Steve Matteo surveys 2025’s best rock books on the West Coast rock scene, sharing praise for Cameron Crowe, David Leaf and Jude Warne. Click through the book titles for purchase information:
CAMERON CROWE – ‘THE UNCOOL’: One of the most engaging memoirs of 2025 is Cameron Crowe’s The Uncool (Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster). Crowe is the award-winning screenwriter and director of such films as Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Say Anything, Jerry Maguire, Vanilla Sky and maybe most famously, Almost Famous. Almost Famous was a thinly veiled autobiographical coming-of-age story about an unassuming California-based, teenage rock fan who wrote for Rolling Stone magazine during their ’70s heyday.
Crowe’s memoir takes us through his life, mostly from birth to just as his movie career was taking off, with the end of the book bringing us up to today; it works as the perfect textual, non-fiction companion to Almost Famous. Fans of classic rock will thrill to Crowe’s affectionate and honest account of being at the center of the ’70s music firmament as a starry-eyed, yet surprisingly grounded kid. Crowe calls his book The Uncool, which is the only thing misleading about it. While he stresses his awkward teenage years and early 20s as a time when he was grappling with growing up and dealing with complicated family dynamics, he ends up being quite cool.
It’s his honesty and passion for rock ‘n’ roll and his connection to the exalted rock stars he wrote about, during those heady salad days of the rock scene, that forced him to grow up and face the world. He never brags about his cool times or wallows in recounting tales of dabbling in the sex-and-drugs rock star excesses of that era. Naturally, this is a very readable and engaging memoir.
Crowe walks a very fine line here between recounting his experience as a wide-eyed teen in love with rock ‘n’ roll and revealing the sometime conflicted nature of the rock gods he writes about so eloquently. His times with Gregg Allman, David Bowie, Kris Kristofferson, Tom Petty, Gram Parsons and members of the Eagles and Led Zeppelin, to name a few, are both insightful about those musicians and a snapshot of a brief time when true rock gods roamed the Earth. Cameron Crowe: very cool!
DAVID LEAF – ‘SMiLE: THE RISE, FALL AND RESURRECTION OF BRIAN WILSON’: David Leaf has become perhaps the foremost chronicler of the life and music of Brian Wilson. His newest book SMiLE: The Rise, Fall, and Resurrection of Brian Wilson (Omnibus Press) looks at the up-and-down professional career and personal life of Brian Wilson, the Beach Boys’ de-facto leader and visionary and one of the true geniuses in pop music history. Leaf has written eloquent and knowledgeable books on the group’s history and on Wilson’s iconic and misunderstood Smile album, as well as a definitive biography on Wilson, among many other books and projects.
What makes his new book such a welcome addition to his books and scholarship of Wilson and, ultimately, of the Beach Boys, is that this book is an oral history. Rather than re-telling the same Wilson and Beach Boys story, or hearing some critic’s opinion on the music, this book allows the people who were there and, in many cases, closest to Wilson, tell the story. Leaf allows a wide variety of voices to come through, painting a full picture of an artist who was not always as easy to nail down as some critics and historians would like to make people think.
The book is like a this-is-your-life, no-holds-barred epic tale of not only Wilson, but of the Beach Boys, as well as of the ups and downs of pop music stardom and falling and being resurrected. It also serves as a social and cultural history of a time and place and tells how the ’60s and beyond in California became a metaphor and petri dish of music, lifestyle and new ways of living. This may be Leaf’s best book yet and more of these oral histories on pop and rock music would be welcome.
JUDE WARNE – ‘LOWDOWN: THE MUSIC OF BOZ SCAGGS’: It’s hard to fully explain to music followers of today just how big an album Silk Degrees by Boz Scaggs was in 1976. It was one of many blockbuster albums that defined the 1970s, along with Tapestry by Carole King, Dark Side of the Moon by Pink Floyd, Frampton Comes Alive by Peter Frampton, Rumours by Fleetwood Mac, Aja by Steely Dan and Hotel California by the Eagles. They were blockbuster sellers, but also critically acclaimed. What they all had in common was musical artists who had toiled for years, often at first on the underground, but who then eventually broke big, through talent, innovation, timing hard work and record company support that allowed them to develop their sound.
Of the lot, Scaggs was easily the best singer and the most stylish. He came up through R&B circles and a stint with the Steve Miller Band, who boasted big albums of their own in the 1970s. He cultivated a unique blend of blues, R&B, soul, pop and rock, which was coupled with peerless musical support in the studio, and a little disco tinge and flash. The result was one of the most consequential blue-eyed-soul albums ever recorded and one that still sounds good 50 years later. In her book Lowdown: The Music of Boz Scaggs (Chicago Review Press), Jude Warne gives us the entire story of Scaggs ascending to such lofty heights.
She also tells the story of the challenges he faced after such a massive success, coupled with personal problems that would have derailed a lesser person. There is also her take on how much studio vets who played in the group Toto were so integral to his success and how the album helped as a springboard to their own success. This is the definitive Scaggs bio, and while many may not know his story or the blockbuster phenomenon of Silk Degrees, this book is a fresh reminder of just what a major talent he is and how important Silk Degrees still is from maybe the most successful decade in pop music.
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