Interview by Jes Burns

            Charles Cross is the author of five books including New York Times-bestseller Room Full of Mirrors: A Biography of Jimi Hendrix, (2005, Hyperion in the U.S.; Hodder in the U.K.)  His 2001 release, Heavier Than Heaven: The Biography of Kurt Cobain (Hyperion/Hodder), was a New York Times-bestseller and was called “one of the most moving and revealing books ever written about a rock star,” by the Los Angeles Times. In 2002, Heavier Than Heaven won the ASCAP Timothy White Award for outstanding biography.  Cross’s other books include the national bestseller Backstreets: Springsteen, the Man and His Music (Harmony, 1989); Led Zeppelin: Heaven and Hell (Harmony, 1992); and Nevermind: The Classic Album (Schirmer, 1998).

            Cross’s writing has appeared in hundreds of magazines including Rolling Stone, Esquire, Playboy, Spin, Guitar World, Q, Mojo, Salon, Spy, Uncut, NME, Request, No Depression, Revolver, Ray Gun, Creem, and Trouser Press. He has written for many newspapers and alternative weeklies including the London Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Oregonian, the Seattle Times, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, and Seattle Weekly.

Jes Burns: What first drew you to music journalism?

Charles Cross:  Music is what drew me to music journalism.  I remember reading a piece that a writer named John Rockwell wrote in Rolling Stone.  He’s a writer who normally wrote for the New York Times, but he wrote this piece in Rolling Stone on Neil Young’s album American Stars ‘N Bars.  That record review made me think, “Boy, music journalism…this is an art.” This is not just saying yes or no on a record. There’s a skill to this.  And ironically years later I won an award, and John Rockwell just so happened to be the person presenting it. 

JB: Do you play any instrument?

CC: I don’t.  I would argue that I am a good enough music critic to know that I would stink.  I played guitar very briefly in junior high and never got good at it. 

I have to say that most of the rock writers who are also musicians are probably failed musicians.  Everyone wants to be a musician.  What many musicians have argued over the years is that the writers want to be musicians.  I would love to have Mick Jagger’s wealth and the adoration of millions, but I’m not sure I would want to have to tour with Keith Richard for a couple of months out of the year. 

JB:  Your first book was Backstreet: Springsteen, the Man and His Music. 

CC:  Yeah, I had been a big Springsteen fan.  [The book] was a collection of stuff in a Springsteen fan zine that I published.  I’m sometimes embarrassed by that, because I was a big Springsteen fan early, the Born to Run era.  Some people I know thought, like myself, by Born in the USA he had sold out; it was a different thing.  There certainly are many things in his catalog that were very powerful and, I would argue, are still very powerful. 

JB:  What’s the story behind getting that published? 

CC:  I sent a proposal to an agent, just out of the blue –a name I saw in the back of a book, and he called me a few weeks later and said, “Great idea.  I think I can sell it.”  And it was that simple.  The key was knowing that there was a market, and that book was a national best seller. 

JB:  So, it was timing, do you think?

CC:  Well, timing, knowing a market.  The reason I proposed it, and the reason I even started the fan zine, was that I knew that there was a huge fan base that I didn’t think any media had reached at that point. 

JB:  Is there anything in particular that makes musicians ideal subjects for biography? 

CC:  Well, I’m not sure that musicians are ideal subjects for biographers because music is something you almost have to hear to understand.  I mean, the ideal subjects for biographers are literary figures because it’s the form that they worked in.  You can quote from their work, and probably the best biographies are biographies of literary or political figures.  I guess this has been a big part of my career -- arguing that music is a legitimate cultural form – that it deserves attention and respect on the level of theater, film, and other cultural avenues.  For the most part, music has not gotten that, certainly popular music.  You know, a rock star is not usually considered a significant cultural figure on the same level as an opera star or a great stage actor.  I feel that their contribution is worthy and popular newspapers and magazines have failed by failing to recognize the role rock music has played.  That’s changed over the last twenty or thirty years, but thirty years ago, when a couple of the magazines I wrote for began, there wasn’t coverage.  Rock stars were second class citizens.  Now that’s shifted I think. 

JB:  Now rock stars are getting more attention than the literary figures. 

CC:  That’s probably true.  People are less interested in literary figures because people are reading less.  So many people spend so much time in front of their Play Stations, or their iPods, or with something other than a book.  In the book industry, there are challenges ahead over what happens in the future because with fewer people reading, most books lose money and don’t find an audience.  I’m always flattered when I talk to someone who says they bought my book, but I’m even more flattered to meet someone who read it.  You know, that’s an accomplishment in today’s world, for someone to commit that much time to a book. 

JB:  Have you found that it makes much difference writing about living versus dead people?  Is one more challenging than the other?

