Crowe At The Crossroads - by Nui Te Koha,

Weekend Magazine, February 17th, 2001


He calls himself the master of unrequited love and says he sacrificed his relationship with Meg Ryan for life Down Under. Nui Te Koha spends a day on the road with actor and musician Russell Crowe.

Life is sometimes easily boxed. Or so Russell Crowe discovered when his film career began fast-tracking six years ago and the accumulated spoils and accolades of the job had to be shipped from Hollywood to me a far in northern New South Wales.
"When I first bought that property, I lived in a caravan for three years," Crowe says. "I let my parents move into the little house and eventually I built some stuff... and there's an office there for me now. And six years of stuff came out of boxes and bags, and got stuck on shelves and put on walls."
"I sat in a chair and looked at this wall and it was covered in all these things. Very tastefully, mind you," he chuckles. "And I had this perspective. I wasn't chasing anything. I was in the middle of it: the thing I had been looking for in terms of getting myself to a platform of being able to do work of the highest calibre in a medium I had chosen to work in." "Here I am," Crowe says without a hint of pretence or ego.

"I can take a little bit more time. I can take a deeper breath because it's not the pursuit anymore, it's the journey." "To sit back and look at that wall - and this happened only recently - it was like, 'OK, I can relax a little bit. I still have to work as hard, but I don't have to work on getting the work."

Crowe, 36 - actor, musician and, more recently, a man oddly famous for being in love with Meg Ryan - is at one of life's crossroads. There's no crisis, retirement plan or pangs of regret. He simply wants to make more time for himself after throwing much heart and soul into the "day job." Crowe's own downbeat term for his incredibly successful acting career. "It's not about being selfish," he says. "You have to be prepared to do something for yourself. Now and then you have to let yourself off the hook in terms of responsibility." And, in a nice twist to the Crowe enigma, lately it's been the musician inside the talented actor who's bared his soul most on the trickly subject of life's checks and balances.

Bastard Life or Clarity, the latest album from Crowe's band, Thirty Odd Foot of Grunts, is about choices, good and bad. In a revealing journey of broken relationships, haunted pasts, sacrifices, real-life people and tragedies. Crowe's characters shift between hope and hopelessness.

Personally, Crowe, an Oscar-nominated actor and one of this country's most critically acclaimed thespians, says he chose clarity over a bastard life a long time ago. "I don't think I could do the job I do and include all the things I do in my life without a certain degree of clarity." "However, volume of work will always block out certain views. I do get fairly busy." He smiles at the obvious understatement.

If the Russell Crowe success story could be described in one sentence it might go something like this: unwavering self-believe, perseverance and a willingness to start from the bottom. "I was petrified as a young fella because I didn't have a certificate from NIDA," Crowe recalls. "I didn't have something official that said I studied this art form, I studied this craft." "I thought the only way to combat this is you just do as much as you can, you do work in as many mediums as you can, you do everything until you've learned from that." "So I did what I could for it, whether it was a training film for the Seventh Day Adventist Church, a television commercial or just stuff to get in front of the camera." "You don't get there unless you go back to square one and say: 'This is what I want to do, and I am a student of whatever comes.'"

He was six years old when the music bug hit hard as the acting one.
He got a guitar in 1970. His parents bought it, "one of those mid-size, teeny-weeny ones, but it was still gigantic for me." "I found out immediately it was a way to express myself, even without guitar lessons."

Crowe juggled with several musical identities amid a receptive and supportive new wave scene in Auckland, New Zealand, in the 1980's.
In 1984 he met guitarist Dean Cochran and formed the band Roman Antics. It was the start of an ever-changing musical trip that eventually led the partnership to Thirty Odd Foot of Grunts.

We are in a recording studio in South Yarra for a day-night session of rehearsal and jamming. The band, who haven't played together since last August, power through tracks from the new album, a set list for a gig and new songs. Cochran extracts eerie guitar feels on an old song, The River, while the band - Dave Wilkins (guitar), Garth Adam (bass), Dave Kelly (drums), Stewart Kirwan (trumpet) and Crowe - reduced to a hush, watch excitedly.
"There's a power that happens when we walk into that room," Crowe says later. "It's so cool." "We walk back in and it feels like it's better than the last time. That's been happening consistently for seven years."

Crowe is serious about this music thing. Always has been. But outside, perceptions of who he is in relation to the band still hound him.
"Its about other people seeing a commercial advantage from that," he says. "There's also the politics, strangely, that you are not supposed to be creative in two different media for whatever reason." "I think that's a strange thought process because it stands to reason that anybody who is creative per se is going to be creative in different media"

Crowe says he was especially bemused when broadcaster Andrew Denton recently asked why the actor wanted "two bites of the cherry." "How is it that you see it that way?" Crowe asked. "How is it that's the perspective you have? If that's what it comes down to, it's sad...because it's about the songs."
"If you don't roll your eyes and just listen to the songs, you will hear there is a reason that we do this, and that's within the songs."

