Charles R. Cross, a Seattle-based music journalist who edited the city's leading weekly Rocket magazine and wrote best-selling biographies of Kurt Cobain, Jimi Hendrix and other rock icons, died Friday at age 67.
“We are saddened to announce the passing of Charles Cross,” the writer’s family said in a statement. “He passed away peacefully of natural causes in his sleep on August 9, 2024. We are all grieving and trying to navigate this difficult process of dealing with next steps.”
Among those who paid tribute to Cross was veteran rock critic and Los Angeles Times biographer Robert Hilburn, who wrote on X that Cross's critically acclaimed book “Heavier Than Heaven: The Kurt Cobain Biography” was “at the top of my shortlist of the best music biographies ever written.” “He was as warm and kind as he was an emotional and compelling writer,” Hilburn said.
“I am shocked and devastated,” said his agent, Sarah Lazin. “We worked together — and were friends — for 30 years, beginning with Heavier Than Heaven, which is still in print worldwide after more than 20 years. We have written several books together, and recently sold, with Laura Nolan, an associate agent at Aevitas Creative Management, his next project, a memoir about his beloved Seattle. I just spoke with him on Thursday and he seemed so happy, energetic and excited about everything that was happening. A brilliant, passionate author and loving father. My heart goes out to his son Ashland and to all of us. What a loss.”
Cross has published nine books, including the New York Times bestseller Room Full of Mirrors: The Biography of Jimi Hendrix, and Kicking and Dreaming: A Story of Heart, Soul, and Rock 'n' Roll with Ann and Nancy Wilson, leaders of the band Heart.
Cross was the most visible and influential rock journalist on the Seattle music scene for decades, especially in the nearly decade and a half — from 1986 to 2000 — when he served as editor of the weekly Rocket, where he was well-positioned to monitor and document the fledgling band Nirvana, as well as other artists who quickly evolved from local favorites to global grunge stars.
Cross also founded and edited Bruce Springsteen's Backstreets magazine for many years, perhaps the most famous of all the magazines devoted to a single artist.
As a chronicler of Cobain's life, Cross said, “We [at the Rocket] “We were the first magazine ever to feature Nirvana, the first magazine ever to put them on the cover, and Kurt was even one of our clients—he advertised in our paper that he wanted to sign drummers. So I documented the scene and knew everyone and in the end I felt like some of the stories about Kurt weren't true at all.”
The Los Angeles Times called Heavier Than Heaven “one of the most moving and revealing books ever written about a rock star.” The book won the 2002 American Society of Composers and Authors Award for Best Music Biography. Cross conducted more than 400 interviews for the book, and Courtney Love granted him access to many of the interviews. Love “felt that to understand him, I needed to read his inner thoughts,” Cross said. “The memoir changed this book dramatically because it gave me a place to hear Kurt’s voice.” He also explained, “Part of my motivation was that I felt the story hadn’t been told properly,” noting that he wanted to delve into areas he thought other books had avoided, from the rock icon’s history of suicidal impulses to his conflicted motivations about business.
A Cobain biopic was optioned by Universal Pictures, leading to widespread speculation about which young actor could play the lead role, but development was never completed.
Previously, Cross wrote “Nevermind: The Classic Album.” He followed up the best-selling “Heavier Than Heaven” with two more books about the late rock star, “Cobain Unseen” and “Here We Are Now: The Lasting Impact of Kurt Cobain.”
Cross first came to the attention of local readers when he started Backstreets magazine in 1980, printing 10,000 copies of a four-page yellow sheet devoted to Springsteen, which he gave away for free at a concert at the Seattle Coliseum. In 1989, a collection of Backstreets writings co-edited by Cross was published in book form, Springsteen: The Man and His Music. “Little did I know at the time that a decade later this damned magazine would still be around as a quarterly and be called by some 'the greatest fan magazine in the world,'” Cross wrote in the introduction to the first issue.
Initially, Cross hand-wrote the subscription labels for Backstreets. By the tenth issue, the magazine had transitioned from print to a full-color paper format. While Cross eventually moved on to other journalistic pursuits, Backstreets continued as a magazine, website, and primary source of Springsteen news until early 2023.
Immediately prior to founding Backstraets, Cross served as editor of the University of Washington Daily in 1979. He graduated from the university with a degree in creative writing.
Other books include Led Zeppelin: Heaven and Hell and Led Zeppelin: Shadows Longer Than Our Souls.
Cross was a great critic, but ultimately he felt his greatest talent was in crafting the narrative. “As a rock critic, you tend to use the same words in every review. Eventually, you start looking at this and saying, ‘Oh my God, I’ve used all these adjectives 15 times before, in different combinations.’ So I think one of the things I tried to focus on was letting the narrative carry it, rather than treating it like a critic would.”
In recent years, Cross has been working on a book that he described to an interviewer as “a memoir that talks a little bit about my life and a little bit about the history of music in Seattle.”
No one doubted that Cross was aware of everything that was capturing Seattle’s attention during those heady days of the early ’90s, and what would eventually take the world by storm. Peter Blackstock, who later became a columnist for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and co-founded the No Depression organization, recalls the first time he went to meet Cross at the Rocket offices in 1991. “One memory is still very vivid,” Blackstock wrote on Facebook. “I asked him what shows were worth seeing that weekend, so he grabbed a copy of Rocket and headed to the club listings. ‘Oh, you should go to this,’ he said, pointing to a listing for a show at Off Ramp by a band called Mookie Blaylock. I’d never heard of them, but I took him at his word. And that’s how I ended up seeing Pearl Jam play in front of about 300 people, six months before ‘Ten’ came out.”
Cross had plans to publish a collection of material from Rocket as well. Cross had previously lamented that the alternative weekly's archives were not online, but was pleased when the publication was finally converted to a fully digital format, a project announced in December 2023. (Those archives can be found here.)
Cross also contributes to The Seattle Times. In his most recent column for the city's daily newspaper, he spoke about fellow authors, including Anupreeta Das, on her biography of Bill Gates, and Anna Powers, on her new book about Joni Mitchell's career.
Cross's writing has also appeared in Rolling Stone, Spin, Esquire, Playboy, Guitar World, Q, Uncut, Creem, the London Times, the Los Angeles Times, and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.
