I became the age of my dad, when he died, oh, did the gates open to some other stuff? Because it's a really basic feeling when you're a kid. It's like you pass into a whole other kingdom where you're anointed as an adult, and you lose the feelings that cripple you as a kid. You become an adult.
Then you get to be the age of your parent, and you're like, oh, man. There's no more answers than there used to be. There's just different questions. This is amazing. My dad was just a guy. Yeah. Trying to make it.
Just struggling along like everybody else.
And trying to appear like he had more answers than he did to the kid who was me. So then that secret gets passed along. That there's no secret.
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