Charles R. Cross
Charles R. Cross
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Charles R. Cross was born in Virginia and raised in Pullman, Wash., before moving to Seattle for college in the late '70s. After a stint editing the University of Washington's student newspaper, Cross founded Backstreets, a Bruce Springsteen fanzine, in 1980, and began freelancing for other outlets, eventually settling into editorship at the influential Northwest music biweekly The Rocket in the mid-'80s. When that paper folded in 2000, Cross began work on Heavier Than Heaven, an acutely written biography of Kurt Cobain published in 2001, which won the ASCAP Timothy White Award for best biography. This summer, Cross released Room Full of Mirrors: A Biography of Jimi Hendrix (Hyperion, $24.95), which most of our talk revolved around. This Jukebox took place at the Weekly offices on a late summer evening, while Cross was in the midst of a publicity blitz for the new book.
Ray Charles: "Mess Around" (1953) from The Ray Charles Story Vol. 1 (Atlantic)
Charles R. Cross: This is probably the most-heard rock song of all time or something, right? Is this Ike Turner or Little Richard?
Seattle Weekly: Neither. Think lead instrument.
Cross: The lead instrument is piano. Trevor Johnson? Fats Domino?
SW: I'm surprised that you're not getting it on the voice.
Cross: Well, I'm sure that if I wasn't brain dead I could. [laughs]
SW: What are you brain dead from?
Cross: Doing interviews all day, talking at 7 in the morning to radio jocks and doing TV.
SW: It's Ray Charles.
Cross: Oh yeah. This is the song that sort of began his career. The chorus originated in Seattle, but it was recorded elsewhere. There is a song that was recorded in Seattle.
SW: He was more of a Nat Cole–style, Charles Brown–style crooner on the early stuff, then he did this and sort of upset the apple cart.
Cross: One of the interesting things about Ray—that movie is so off in its depiction of Seattle. You see that movie and you see the clubs that Ray was in, that whole strip, and they're all brick. I don't even know where they filmed that—I think they may have filmed that on a sound stage and re-created it all. You know, places that Ray Charles used to play, the main place was I think called the Rocking Chair—it was an old house. Most of the African-American clubs in Seattle [in the '40s and '50s] weren't actual clubs—they were literally houses that had been converted to restaurants or clubs. That's the way it was, because these places were operating illegally when they began. African-American culture was living-room culture.
SW: Rent parties.
Cross: Exactly. There is a place in Vancouver called the Chicken Inn. Al Hendrix, Jimi's dad, worked at the Chicken Inn as a waiter briefly. Basically [it] was a woman's house. Literally, there was no other place that you could get fried chicken. It began as her kitchen counter or dining-room counter, and then slowly they took the living room and the bedrooms and it became this place where everybody stopped. I'm sure Jimi must have visited the times he went up there. I'm not sure the year it even closed down. In Seattle, a lot of people forget there was a restaurant on Lake City Way and 85th or so called Coon's Chicken Inn.
SW: Spelled Coon and not Kuhn?
Cross: C-O-O-N. Historylink.org gives you a whole history of this restaurant. It's amazing what year it closed, like 1964 or something. The place is now a Chinese restaurant.
To really understand Jimi Hendrix or Seattle music, you have to understand that we had racism and our color line, which was Denny Way, just like everywhere else. And up in North Seattle, the sign was a giant picture of an African-American man that went around the place: Coon's Chicken Inn. A number of people that I interviewed would say Coon's Chicken Inn would sell their chicken in boxes, and when racial tensions grew, some more dangerous and egregious whites would cut the box, take the circle [with the logo], and paste it to their hubcaps. Imagine that you're a young African-American male driving around and you see a car with Coon's Chicken Inn on the hubcaps, what that must have made you feel like.
SW: Jesus.
Cross: One of the other things that really surprised me, that I didn't understand as a white person, was [that] in Seattle, because of the huge disparity between the number of African Americans versus the number of whites, most [racially motivated] violence up through 1970 was white against black. In our current culture, part of what we are taught is that crime is perpetrated by African Americans [against] Caucasians, which is not the case statistically. But that's the white fear. I was surprised [by] talking to African Americans who grew up here about the huge fear they had of getting killed or beaten up. If you were African American and you were in Ballard, there was a good chance that you were going to get the crap beat out of you. And you kind of have to understand that to understand what it was like to grow up here in the '40s and '50s black. Some people said there was a huge change when African Americans finally realized that white people were actually scared of them. It was like, finally the tables turned! And of course they took that to the extreme, and that's why the Black Panthers had one of the strongest chapters in Seattle.