CC:  Well, I’ve written a couple of biographies about people who are dead, and there certainly is a challenge in that you can’t interview those people.  They don’t exist to you, but you do have the material of interviews they did while alive. 

There are benefits, though --  They can’t sue you.  And they can’t try to control your story.  Many rock stars and cultural figures of today want to exert a significant amount of control.  It used to be that as a journalist, if you went to interview somebody, they would just let you interview them.  But nowadays, with a lot of major magazines, if you go to interview Mick Jagger, you sign a release in advance saying that you are interviewing him for a specific publication and you can’t use it anywhere else.  You can’t do this, and you can’t ask him about his four wives, or the girl he impregnated in Brazil or this or that.  It wasn’t like that in the early days of music journalism.  So there’s good and bad to writing about dead people. 

The biographer who writes about dead people, there is a responsibility to recreate this person.  What I want to achieve in my books more than anything else is to have the people who knew my subject come up to me and say, “I felt like I met him again.”  The truth is very relative, and what someone actually did, if you don’t have it on videotape, there’s usually two or three sides to the story.  And sometimes if it is on videotape, there will be a variety of debates about what actually happened.  But nonetheless, if you can capture the person’s character to some degree, that’s what I shoot for.  I want the reader to feel like they met the person, they can smell them, they get a sense of what their physical presence was like, and what their eternal motivation was, which is even a larger and more important thing. 

JB:  You talk about a sort of ethical accountability to your subject.  Where does this accountability lie? 

CC:  Your accountability lies with your readers.  You need to be the kind of writer a reader can trust.  That’s a matter that just came up in the press: the sensationalism around this book A Million Little Pieces.  It was supposed to be a memoir and it sold 1.7 million copies and apparently, much of the book is not factual.  Some people say “Why does it matter?”  Well, it does matter.  There’s certainly always going to be places for writers to embellish here and there and maybe paint a fuller scene, but these are actual facts that are being debated about that book.  It does matter.  It certainly matters to a reader.

And you also have an accountability to yourself.  Just in my personal life, I consider myself someone who lives an ethical life.  I am honest in all of my affairs.  You try to write the best book you can, but also knowing that as a biographer you can never capture everything in a person’s life in a book. 

JB:  I saw that for A Room Full of Mirrors you interviewed more than 300 people as part of your research.  Can you talk a little bit about that process?

CC:  Well, it’s a difficult process.  It’s almost like working on a Ph.D.  You begin by, here’s a list of people I’d like to talk to, and with that book there were 100 people I wrote on my initial list.  And I think I got to 95 of that 100, believe it or not.  Then there were an additional 200 people or so…  Other people would say, “Well, you’ve got to talk to so and so.”  Sometimes it was luck, sometimes it was hard work and sometimes it was just happenstance, you know? 

I interviewed one person who went to school with Jimi and she said, “Have you interviewed Jimi’s first girlfriend?” 

And I said “I think so, yeah, it’s Betty Jean Morgan.” 

“Oh no, no, no.  There was someone before that.” 

So I tracked this woman down; she had never talked to the press ever before.  She was Jimi Hendrix’s junior high girlfriend and in all likelihood the first woman to ever kiss him.  But more important even than that, she was there on the day that he bought his first electric guitar.  And to get an eyewitness account of what that was like (and it was the happiest day of his life), that was very rewarding and really gave some insight to my book that you couldn’t find anywhere else.

JB:  That must have been incredibly exciting.

CC:  It is.  In some ways I describe doing this kind of work as if you’re doing a jigsaw puzzle.  You’re constantly trying to put all the pieces in; one of the problems is when you begin the puzzle, you don’t exactly know what the picture is and you don’t know how many pieces it is.  And I thought this Hendrix book was a 100 piece jigsaw puzzle, and it truth it was a 325 piece puzzle.  And the picture was very different than what I originally imagined going in. 

JB:  There were well over 50 other biographies of Jimi Hendrix out there already.  Are there any pitfalls to writing about so well covered a subject?  And did you read any of these biographies?

CC:  Most of them, yeah.  You don’t want to be egotistical as a writer, but when people say, “Why did you write this book?” part of the reason you wrote this book, is that you feel those other biographies aren’t good enough; they’re not definitive.  They’re missing an emotional part of the story.  It’s not really my job to review my book, but it’s very gratifying when someone reviews it and calls it the definitive work – especially when there’s such a large body of work [about Hendrix]. 

