Movie audiences will recognize him as the bass player in Stillwater, the group teenage journalist William Miller shadows in Almost Famous. But to legions of devotees in music's underground, Mark Kozelek is the frontman and songwriter for real-life band Red House Painters. Since the early Nineties, RHP have released a series of critically acclaimed albums so potent in their exploration of feelings of loss and despair that they -- and those of fellow San Franciscans American Music Club -- were given their own subgenre: "sadcore." Still, it was Kozelek's role as a fictional rocker in Cameron Crowe's celluloid memoir that promised to raise his profile.

"I remember Jason Lee telling me when we were working, he said 'You know, after this movie's over you're going to get more work than a Las Vegas prostitute,'" Kozelek says. "But the truth is, my phone never rings."

Speaking on the phone from his San Francisco home, Kozelek recalls his on-screen band mate's overzealous prediction with a chuckle. But even if Hollywood hasn't been beating down Kozelek's door, his turn as a thespian has had some unexpected rewards.

"For the family and relatives there's always a little bit of confusion about what it is you do for a living," Kozelek explains. "It seems like every time I send my dad a postcard from Korea or wherever it is I'm playing, I get home and he says 'Now, where was that postcard from? What were you doing over there?' You know, it's always the same thing -- he doesn't get it. But then you get a part in a movie where you're just kind of standing around doing nothing, and you've got a couple of lines, and it's something they can actually go down the street to the theater and see at the mall. They're just blown away by that shit. All of a sudden there's this newfound respect for you where maybe there never was before."

Equally profound for Kozelek were the perks of the movie business. Having suffered the travails of being a band on both independent and major labels, luxuries like nice hotels, chauffeured limos and events running on schedule were all things he quickly grew accustomed to.

"That business really spoils you," he says. "I've never experienced the music business from that perspective. I suppose if I was selling records like Matchbox Twenty or something, I would experience the same luxuries I get when I work on a Cameron Crowe movie. But I'm just playing in a small band, and in comparison the treatment you get from the movie business is unbelievable."

Kozelek has already filmed his bit part in the next Crowe film, Vanilla Sky, but he would be the first to admit that he never had any pretensions of becoming an actor. His debut in Almost Famous was merely one of several projects he undertook to keep himself busy -- and to pay the bills -- during the five-year limbo between Red House Painters albums. Completed in 1998, RHP's sixth full-length, Old Ramon, got buried in the fallout of the major-label mergers. With most of their supporters at Island Records gone, there was no guarantee the album would ever see the inside of record store. That is, until the band flexed some legal muscle.

"Just after I finished working on the movie, we got a different lawyer to help us out," Kozelek explains. "He just sort of bullied Island and we got the record back for a really reasonable price, for about an eighth of what we spent [making it]."

Eventually Sub Pop picked up the album and released it last month. Easily RHP's strongest record since 1993's Red House Painters, Old Ramon is also their most varied. The somber "Void" harks back to their earliest work, while "Between Days," with its sinuous guitar hooks, is about as rocking as RHP get. Kozelek even puts a twist on his emotional portraits with "Whop-A-Din-Din," a love song to his cat that will melt the heart of anyone who has ever shared feline companionship.

But Old Ramon isn't the only Kozelek project to hit the shelves this year. In January, he released What's Next to the Moon, a solo album composed entirely of covers of Bon Scott-era AC/DC songs. Though the Midwestern-born Kozelek reared himself on a steady diet of Yes and Pink Floyd, he says he had no special love for the Aussie hard-rockers when he was growing up. It wasn't until he began writing his own songs that he started to appreciate them.

"I guess it's because of the simple structure of their music and lyrics that they work out really well with just first position acoustic guitar chords," he says. "They just break down really well into what sounds like folk songs."

Stripped of their riffage and cock-rock posturing, the songs are rendered unrecognizable. Kozelek's transformative arrangements are so effective that libidinous rockers like "Love Hungry Man" and "Love at First Feel" sound like tear-stained pages pulled from his own songbook, a conundrum that has fooled more than one person.

"Every time I played the songs [live], everyone thought it was a joke when I would say it's an AC/DC song," Kozelek says, laughing. "In fact, when I went down to do voiceovers for Almost Famous, Cameron said he thought 'Bad Boy Boogie' was one of the best songs I'd written!" Given his fondness for recording covers -- he's recorded songs by Yes , the Cars, Simon and Garfunkel, and John Denver, among others -- there must be something other than just his fondness for the artists that inspires him.

"It's really easy to just slip into this one perspective that I write from," Kozelek says. "But I think that I also have a side of me that's kind of surface-y or shallow, but I can't really write from that perspective. I think other people's lyrics allow you to go into that place you can't normally get to yourself.

"A bunch of kids were bantering back and forth on the Internet about all the girls I had been meeting along the tour," he continues. "At the end one kid said, 'God, why doesn't Mark just write about that!' And it's like, I can't. I don't know how to write about that. So I guess Bon Scott sort of allows me to do it!"

MICHAEL ANSALDO
(May 5, 2001)