To Crowe's chagrin, some have looked to the latest batch of lyrics for an open door to his private life and his highly publicised romance with Meg Ryan.
"Contextually, I don't care if it's scrutinised. Already in America they have started taking one song off the album (Wendy) and saying: 'This must be about Meg because the character in the song has a boy.'" (The song is actually about a woman Crowe quietly observed while he worked at a beach resort 16 years ago). "People can scrutinise, whatever. Whatever the assumption is. It's silly to me that in the magazines you are put into that small, emotional box: 'You must be this insensitive man thing!'" "But in reality, how the f... could I do my job if I was that bloke, if I was that fella? It's not possible."

Crowe does explain, sheepishly, the context of two "relationship" songs, Hold You and Swept Away Bayou (Facing the Headlights Alone): thematic opposites, of love not returned, and love connected. "I'm an expert at unrequited love," Crowe says. "I have, however, over a while, worked that out." "It's about seeing this ideal that's unattainable, and you don't want to just throw those thoughts away." "To see somebody that you are immediately attracted to on a number of different levels...you should enjoy that."
"You don't have to discuss it with anybody or bring it to anybody's attention, but why not just allow yourself that experience, even if the situation is incorrect?"

In real life Crowe doesn't play the victim. He enjoys his lot in life and knows full well the flipside of celebrity. "There are no complaints. I'm pursuing the things I've always wanted to pursue. But a separation began a while ago between me consciously in the public eye and this other thing that became this 'Russell Crowe'." "I look at it from this perspective and think, well, how did that happen? How did this sudden desire, this thirst for absolute rubbish, happen?" "You become this product." "You have to have a sense of humour about it, man. The only way you combat that is through the strength of your work."

Misconceptions - there have been a few. But he doesn't care. "I have a lot of routines about this s..., man. I got married three times this year. I had half a dozen babies, every woman I talked to I impregnated, so I've got the most fertile breath on Earth." "I don't care what the misconceptions are. I'm a bad boy. I'm Lothario. Whatever, mate." "At the same time all that stuff was being written, I was ear-tagging calves, so, whatever..."

Crowe reveals a nifty shirt trick he brought into action at the height of the frenzy. "It got to the point that wherever we went, people would be sneaking up on us with cameras - and that's me and whoever," Crowe says, then giggling: "I initially blamed Jodie Foster." "So I just started wearing this shirt, which isn't popular with anyone, but I really like it. If I got to a place and hadn't really scoped it out, I just put on this shirt." When photographers pounce, "it doesn't matter what the headline says you are doing, or where they say you are doing it, if you are wearing the same clothes, the possibility of (misconceptions) is lessened in some people's minds." "If you keep wearing the same shirt, a certain number of people will say (of the report): 'Oh, bulls...'."

This much is true: Crowe romanced Ryan during, and after, they worked together on the film Proof of Life. Asked what Ryan brought to his life, Crowe replies, in an instant: "A lot of light, mate." "Meg is a beautiful and courageous woman. I grieve the loss of her companionship, but I haven't lost her friendship." "All these things that you read about us, the arguments here and there, and slamming this and that - that's just all absolute rubbish. It's complete garbage." "The bottom line is, I have a big life here. I have got to be here. When I'm off the hook with the schedules, I have to come home. I can't sustain myself through the course of the year without filling up on home." "And she has the same needs. We both have huge schedules, so who knows about that sort of thing." "She is a searcher. She's got an incredibly inquisitive mind, so it was very easy for us to be in the same room together for hours and hours and hours, just talking. That was very special."

In the studio the band, tight and firing a few hours into the session, have crossed on to a wonderfully melodic ground. The song, Sail the Same Oceans, dedicated to actor Jack Thompson, is lyrically about Crowe removing himself from Australia and home-grown relationships in order to have a serious stab at the day job. These days, home equals balance. "Home is my space," he says. "I get to wake up in the sun. I get to walk around under the trees, I get to hang around with people who understand things without me having to re-explain myself." "It's really simple things. It's rough being away from your dog for six months. That's rough stuff, man."

From Oceans the band moves to The Night Davey Hit the Train, a darker narrative based on real-life conversations with guitarist Cochran and actors Daniel Pollock and Ben Mendelsohn about suicide. The track is dedicated to Pollock, Crowe's co-star in Romper Stomper. Pollock was hit by a train.
Crowe recalls an 18 year old Cochran saying that jumping off a famous suicide bridge in Auckland would at least be something he'd have control over. "You jump off," Crowe replied, "but not with the point of death, with the point of life. Whatever the thing is that's going to fulfil you, you have got to go for it. It's so easy to settle for something else - even death."

In a world of manufactured pop, slick productions and even the huge budgets Crowe must enjoy in his day job, Thirty Odd Foot of Grunts is an interesting proposition. They approach the music seriously, but thrive on the unrefined, organic feel of the room, a sort of as-is ethic.

Crowe revels in his role as storyteller, chain-smoking his way through vivid tales of loss and gain.
Kirwan's horn lines also lend the music a disarming edge: sometimes solemn, sometimes sexy. And for now, it feels like an animal that Crowe and the rest of the band can control. Happily.

The Grunts are not signed to a record label, there are no corporate obligations, and all creative decisions are channelled through the band.
If Crowe puts the same level of commitment into the Grunts as he does into his day job, does he want to achieve the same level of success with the music? "I would really rather not," he says.
"The point is not the good or bad stuff people are saying about you. You don't drive yourself on praise, and you are not slowed down by other people's criticism." "The point is the artistic expression and whether you will give yourself over to it. That's the point."