Funny to read another laudatory piece about Cross in the Stranger. Since Segal says he didn't get to Seattle since 2002, that's how he missed the era of the Stranger loving to use Cross as a punching bag! I guess everyone's loved when they're dead.

The same could be said about the Rocket, really. I knew a number of Rocket writers, and boy did they have to put up with a lot of griping from the public, who were always complaining about what they thought the paper was doing wrong. And everyone seems to forget it was Cross that was responsible for killing the paper, selling it in 1995 to another owner who ran it into the ground. The Stranger never ran any "gee we miss the Rocket" stories when the paper finally folded either.

And no, the Rocket was not the first to put Nirvana on the cover. That would be the UK music weekly Sounds, the Oct 21 1989 issue, alongside Tad, when the bands were touring overseas (with the memorable headline: "Tad & Nirvana: Grabbing American By The Balls"). Nirvana appeared on the Rocket's Dec 1989 cover. And even Cross notes in his book that none of the ads Nirvana ran in the Rocket drew any responses. So, no, those ads weren't "the start of it all."

Dave, speaking as a former Rocket writer, if you didn't hear anyone "speak ill" of the Rocket, it's because you weren't talking to the right people. The Stranger in particular loved to pick on us (when you weren't bashing the Weekly); it's an era I look back on fondly, when "alternative" papers actually mattered, and we all scrapped with one another.

Of course in the immediate aftermath of its demise, it felt like people had written off the Rocket as being long past its sell by date, so no one cared that much that it folded. Charles' decision to sell to BAM magazine in 1995 was disastrous and set the paper on a path to ruin. And the last couple of years the Rocket was godawful. The paper got thinner and thinner and the writing was remarkably tepid. I was glad to have left a few years before. I heard rumors that writers were using pseudonyms to hide their association with the paper.

Even the Stranger wasn't blasting it anymore. Why would you? Nobody cared about the Rocket by then. Attacking it would've been like kicking a blind man in a wheelchair.

If you looked at the articles that came out when it folded, there was no great sorrow. It was more "how did it even last this long?" Now there's this rosy nostalgic hue for how wonderful it was, when it sure wasn't treated like that at the time.

There were definitely local bands that were irked when they didn't get coverage in The Rocket back then, but that's pretty normal for any scene. And there were publications like Backlash and Snipehunt that were covering bands that were even further out of the mainstream. Nonetheless, The Rocket was a great resource to the Seattle music community for all the reasons you listed. Discovering that the guy who published Backstreets was also running a local bi-weekly was a real eye opener to me as a college student, and made the idea of being a music writer seem more approachable to me.