I once went on a date with Charles R. Cross – often known as “Charley.” It was the first time we’d formally met – though he’d said hello to me in passing, maybe once. I was a regular contributor to The Rocket, coming by once a week or two to pitch assignments or drop some off. When I walked into editor Joe Ehrbar’s office one day in 2000, Ehrbar once again channeled a bit of J. Jonah Jameson and quasi-barked, “Stav! Do you have a date for the Almost Famous premiere and afterparty?” I’d just interviewed Cameron Crowe for the film.
“Uh, no,” I replied sheepishly.
“Well, you have one now. Charley’s your date.” Holey moley, I thought, Charles R. Cross is going to be my “plus one.” Just hours later, I was sitting next to one of my idols, watching a movie that so beautifully validated our profession. So coincidental, as Charley was to me as Lester Bangs was to Cameron Crowe. I have thought of that night, now and then, ever since… and I think of it now, as I process Charley’s passing.
New York Times bestselling author Charles R. Cross, one of America’s most talented music journalists and biographers, died on Friday of natural causes. A heart attack in his sleep, it was rumored. At the time of his passing, Charley, just 67, was enjoying one of the pinnacles of his career – while working on his next.
To write about Charley Cross’ legacy, one must begin with The Rocket – Seattle’s legendary – and long-defunct – music and arts magazine that reigned for over 20 years… only to be sunk almost overnight by an Illinois carpetbagger. Charley wrote, edited, published, served as editor-in-chief – and for a while, owned – an oversized, matte-finish reflection of a town that was, at the time, a very livable, quasi-blue collar city. A Jet City peppered with artsy folks, with dashes of great affluence.
It was, and remains, the coolest music magazine that I’ve ever read. For those unfamiliar, I so wish you could hold in your hands a copy; right now, and more importantly, back when it chronicled and forecast the pacific northwest’s music scenes. It was exciting, and immediate. Simultaneously reverent and irreverent, breezy and hard-hitting. A young NW band was thrilled to be mentioned in The Rocket; a review – even a less-than-rosy one – was considered a badge of honor. A Rocket feature was a trophy, and making the cover was the holy grail. Over the years, the magazine featured some of the best writers, artists, cartoonists (including Lynda Barry and a pre-Simpsons Matt Groening) to be found on the West Coast.
The Rocket was as cool in the realm of NW music as say, Mad Magazine or The Village Voice (in their primes) were the epitome of cool for everything else. It had a unique tone that I’ve never seen exactly presented anywhere else, and Charley was responsible for co-creating that tone; more importantly, for maintaining, polishing and evolving it.
I began reading The Rocket around the tail end of my freshman year of high school; it was just a few years old then, and Charles R. Cross – who had made his bones at the University of Washington’s newspaper (and for publishing the renowned Springsteen fanzine, Backstreets), was one of the Rocket’s many young hotshot writers. His features and reviews were my favorite to read, which is saying something.
Coming of age in Everett (which seemed to be a 2-day trip by wagon from Seattle), The Rocket introduced me to a world that I soon yearned to live in. Work in. I read every issue from cover-to-cover, gleaning nuggets about bands that I might’ve heard on the radio; soon, it would be a guide to who I wanted to see on stage. Charley became the magazine’s editor in 1986, the year I graduated from high school. As the decade neared its close, The Rocket became better and better… as if unconsciously preparing for a music phenomenon that it would soon become famous for chronicling.
The Rocket’s unceremonious demise gutted Charley, of course; it devastated a lot of us. But Charley kept writing; a 2001 biography of Kurt Cobain, Heavier Than Heaven, introduced his major talent to the world.
I had so admired him as a magazine feature writer, but Charley’s work on two books in particular — the Cobain opus and 2005’s Room Full Of Mirrors (on Jimi Hendrix) made me appreciate his skills even more. I wasn’t the only one; many consider the tomes as the definitive biographies of those artists. Charley was as far from a literary hitman as you could get. Meticulous, earnest, respectful yet dogged in his pursuit of accuracy, he possessed an increasingly rare integrity that garnered the trust of Courtney Love, members of the Hendrix family, the Wilson sisters, and countless other interviewees.