One of the reasons I felt I could tell this story – I’m too young to have met Jimi Hendrix – but I thought I knew the emotional story that needed to be told about this kid who grew up in Seattle, grew up poor, grew up black.  I thought that hadn’t been told.  Maybe there is some kind of fearlessness you have to have going into it when there’s that much stuff.  What made me think I could do this book was reading the book on John Adams.  Because I realized the author of that book, David McCullough, had never interviewed John Adams, just like I never interviewed Jimi Hendrix, nor seen him in the flesh, and that there were 300 books done on John Adams.  The real key is not necessarily the access or the intimate knowledge or being the boyfriend of, or this or that; the key is being a story teller.  That’s what writing is about.  And the real key to being a successful biographer, a successful magazine author, is telling a story.  That’s what the art is.  David McCullough’s book is brilliant.  And John Adams had been dead for 200 years.  When I read that, it made me think, "Yes, I can do this.  I can tackle the subject and bring something to it.” 

JB:  What other kinds of research besides interview went into the Hendrix book?

CC:  Public records, digging through old city directories to find out where people lived, using audio and video recordings that are known to exist, researching magazine articles from the time, researching newspapers… You know, those are just some.  It’s an arduous process that requires a lot of work in a number of different fields. 

JB:  In the author’s note in Room Full of Mirrors, you say that many of the press reports of the 70s made Hendrix into an icon and that stripped away a lot of his humanity.  How do you give a character back its humanity?  Talk a little bit about your writing process and your narrative style, and how specifically you go in and bring life to your characters.

CC:  Well, you do that, number one, by getting as much material as possible in their own voice – literally listening to recordings.  Or, I love the stories that people would tell me and they would imitate Jimi’s voice as they told it.  After you’ve heard a couple hundred of those, you begin to really get a sense of, oh, this is what he would do in this situation, this is the way he would talk.  You begin to understand what motivates him.  I guess that’s how you animate him – you begin to understand him. 

One of the things about biography and people is you can never completely nail it because people do weird things.  They do contradictory things.  With Kurt Cobain, the great anomaly there was that Kurt Cobain was a heroin addict, and yet he drove a Volvo.  And the reason he drove a Volvo was because it was the safest car ever made.  I can understand that.  I drive a Volvo, too.  But Kurt drove that Volvo to heroin dealers’ houses, bought drugs and overdosed.  That’s crazy, but that craziness…  How many people have eaten a cookie and then worked out?  Or gone to the health club and stopped at the ice cream place on the way home?  We are complicated people.  The reasons we do and are motivated for certain things are not always easy to explain.

JB:  Do you consider Hendrix a Seattle artist?

CC:  I think you do, even though Jimi left Seattle when he was 18 to join the service and only came back on the four occasions that he played concerts there.  Nonetheless, you could take him out of Seattle, but I’m not sure you could take Seattle out of him.  He was forever talking about Seattle.  He wrote at least four or five songs where there were clear Seattle references.  I mean, it was something that haunted him forever.  He had very tumultuous times in Seattle and a very mixed history with it as anybody would who went through what he went through.  But nonetheless, it was his hometown, it was his place. 

JB:  Did your perception of this change as you were writing the book? 

CC:  Oh yes.  I knew he had a troubled relationship with Seattle, but I did not realize that basically, every time that Jimi went back to Seattle, he returned to the high school that he dropped out of.  I didn’t realize that going in.  I didn’t realize that Seattle had such emotional draw to him, which it apparently did. 

JB:  If Hendrix is a Seattle artist, are you a Seattle writer?  Or a Northwest writer? 

CC:  I’m a Northwest writer.  I grew up in Pullman, so not only do I know the experience of being in a big city in the Northwest, I know the experience in being in a podunk town, which is what Pullman was when I was growing up.  I am a Northwest writer.  That doesn’t mean I’ll always write about Northwest subjects, but certainly sense of place has played a major role in most of my work.

JB:  That is a major draw for choosing your subjects?

CC:  Well, there’s also just the practical matter of, you know, you don’t necessarily leave home as much.  You know the people, you know the streets.  Some of that is more just the reality of my life.  I’ve got a young child.  How much travel do I want to do and be away from him. 

JB:  What are you currently reading?

CC:  I’m currently reading Joan Didion’s Year of Magical Thinking about grief.  I’m rereading several books at the moment.  I’m constantly rereading books.  As a writer, you have to analyze books not just for content, but for their style.  And that means you want to look at them again and again. 

JB:  Which books are you rereading right now? 

CC:  I’m rereading Erik Larson’s Devil in the White City and Peter Guralnick’s biography of Elvis Presley, Last Train to Memphis. 

JB:  Have you started your next big project?

CC:  I have not.  I have been debating a number of different ideas.  The way I have been doing these books, it’s so much work and so much commitment; it’s like choosing your Ph.D., what you’re going to study.  And I have been reticent to dive into next.  I’m still doing some promotion of the Hendrix book.  I’ve got three or four ideas, and I don’t know exactly what I’m gong to do. 

Jes Burns graduated from the LNF program in 2005. She is a freelance journalist who just completed an internship at National Public Radio.