Charles R. Cross, the Seattle-based author and music journalist who wrote definitive biographies of Kurt Cobain and Jimi Hendrix, died Friday. He was 67.
His death was announced in a statement from his family, which said he died “of natural causes in his sleep.”
Cross was perhaps best known for “Heavier Than Heaven,” his deeply reported 2001 account of the life and career of Cobain, who shaped rock history as the frontman of Nirvana and who became one of the genre’s tragic figures when he died by suicide — just months after the release of Nirvana’s third studio album, “In Utero” — in April 1994. The book, for which Cross conducted more than 400 interviews, won an award from ASCAP, the performing rights organization, and was described by former Los Angeles Times pop music critic Robert Hilburn as “one of the most moving and revealing books ever written about a rock star.”
Among Cross’ other books were 2005’s “Room Full of Mirrors,” about Hendrix, and 2012’s “Kicking & Dreaming,” which he wrote with Ann and Nancy Wilson of the long-running rock band Heart.
In addition to his books, Cross wrote about music for publications including Rolling Stone, Spin, Esquire, Entertainment Weekly, Playboy, Q, Mojo, Guitar World, the Seattle Times and the Los Angeles Times. In 2021 he interviewed Cobain’s widow, Courtney Love, for a Times article about the 30th anniversary of Nirvana’s smash “Nevermind” album.
Cross began his career in music journalism in the late 1970s while working on the student newspaper at the University of Washington, according to the Seattle Times; after he graduated in 1980, he founded Backstreets, a well regarded Bruce Springsteen fanzine that continued to publish until 2023.
In 1986, Cross was named editor of the Rocket, a weekly newspaper in Seattle, just as that city’s music scene was beginning to attract national attention; he went on to edit the paper through the grunge explosion of the late ’80s and early ’90s — during which Alice in Chains, Soundgarden, Pearl Jam and Nirvana became staples of MTV and alternative rock radio — until 2000.
Cross’ agent told Variety that he was at work on a memoir when he died. His book about Heart was being developed into a film by Carrie Brownstein of Sleater-Kinney.