Charley saw things, heard things that some others didn’t see or hear. He took stories people thought they already knew, and expanded them. Turned time-gaps and overlooked moments into wonderful vignettes. His pen was also a magnifying glass, a flashlight, and a brush. Charley was a detective, and an artist. I have little appreciation for Cobain and the “grunge” phenomenon The Rocket so famously heralded, but I was riveted by Heavier Than Heaven… and developed empathy for the doomed singer along the way. The last pages of that book are some of the most haunting stuff that I’ve ever read.
Probably a year or more passed, after The Rocket’s shuttering, before I saw Charley again… and not at a concert, at a yard sale. I had married my late wife Andrea in 2001, and we were addicted to treasure hunting. Charley was also a second-hand aficionado, hunting for records near his North Seattle home. We probably crossed paths two or three times a season, chatting in front of strangers’ homes on Saturday mornings. “Hey, you find anything good?” “Have you been to that one sale yet?” That sort of stuff. Andrea, a newspaper editor and longtime Rocket reader, adored Charley – and he adored her. For a few minutes at a time, we’d discuss his last book or feature, and his next. And he would inquire likewise. It was always a very pleasant treat to hope for, running into Charley.
He was a mild-mannered, kind man… but Charley also possessed a sense of outrage, as a journalist and as a person. He wasn’t a sputterer, though. Charley was too smart for that; Charley’s measured delivery of the facts often landed heavier blows. When he, Andrea and I sat down in ’05 for an interview about his Hendrix book, we discussed the racism that marked Seattle history – and not just in the realm of music. There was, we collectively opined, a reason why the Jet City all-but-ignored Bruce Lee for years; why the town still has yet to fully claim him as an adopted son.
I often cite, in conversation about old Seattle, a passage in Room Full Of Mirrors. Charley mentions that, in the mid-60s and far from the Jim Crow South, Jimi Hendrix could buy a pair of slacks in a downtown department store – but couldn’t try them on first. Charley might’ve been Seattle music’s most ardent champion, but his loyalty was not blind.
As a fanboy might be compelled to tell an idol how the latter’s music affected his life, I eventually confessed to Charley how I came to write for The Rocket during its last two years. I tried to avoid Farley-esque breathlessness as it spilled out; that the years after high school were lost ones: a foray into community college, and menial jobs. I had no mentor, no street knowledge of how to get from A to C as a young journalist. Living and working in Seattle had remained a faraway, impossible dream. I explained that I’d then spent much of the 90s in California, running record stores. Shortly after returning to Washington, a near-fatal accident prompted me to reconsider writing, and specifically, writing for The Rocket. I was near-destitute; nothing to lose. It took me a year or so of freelancing around Seattle, accumulating enough clips, to get Joe Ehrbar’s attention.
I concluded by saying, “In hindsight, at 19 I should’ve driven my car to town and parked in front of your offices; living in it until you gave me a job. Any job – running errands, getting coffee, whatever it took to get a foot in the door. It would’ve saved a lot of trouble.”
Laughing, Charley replied, “I probably would’ve given you something to do.” I’d embarrassed him, but I wasn’t sorry for it. He had to know.
By the time of The Rocket staff’s “33 1/3” reunion party in August of 2012, I hadn’t seen Charley in at least two years. Andrea’s hair had grown back, but chemotherapy had left permanent effects. Nonetheless, she was excited to go – and we arrived early, volunteering to help with whatever.
Shortly after greeting us, Charley turned to me and said, “Could you greet people? You’re pretty suited for that.” I chuckled and headed towards the other end of the cavernous bar, as an overdue meeting of a mutual appreciation society came to order behind me.
What a day that was, fabulous in every respect. It was also the last time we’d see Charley, though I intermittently communicated with him via Facebook and email.
Charley was generous with his time – helping writers, musicians and artists when he could. He shared knowledge, and he spread music around like Johnny Appleseed. When Covid hit, he came up with the ultimate Appleseed move: his own “Album of the Month Club.” As Charley advertised to friends on Facebook, simply get on the mailing list – and he’d send you a package of CDs every so often. Stuff he had on his computer, music he’d been besieged with for decades. He’d often attach Post-Its with a one-sentence review, or summation; stuff like “Check out track #4!” and “One of the definitive Stones concerts.”
