Charles R. Cross, a Seattle music writer who edited The Rocket, a local rock bible, during the city’s grunge-era flowering in the 1990s, and who wrote acclaimed biographies of two of the city’s most venerated musical figures, Jimi Hendrix and Kurt Cobain, died on Aug. 9 at his home in Shoreline, Wash., He was 67.
His death was announced in a statement from his family. No cause was given.
Mr. Cross was the editor of The Rocket, a biweekly magazine, from 1986 through 2000, a period when Seattle bands like Nirvana, Soundgarden and Pearl Jam redefined rock. It was considered a must-read for musicians looking to join the wave.
It would be “impossible to imagine the music or community of Seattle in the 80s and 90s without charles r. cross,” Chris Walla, a former member of Death Cab for Cutie, the critically acclaimed alternative rock band from Bellingham, Wash., wrote on social media.
Mr. Cross was also a well-known sage to fans of Bruce Springsteen: He turned his self-produced fanzine into Backstreets Magazine, a trove of Springsteen arcana that was well known to the artist himself.
At a concert in Pittsburgh on Sunday, Mr. Springsteen paid tribute to Mr. Cross, telling the audience that his “help in communicating between our band and our fans will be sorely missed” before launching into his song “Backstreets.”
Mr. Cross published the first of his nine books, “Backstreets: Springsteen, the Man and His Music,” in 1989, followed two years later by “Led Zeppelin: Heaven and Hell,” an illustrated history that he wrote with Erik Flannigan, with photographs by Neal Preston.
His 2001 Cobain biography, “Heavier Than Heaven,” was based on more than 400 interviews, as well as Cobain’s private journals and other materials provided by his widow, Courtney Love. The book received ASCAP’s Timothy White Award for outstanding musical biography in 2002. Reviewing it in The Los Angeles Times, the pop music critic Robert Hilburn called it “one of the most moving and revealing books ever written about a rock star.”
Mr. Cross’s biography of Hendrix, “Room Full of Mirrors” (2005), was called one of the best music books ever written by Vibe magazine.
He also collaborated with Ann and Nancy Wilson of the platinum-selling band Heart, who grew up in the Seattle area, on “Kicking & Dreaming: A Story of Heart, Soul, and Rock & Roll” (2012).
“Charley was the coolest rock literati bookworm to ever be lucky enough to know,” Nancy Wilson wrote on social media. “And all us cool rock people got to feel even cooler to know him and call him a friend.”
Charles Richard Cross was born on May 7, 1957, the elder of two children of Herbert Cross, a psychology professor at Washington State University in Pullman, Wash., and Bettie (Thompson) Cross, a bookkeeper.
After graduating from the University of Washington in 1979, Mr. Cross was working in public relations at Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle when he started Backstreets. Never lacking for ambition, he distributed 10,000 free copies of the first issue at a Springsteen concert in Seattle in October 1980.
Two years later, he joined The Rocket as a writer. He bought the magazine in the mid-1980s and edited it until it ceased publication in 2000. During his tenure, he chronicled the rise of the visceral yet often melodic offshoot of Pacific Northwest punk rock that the news media would famously — or infamously — label “grunge.”
The Rocket was a staple of the scene in those years. In 1988, Cobain posted an advertisement in the magazine for his fledgling band that read: “DRUMMER WANTED. Hard, heavy, to hell with your ‘looks and hair a must.’”
At that time, few around town considered Cobain a legend in the making, Mr. Cross said in an interview with the culture site Flavorwire in 2014 upon the publication of his book “Here We Are Now: The Lasting Impact of Kurt Cobain.”
“No one in Seattle had any idea that Nirvana were going to be as big as they ended up,” he said. “And anyone who says they did is lying.”
After Cobain’s death by suicide in April 1994, his story became the stuff of myth, which Mr. Cross both explored and at times exploded with his two books on the star-crossed rocker.
“People ask why Kurt didn’t seek help, or why those around him didn’t force him to get help,” Mr. Cross said in a 2014 interview with the Seattle alternative newspaper The Stranger. “But the truth is he did seek it, and people did force him. Kurt was in rehab at least six times.
“His own diaries are filled with pages of ‘Please God help me,’” Mr. Cross added. “He wanted nothing more in life than to be free of his addiction, and he spoke privately and publicly about how drugs hindered his ability to create. Drugs did not make Kurt Cobain the talent he was; they destroyed that talent.”
Mr. Cross is survived by his sister, Catherine, and a son, Ashland.
As a voice of the Seattle music scene, Mr. Cross felt inexorably drawn to another of Seattle’s ill-fated rock titans. In a 2005 interview with the site JamBands.com, he called Jimi Hendrix “the sort of character that awaits any Northwestern rock journalist, just as an aspiring actor knows that Shakespeare’s canon awaits.”
Despite the surface differences between Cobain — famous for his ragged thrift-store clothing and his musical howls of pain — and Hendrix, known for his resplendent psychedelic plumage and mind-bending guitar virtuosity, the two had a lot in common, Mr. Cross said.
Both were left-handed guitar players who battled drug abuse and died at 27. Both also felt crushed by the pressures of fame.
Both, too, came from “disenfranchised segments of society,” he told JamBands.com, noting that Cobain grew up the “poverty of the white lower class” — although he never had to face the racial indignities that Hendrix experienced.
In “Room Full of Mirrors,” Mr. Cross recounted that Hendrix, fresh from a triumphant debut in Britain in 1967 and headed to the appearance at the Monterey International Pop Festival that would make him a rock demigod, was mistaken for a hotel bellhop during a layover in New York because he was Black.
His book showed Hendrix, like Cobain years later, had grown so weary of the brutal demands of the music industry that he at times lost his desire to perform.
“I think that much rock biography is sort of ‘sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll,’ and that has an emphasis on what was said onstage, what was played onstage,” he told JamBands. “I’m far less interested in what Jimi played onstage, but what motivated him to take to the stage in the first place and what motivated him to not play.”
Read More: Charles R. Cross, Biographer of Cobain and Hendrix, Dies at 67
