Best fictional movie band

[The Minsky Moment]

No love for Maxwell Demon and The Venus in Furs or Curt Wild and the Wylde Ratts, both from Velvet Goldmine?

EDIT: Fucked up the movie title

A lot of that music (and the best) was not fictional. Off the top of my head I can recall TV Eye (Iggy Pop) and 20th century boy from T Rex.

[The Minsky Moment]

Stillwater - They're essentially Led Zeppelin, plus "Fever dog" is awesome.

I think the band is supposed to be American early-mid 70s Southern Rock, like Allman Bros or Skynyrd. It's the opening drum part on Fever Dog copying John Bonham that is throwing you off.

[Tamas]

No I am pretty sure they are supposed to be Zeppelin

[The Minsky Moment]

Ok . . .
Stillwater is portrayed a young American band and the premise is that they are not yet well established (the main character is sent to cover another band for which Stillwater is the opening act).  Page and Jones were well-seasoned British session musicians, already quite famous in their own right in the 1960s.  It's hard to imagine Zeppelin as a relatively unknown opening act in the early 1970s.

[The Minsky Moment]

Now I can't stop thinking about it . . .

There's an online collection of all of Cameron Crowe's writing including the Rolling Stone articles: http://www.theuncool.com/journalism/

It turns out he did write a big story on Led Zeppelin in 1975, two years after the movie is set.  Jimmy Page initially refused to be interviewed, which would fit the plot of Almost Famous.

However, in the 1973, the year the movie is actually set, he ran two stories on the Allman Brothers, one short one and a longer one which was his first cover story - which also fits the plot of the movie.  On the cover story, he gives the following account, which should be very familiar to anyone who recalls the movie:

"I was 16 when Rolling Stone sent me out on the road with the Allman Brothers Band. I spent over two weeks amassing interviews with all the band members and their roadies. The night before I was to leave, Gregg Allman – still mourning the recent deaths of his legendary guitarist-brother Duane Allman and bassist Berry Oakley – had a late-night vision that the FBI could possibly be using me to investigate his band. He demanded all my tapes back until further notice. I left the tour in an emotional mess and wound up catatonic in the San Francisco airport, where I ran into my then-stewardess sister Cindy. She cheered me up and sent me home. Days later, the tapes arrived at my house with an apology note from Gregg Allman. I never told the magazine. It was my first cover story."
– Cameron Crowe – Summer 2000

Stillwater is obviously not a real band, it is a fictional composite.  But it seems clear that Crowe's experiences covering the Allman Brothers are the most important inspiration.

[HVC]

Huh, didn't realize almost famous was a flop and didn't recover its budget at the theatres.