What finally led you to make this project? Were you thinking back over old times ... ?

Yeah, I was sitting back in the old rocking chair ... No, actually, this was always the next movie. I wrote it up here [in Seattle]. I wrote it 10 times up here. I always wanted to capture what I loved about music. I did so many different versions of this and most of them weren't worth filming.

Or they felt a little bit like "Austin Powers," where it was always an English band and some guy would come to the room and say, "Let the grooviest heads prevail!" There were funny things about those early scripts, but when it started to be about my family and stuff, I was nervous to write about it. It became a "put up or shut up" kind of project.

So how close is this to your real-life experience?

Agonizingly close. Painfully close. It's too close to even cop to, you know? But I can't be the coy guy who says, "Don't confuse me with the protagonist." I can't. It's mostly all true. It happened.

Was your mother as obsessively protective and conservative as Frances McDormand's character in the film?

Oh, yeah. Remember the scene where she drives William to the Stillwater-Black Sabbath concert and screams, "Don't take drugs!"? That's not far off. But she also kept encouraging me to write the movie, and she was even on the set many times during the production.

Talk a bit about the Stillwater tour that William embarks on. Is it an amalgam of several of the tours you covered for Rolling Stone? If you read the Rolling Stone interview you did with Led Zeppelin in 1975, it sounds a lot like that.

It is very much the Zeppelin tour, and it's somewhat the early writing I used to do about the Eagles. The Eagles were very much delinquent guys who were not that much older than me, it seemed, so I really loved hanging around with them.

But, yeah, Zeppelin, I'll tell the story quickly: As many probably know, Rolling Stone ripped apart all of their albums. So Jimmy Page said that he'd never talk to Rolling Stone, but Rolling Stone always wanted to put them on the cover. Page said, "We're not going to help that fucking magazine sell issues." But I had written about them for other places, and they also knew that I wrote for Rolling Stone. I went on tour with them for another publication, the L.A. Times, and stayed on the road with them to try to convince them to do Rolling Stone. And as in the movie, a couple of days turned into a long three-week tour. My eyes got blood-red because I just didn't sleep. One by one, they all said they'd do it, except for Page, who kept saying, "In another city, I'll make the decision." Of course, that becomes the [focus] of the movie, too, as Russell Hammond [Stillwater's guitarist, played by Billy Crudup] continually plays that game with poor William.

Were you scared of '70s nostalgia when approaching this film?

Yes, absolutely.

What was your plan for avoiding the usual '70s stereotypes?

Shoot the timeless part of the '70s, as opposed to the kitschy part. Joel Bernstein is a really good friend of mine, and he's a great photographer. We do a little homage to his Neil Young cover for "Time Fades Away" in this movie. He'd always take pictures of the audience back then, and three out of five could be around right now. The fourth was a beatnik from the '50s and the fifth, maybe, had the mullet. I just got tired of these movies that were all about the mullet guy! So if you put the other three in the movie, then you could maybe tell a story that was somewhat more anti-nostalgia, and the jokes reminding you that it's actually '73 might be funny.

Music has always been such a big part of your films, and not only the soundtracks -- Lloyd Dobler [from "Say Anything ..."] is defined by his Clash T-shirt; Mike Damone, the ticket scalper from "Fast Times at Ridgemont High"; the grunge band in "Singles." Did you just feel it was a matter of time before you made a film that was purely music-culture driven?

Yeah, well, speaking of "Singles": This movie is what people, for whatever reason, thought "Singles" was going to be. It was this movie. People thought "Singles" was going to be "The Mark Arm Story." [Arm was the lead singer of early grunge band Mudhoney.] What "Singles" was always meant to be was "Manhattan" set in Seattle. I never got that movie cast right. It's the only movie that I've directed that didn't feel right. There's problems with "Singles" and there's stuff I really like, such as Bridget Fonda's performance and just the fact that we caught parts of the city at a key time.

But the problem was that the studio hung onto it for a year, not knowing what to do with it, and then Nirvana exploded, and they decided to put it out. At that point, it was the perception that somebody went to Seattle to do a movie to exploit the scene. It was really disappointing, not only for me but for people in Seattle.

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