Charles R. Cross, editor of Seattle’s biweekly music newspaper The Rocket died on Friday, close friends confirmed. He was 67 years old. In a statement to Variety, Cross’s family said he died peacefully in his sleep of natural causes.
Cross edited The Rocket from 1986 until its end in 2000. Under his watch, The Rocket chronicled some of the Pacific Northwest’s most influential artists, including cover features of bands like R.E.M, Nirvana, Alice in Chains, Modest Mouse, Sleater-Kinney, and Murder City Devils, all before they broke into the mainstream. Even the newspaper’s classifieds had a storied history: in 1988, Kurt Cobain, then just an Aberdeen teen, posted a “DRUMMER WANTED” ad in its pages.
Cross dedicated half a century to celebrating arts and music in the Pacific Northwest. He was a storyteller as much as a culture critic, and shined a light on the people—and their stories—who could have otherwise gone unknown. In 1980 he founded the quarterly Bruce Springsteen fan magazine Backstreets, which published for more than 40 years. In 2001, he wrote the New York Times bestselling biography of Kurt Cobain, Heavier Than Heaven, which is arguably the most complete biography of the artist. He also wrote definitive biographies of Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin, and Heart (which he co-wrote with Ann and Nancy Wilson).
He was an enthusiastic supporter of local music and he had a heavy hand in ensuring Seattle’s music scene is forever etched in history, a fact made apparent by the droves of loving memorials being shared on social media from music critic Robert Hilburn to Black Tones frontwoman and KEXP DJ Eva Walker. “People think of Charles as a biographer of Seattle legends, but every time he and I got together, all we talked about was all the new bands we loved,” legendary local radio DJ Marco Collins told The Stranger. “He was a tireless champion of our music scene, old and new.”
He impacted many of us at The Stranger, too. I, for one, first started doing concert photography and music journalism as a teen because I one day hoped to be published in The Rocket.
Culture critic and author Ann Powers met Cross when the two worked together at The Daily UW in the 80s. Shortly after learning of his death, she talked to The Stranger about his legacy. “I hope that as we’re celebrating Charlie’s stewardship of The Rocket, and his remarkable achievements with Backstreets, we also go back and read his books. Because his books are extraordinary. Both his biography of Kurt Cobain and his biography of Jimi Hendrix set a standard that I think any music biographer would aspire to,” Powers said. “He was just such an intrepid researcher and would find those corners of his subject’s lives that changed your view of an artist with such great empathy and understanding. In his books that’s especially evident.”
At the time of his death, Powers told The Stranger Cross was working on a new book, “sort of a biography of Seattle,” she said. “A cultural history of Seattle and Seattle music.” She said she hopes the book “finds the light of day. I know he had done hundreds of interviews for that book already. The guy left no stone unturned, as far as really wanting to tell the entire story. Nobody was more qualified than Charlie. I’m really hopeful that that work will find its way into our lives.”
“We talked for a long time about what he was trying to capture in this final project about Seattle music and Seattle culture and how things had changed,” said Powers. “What I walked away with was … his dedication to Seattle as a wellspring of creativity. His belief that the Pacific Northwest had unique characteristics that produced music and musicians and music culture and arts culture that really mattered.”
Earlier this year, Cross's stamp on Seattle’s culture was immortalized. He and John Vallier, curator of UW Ethnomusicology Archives, completed digitizing all 333 issues of The Rocket and made the archive available to the public for free. “Having The Rocket digitized and available lets us go back and find the stories, not just of the beginnings of [Seattle rock], but those artists who were really challenging the definitions of rock or popular music in general. It’s so important, as we flesh out our history and fill in what has been suppressed, that we have this material available,” Powers told the Seattle Times when the project was announced.
In 2014, when he was interviewed by Stranger contributor Trent Moorman,Cross said, “What I'm certain of though is that the Seattle music scene of the late eighties and early nineties, which included many talented musicians, not just Kurt, changed history. I’m proud to have been some part of that.”
