Last weekend's news that Seattle rock scribe Tom Phalen had died of apparent heart failure brought a flood of memories about his role in covering the glory days of the grunge era.

Phalen, a longtime freelance contributor at The Seattle Times and "Ace of Clubs" columnist (he also wrote for Rolling Stone, Seattle Weekly and the Journal-American) was a terrific writer with a flair for describing music and getting to the essence of his subject matter. He was also good at lampooning his fellow writers.

In a 1992 story about the first anniversary party for now-defunct Seattle nightclub RKCNDY, where Pearl Jam, Alice in Chains, the Gits and a host of other bands played, Phalen described the scene with an eye for detail and a great sense of humor: "DJ Riz was playing fine funky noise, there were people sandwich-dancing (threesomes) on the stage, journalists everywhere -- myself excluded -- were storing beers for winter, and I haven't seen so much blatantly visible black lingerie since the Christmas issue of the Victoria's Secret catalog. And that was just the guys."

But alcohol was one of Tom's worst demons, causing him great emotional pain and serious health problems. He finally licked it, or so I heard, and got out of the business of writing about music entirely.

I met Phalen in the 1980s at the old Music Hall (now long gone), where he was seated next to me in a cramped booth hardly big enough for one person. Over the years, I always enjoyed sharing assignments with him, even though we worked for rival newspapers.

But he was also a fierce competitor. In the days when the Times published in the afternoons and had later deadlines, Phalen would often base his reviews on whatever I missed by having to rush out to meet earlier P-I deadlines in the pre-Internet, non-laptop era.

Tom was good at catching a half dozen shows a night and summarizing the essence of each event. He was in and out in a flash, but often came up with just the right words to describe a show in a subsequent story.

Here's a snippet from a review of a Prodigy concert in 1998 at Mercer Arena: "For all the noise -- the bone-breaking bass, the barbed-wire sci-fi samples, the funked-up and hip-hopping scatological sloganeering -- it was the lights that seemed to most affect the several thousand bodies jumping in unison to Prodigy last night. The music, its incessant bass and drums, had everyone moving, but that was an audience on automatic pilot. The lights created reactions and got results."

Phalen, 58, died Aug. 27. If you're curious about his work, go to seattletimes.com and do a search for his name. And be sure to spell it correctly: P-H-A-L-E-N. You'll be amply rewarded by his prose.