The big joke has always been that the music business is junior high school with money, and that seems truer now than ever before. Even the kids that pretend to be misunderstood loners (Pete Wentz) still want to bang the cheerleader (Ashlee Simpson), which shows to me how little their careers have to do with the music they're making.

The big joke has always been that the music business is junior high school with money, and that seems truer now than ever before. Even the kids that pretend to be misunderstood loners (Pete Wentz) still want to bang the cheerleader (Ashlee Simpson), which shows to me how little their careers have to do with the music they're making.

The big joke has always been that the music business is junior high school with money, and that seems truer now than ever before. Even the kids that pretend to be misunderstood loners (Pete Wentz) still want to bang the cheerleader (Ashlee Simpson), which shows to me how little their careers have to do with the music they're making.

My low opinion of musicians actually comes less from my experiences as a journalist or fan than from my years as a working musician myself. Takes one to know one, I guess.

And I just found Almost Famous embarrassing. It's adolescent-male wish-fulfillment of the basest sort, really—a fanboy's fantasy splashed on screen: Wow, whouldn't it be cool if I met my favorite writer ever and he was this really cool guy and he really liked me and I got to meet all these bands and we'd be really good friends and all the girls would think I was really cool and…

The fact that it's based on the writer's own true life story makes it even more inexcusable. I hold to the late, great Dennis Potter's dictum that we should all regard our own pasts with a sort of tender contempt; Cameron Crowe seems a little too enamored of his younger self, which would seem to me to indicate a lack of necessary distance, or perhaps a continued immaturity.

I'm suspicious of people who rhapsodize their own long-gone youth. Me? I like being a grown-up, and I wouldn't want to be young again, not for all the tea in China.

My low opinion of musicians actually comes less from my experiences as a journalist or fan than from my years as a working musician myself. Takes one to know one, I guess.

And I just found Almost Famous embarrassing. It's adolescent-male wish-fulfillment of the basest sort, really—a fanboy's fantasy splashed on screen: Wow, whouldn't it be cool if I met my favorite writer ever and he was this really cool guy and he really liked me and I got to meet all these bands and we'd be really good friends and all the girls would think I was really cool and…

The fact that it's based on the writer's own true life story makes it even more inexcusable. I hold to the late, great Dennis Potter's dictum that we should all regard our own pasts with a sort of tender contempt; Cameron Crowe seems a little too enamored of his younger self, which would seem to me to indicate a lack of necessary distance, or perhaps a continued immaturity.

I'm suspicious of people who rhapsodize their own long-gone youth. Me? I like being a grown-up, and I wouldn't want to be young again, not for all the tea in China.

BTW, Jack, I'm displeased with your glass-practically-empty view of Almost Famous. I'm not saying you're wrong about any of the individual facts about rockers, scenesters, etc being shallow and most of the music being mediocre. But I can't countenance the your attitude about the whole thing.

Every one of us who writes about this stuff probably sees a little bit of him/herself in that story–things we either did or dreamed of doing. I know that for me — having gone backstage for the first time at age 17 at a Pretenders/Alarm concert and having had my ears chewed off for an hour and a half by two guys like Mike Peters and Eddie MacDonald, who thought at the time that their overwrought revolution-rock was the culmination of punk and the ultimate expression of their generation — the romance was EVERYTHING.

The reason, as surmised, is that these supportive, sympathetic celebs didn't want to cross either hitmaker for fear of damaging future collaborations. Never mind their bald-faced acceptance of assault and battery, there are future dollars to be made. Don't burn that bridge! Don't do it! So, yeah. Even when some of the groups were being utter tools in their regressive interviews, none were going to come right out and say, “Adam Levine is three steps away from being a full-blown pedophile and doesn't really care who hangs off his hose so long as they have a pulse.” Why? Don't burn that bridge! Don't do it!!