"The Rocket went under? When I was 13 in '87, it was the only thing I wanted to read."--Seth

"EVERYONE INVOLVED in the music community in Seattle can probably link themselves somehow to The Rocket, which is rather profound if you think about it, considering what this town has accomplished," Anna Wolverton of Sub Pop wrote to me in an e-mail. For this record label that has become synonymous with Seattle music, the connection is paternal: Bruce Pavitt started the label in 1986 while he was writing a column in The Rocket he titled "Sub Pop."

The subtractions made in Seattle culture over the last year are freaking a lot of people out. First, the RKCNDY closed--in the tender years of spelling bees and grammar tests, the vowel-less billboard that looked up the Denny freeway overpass was the most profound reclamation of language I'd been exposed to, a semiotics that came to be the primary strength and virtue of popular music (still is, especially in rap). Then, the self-consciously frumpy Kingdome, a Seattle institution of all-purpose culture housing blowout concerts and Boeing Christmas parties alike, was imploded.

And now, after 21 years, The Rocket is gone, the paper that for so long was the one to offer all of its information and insight for free. I first understood the half public-service/half "no one would buy it" role of alternative press from reading The Rocket. During my pre-pubescent years, the paper seemed to me as bizarre and as unapproachable as the teenagers who were reading it, but I recognized it as something that was integral to Seattle culture. When grunge hit, The Rocket was evidence that Seattle knew of its talent; The Rocket put Nirvana on the cover because of Bleach. I didn't trust anyone to talk about Kurt Cobain, the Northwest's #1 martyr, aside from The Rocket. The stacks of Rockets, the RKCNDY sign, the Kingdome--before I ever even saw a real concert, I recognized them all as the architecture of my city's music culture.

The Rocket began as a section in the hippie alternative paper The Seattle Sun. As the legend goes, the Sun staff wanted to do a cover story on macramé, and editors Robert Ferrigno and Bob Newman laughed. "The political editor of the Sun glared at us suspiciously, and warned us about our 'negativity,'" Ferrigno wrote in The Rocket's 15-year anniversary issue. "The next day we started raising money for The Rocket. Two months later the first issue came out--[with] articles on local clubs, record reviews, and plenty of attitude." The Rocket's birth is an emblem of American alternative culture changing focus from hippie to punk, from a peace sign to a middle finger (though the requisites of wild clothes and hair were inherited, as Thomas Pynchon points out in Vineland). The first office shared its space with a band, didn't have heat, and was more a place for hanging out than working, as the romantic memories tell it. After 12 years of momentum, The Rocket began a Portland edition (except for different concert calendars, the editorial content was mostly the same), and switched from being a monthly to a bi-weekly, with distribution covering the Northwest from Vancouver, BC, to Eugene, OR, to Missoula, Montana.

The demise of The Rocket has reverberated as a loss through the local music industry. Cheryl Waters, the assistant program director at KCMU, told me she kept copies around for professional reasons. "The Rocket was the only accessible resource for knowing local bands," she said. "It was more a question of the quantity of their local music coverage." The Rocket paid insistent attention to Northwest talent. "As a music programmer, it was an invaluable resource."

Angel Combs, executive director of the local music activist group JAMPAC, wrote in an e-mail: "The Rocket was an essential medium for communicating with our constituency on issues facing the music industry.... They have always been supportive of our work. It's a great loss to artists and activists."

I was the calendar editor and a staff writer at The Rocket since last April. The inside story of the paper's long decline and abrupt end on October 18 goes something like this: In '95, Charles R. Cross sold the paper to BAM Media, a publishing company based in the Bay Area (though Cross continued as the editor). BAM used the then-profitable Rocket to float its other papers, which sucked The Rocket dry, while not getting the other papers off the ground. The company closed the doors on all of its projects in August of this year, and sold The Rocket to Dave Roberts, the publisher of the Illinois Entertainer, another free music rag.

Roberts bought a couple computers, gave a couple promotions, cut the office size, and made other such indications of reconfiguring the business for a grand resurgence. Then almost everyone's paychecks bounced, and the next time we saw Mr. Roberts, he told us it was our last day. It's unclear if this was all some shifty, shady bullshit (rarely does someone buy a business and let it collapse two months later), if he was just a bozo (he told the co-editor that he was thinking of buying a tanning booth for the office; and, rarely does someone buy a business and let it collapse two months later), or what. At the very least, a paper that goes out of business is usually allowed to produce a "goodbye issue" where it can salute its audience and itself. Not so under this unfortunate leadership. As Editor Joe Ehrbar said, "There's no reason The Rocket should have gone out of business."

