''Backstreets Magazine'' is a published quarterly

Bruce Springsteen Bruce Frederick Joseph Springsteen (born September 23, 1949) is an American Rock music, rock singer, songwriter, and guitarist. Nicknamed "the Boss", Springsteen has released 21 studio albums spanning six decades; most of his albums feature th ...

fanzine A fanzine (blend word, blend of ''fan (person), fan'' and ''magazine'' or ''zine'') is a non-professional and non-official publication produced by enthusiasts of a particular cultural phenomenon (such as a literary or musical genre) for the pleas ...

that has been covering the music of Springsteen and other Jersey Shore sound artists since 1980. On February 3, 2023, the magazine's publisher and editor-in-chief announced that the magazine will cease publication after one final upcoming issue and will stop updating its website.

History

On October 24, 1980, Bruce Springsteen performed at the Seattle Coliseum in

Seattle, Washington Seattle ( ) is the List of municipalities in Washington, most populous city in the U.S. state of Washington (state), Washington and in the Pacific Northwest region of North America. With a population of 780,995 in 2024, it is the List of Unit ...

, during

The River Tour The River Tour was a concert tour featuring Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band that took place in 1980 and 1981, beginning concurrently with the release of Springsteen's album '' The River''. Itinerary The first leg of the tour took place ...

. That night Charles R. Cross passed out 10,000 copies of a free four-page tabloid about Springsteen that he had created. That first issue mostly ended up discarded, with many copies floating in puddles by night's end. Those did survive have become valuable collector's items, sometimes fetching hundreds of dollars for a copy.Graff, Gary (2005). ''The Ties That Bind: Bruce Springsteen A to E to Z'', Visible Ink Press, USA. . After that modest beginning, ''Backstreets Magazine'' began an uninterrupted run of publishing. Along the way the magazine won a Music Journalism Award winner for Best Fanzine, and grew from its newsprint roots to a slick magazine format with issue number 10. Full color covers followed soon thereafter, and eventually ''Backstreets'' became a typical full-color published magazine. Christopher Phillips is the publisher and editor of ''Backstreets''. He moved to Seattle in 1993, and began working with Cross starting with issue number 44. By 1994 Phillips was

managing editor A managing editor (ME) is a senior member of a publication's management team. Typically, the managing editor reports directly to the editor-in-chief and oversees all aspects of the publication. United States In the United States, a managing edi ...

, and he launched the companion website in 1995. In 1998 Phillips took over the magazine completely. He stayed in Seattle until 2000, and then moved operations to the East Coast. Phillips and ''Backstreets'' both reside in

Chapel Hill, North Carolina Chapel Hill is a town in Orange County, North Carolina, Orange and Durham County, North Carolina, Durham counties, North Carolina, United States. Its population was 61,960 in the 2020 United States census, making Chapel Hill the List of municipa ...

Website

Backstreets.com grew into a major source of information for the Springsteen fan community. The website provided news, show schedules and reviews, ticket sales information, online store, and news about E Street Band members and Jersey Shore artists. The site also includes BTX, an Internet forum which presents a number of message boards for discussion of everything about Springsteen, as well as to buy, resell, and trade tickets to Springsteen's shows. BTX became the dominant Springsteen fan discussion forum in the U.S., supplanting prior vehicles such as the

Usenet Usenet (), a portmanteau of User's Network, is a worldwide distributed discussion system available on computers. It was developed from the general-purpose UUCP, Unix-to-Unix Copy (UUCP) dial-up network architecture. Tom Truscott and Jim Elli ...

group rec.music.artists.springsteen, the "Luckytown"

electronic mailing list A mailing list is a collection of names and addresses used by an individual or an organization to send material to multiple recipients. Mailing lists are often rented or sold. If rented, the renter agrees to use the mailing list only at contra ...

, and the pre-Internet, telephone-based "Bruce party line". The website was successful enough that, as the decade of the 2000s progressed, the "quarterly" issues of the printed magazine came out far less frequently, causing some sporadic dissatisfaction among subscribers.

References

External links

Official website
{{italic title 1980 establishments in Washington (state) Bruce Springsteen Fanzines Magazines established in 1980 Magazines published in Seattle Music magazines published in the United States Quarterly magazines published in the United States