I thanked him every time something arrived during that extremely isolated year. In one email exchange (he had an AOL account! forever), we talked about mailing costs – he didn’t even ask for a penny taped to a postcard, but donations were very welcome. Charley wrote,
“… it’s been an expense, but it’s been worth it to bring joy to people. A couple of the stories people have told me, just broke my heart. One guy’s wife was going in for a mastectomy the day after he got the package — that alone made this worth it. Another person had no music because they were in their old hometown taking care of their older parent. And there were other stories.
Hope you find a new musical crush.
Cheers,
Charles”
After Covid restrictions lifted for good, Charley resumed being everywhere at once… a living Johnny Renton. Renton, The Rocket’s man-about-town columnist, was for years actually a fictitious composite of a dozen or more reporters’ exploits. So often, he had his son Ashland in tow; Charley continued to jot down Facebook missives that centered an ever-developing Ashland in his world, and worldview. Charley was so proud of him, and his friends marveled at photos of them together.
As soon as I could get on an airplane safely, I flew to North Carolina; soon, I moved there… marrying one of Andrea’s friends in 2021. Apart from trading the occasional FB comment on each other’s pages, I had no communication with Charley until last October. He had inquired if I had some Rocket back issues that he was missing, for a bombshell project. I did. Charley rang me up, and we talked for an hour. He interviewed me for a memoir/Seattle music history book that he was working on; wanting to know my recollections of The Rocket’s unexpected last day. I interviewed him about his work, his son. About a Seattle that had begun disappearing with the dawn of a new century. We talked about Andrea – who passed away in 2016 – and about my new life.
He was so excited about this new project he was spearheading, along with his close friend John Keister. Keister had written alongside Charley at the UW Daily and The Rocket before hosting Seattle’s iconic sketch-comedy tv show, Almost Live! Now they were working with the UW on digitizing The Rocket’s entire morgue! The Rocket was finally going to be online! What a huge contribution to music history this would be… and what a remarkable gift to all of those who had contributed to the magazine over the years. To people whose work had been, to date, clippings saved in binders and dusty boxes.
We chatted like magpies – or like two music fans – into the night. I finally put down the phone, wishing that it had been something that we had done much more often – at least a few times a year. But he was so busy, and to a much lesser degree so was I.
Charley soon became even busier, if that was possible. The UW-archived Rocket went online just after Christmas, to a surprising amount of enduring fanfare. And, as always, Charley continued to write for various publications while he worked on that book. An extraordinary piece for Crosscut in February on the slow demise of an iconic Seattle drugstore chain, Bartell’s, was almost a companion piece to a thing of beauty that he wrote in 2019 about the last days of the Northgate Mall. I wished that Charley would venture away from music more frequently, as his perspectives and talent crossed genres so easily – and so damn well.
When we had talked, Charley shared hopes on the hush-hush of another Rocket reunion in 2024, and perhaps a public celebration of the magazine; all to coincide with the release of the memoir, I imagined. As this summer passed with no word or invitation, I guessed that his assuredly epic saga was not yet finished. No surprise, for Charley was a perfectionist – and this time, he was writing about subjects closer to home than ever before. The man was probably writing during his last day on earth.
My wife put her arms around me last night as I sobbed in my office chair last night; like countless others, I was in shock by the news. Charley seemed built to last; he had the demeanor, the attitude, the spirit to last another 30 years – and be working almost every day of them.
After I told Deborah a bit about him, she softly said, “Isn’t it something, to be friends with one of your heroes?”
Yes, it is. And Charley was more than one of my heroes. More than any other figure, Charley was responsible for both my teenaged desire to be a professional writer, and for my 25-plus years of writing about music. He was a music nerd who had the talent and determination to turn his love into a life’s work; Charley became famous for it, garnering respect – and more than a little envy – while retaining his extraordinary humility. Sounds like a favorite rock star’s bio, doesn’t it?
To the end, he remained a youthful fan; full of wonder, with fervent hope for his son’s future, for everyone’s future. Charley was the Jet City’s most beloved music supporter, but he was first and foremost a devoted father.
Charley Cross achieved true greatness, then, in what mattered most to him. Certainly someone to admire, and remember, always. I sure will.