To be sure, like all free alternative papers, The Rocket had its acerbic non-audience as well as its supporters. The people I talked to on the street offered adjectives from "irrelevant" to "boring" to "bogus" in describing the paper, and its local music focus alienated many potential readers. "Like Variety, if you're not in the business, it doesn't make sense to pick it up," commented Bruce while waiting for the bus. And many people said they stopped paying attention to The Rocket when The Stranger appeared, people who said they looked for color and attitude in a free rag more than faithful local music coverage. "I've been in Seattle for 10 years," remarked Paul, "and I haven't paid attention to The Rocket in years. I never thought it was great. The local rock focus was closed-minded because it ignored all the music that was happening elsewhere, and they missed out on a lot."

To be sure, The Rocket in part created its acerbic non-audience. A feature we did on independent record stores last month pissed off all the stores we didn't profile, and threats that we'd better stop ignoring so-and-so's record (to whom Ehrbar fired off an email about frail egos) came through the very last week. "I actually don't like The Rocket. They gave our CD a bad review, so I'm glad they went under," John Merithew of the band C Average (half) jokingly said. "Actually, it's probably because of that that they went under."

And there are the ingrates. Calvin Johnson, of Beat Happening, Halo Benders, and Dub Narcotic Sound System notoriety, said that "it was nice" to be on the cover with Halo Benders' Doug Martsch in '97, but "it would have meant a lot more if we were on the cover in the '80s. There are so many magazines out there now." Well.

However the readership changed or the musicians reacted, up through the last issue it was a boon for a band to be covered by The Rocket--and a thrill to be on the cover (except for Johnson, apparently). I spoke with Rocky Votolado of Waxwing, who was devastated when he found out about The Rocket's end. Waxwing were on the cover of the second-to-last issue, and Votolado told me the coverage "definitely was a boost in morale, and even helped in getting shows, including the one at the Showbox. I always wanted to be on the cover; I think every band did, whether they said it or not."

As for local hiphop, The Rocket was much more of a rock rag than a rap one, but it sported Sir Mix-a-Lot on the cover years before "Baby's Got Back," and put Source of Labor on the cover last summer in response to their years-and-years-long anticipated first LP. Not that it was a phenomenal album, but SOL have been building a hiphop community for almost a decade (the only weekly hiphop event in town is the all-ages series at the Sit & Spin, hosted by SOL's Wordsayer), and The Rocket wanted to recognize their importance. "The city of S.E.A. has a chance to be the 'new spot,' and we'll see if anybody else picks up the peel and runs with it, since now The Rocket has left the court," MC Jace of the Silent Lambs Project e-mailed me.

The paper fostered homegrown talent by covering even the most boneheaded local bands, as long as they were something to talk about. The next issue was to include the annual "Demo Listen Derby," where the writers take home a dozen or so three-song demo CDs and tapes and write a 40-word review. Most of the demos were predictably dull at best, and the reviews had to be insubstantial first-impressions, but it was the gesture that was important. I got hold of Joe Atlas from the New Congress Club, one of the many unknown bands that were to be reviewed, who said he was excited to get even these few words of feedback, and if the words were favorable, it would be great to have the quote. "The Rocket gave up-and-coming bands a spotlight, and every little bit of help from them [was] great," he said.

The Rocket was also known for gathering writers and illustrators who would otherwise have no outlet. It paved the road for the voice of a strong alternative press in Seattle that paid close attention to the culture being generated at ground level. After a month of being on the editorial staff there, I went through the archives and asked to take home a copy of the August '85 issue so I could frame it. The cover was hilariously illustrated by Evergreen graduate Matt Groening (back when Bart and Homer were just twinkles in his eye), and inside was a Billy Bragg article written by Ann Powers (back when staff writing for the NY Times was a distant dream), "I-wuz-there"-style rock journalism pieces on a teen dance, and coverage of the Bongathon, whose headline lamented "The 10th Annual Bongathon was a bust." I remember how, up through this point, "Seattle culture" was still about salmon and the Space Needle, and The Rocket was the only element amending this.

The Rocket will be remembered as a way Seattle knew itself. As Saskia of Orpheum Records commented, The Rocket was much like the clumps of posters on telephone polls that swelled at eye-level. It was a large part of how information and thought was tendered about Seattle, and how the culture it created decorated the city. Not coincidentally, many who directed the art found in The Rocket also made band posters that were tacked up around town, people like Art Chantry and Stewart A. Williams--whose poster for Oral Sets is up now.

It saddens me that we're not just building our city on top of old versions of itself anymore, like we did in Pioneer Square; that there's no chance someone 5,000 years from now will dig to find the roof of the Kingdome and totally flip out, or will uncover the RKCNDY sign and wonder what dialect it was written in; that a circa-'92 telephone pole won't be petrified with copies of The Rocket littered around it. As far as I know, there aren't even songs to remember them by.