Charles R. Cross and his son Ashland at Seattle's Climate Pledge Arena, 2/27/23

ON THE BACKSTREETS, UNTIL THE END
Charles R. Cross never stopped writing for Backstreets. His voice was instrumental in establishing the style and spirit of Backstreets for our entire run, and we felt it was important to bring it all back home with one more editorial from our founder. Following the close of daily operations in 2023, we asked Charley to return to his "On the Backstreets" column for a last dispatch. He happily obliged, setting up this heartfelt installment from the confines of the old Seattle Center Coliseum, where Backstreets got its start. Now feels like the time to share it. Charley was in his early 20s when he was moved to print up the four-page newspaper — Backstreets #1 — in 1980; here, he looks back from the vantage point of a father in his mid-60s, reflecting on his creation and all the things it's brought us.
— The Editors

Dateline: Seattle, Washington, February 27, 2023

In just a few hours I'll walk into Seattle's Climate Pledge Arena. It makes a kind of eerie sense that this place will represent the end of this magazine for me — all 42-and-a-half years of Backstreets history. It will end under the very same roof where it began (though the rest of this arena, other than the roof, was rebuilt a few years ago). "It ends where it begins," I'll say to myself as I walk into what was on October 24, 1980 the Seattle Center Coliseum, where I handed out the first issue of Backstreets.

Tonight, February 27, 2023, will be my first Springsteen show in seven years, and even before I witness it, mortality is on my mind. Any Springsteen fan with an Internet connection knows that mortality is the theme of this tour, with the centerpiece of the set being the new song "Last Man Standing," about the death of George Theiss of his first band, The Castiles. This segues into "Backstreets," a song about friendship, loyalty, and longevity.

But thinking about mortality in any sense always brings up your own impermanence. In a world with so much death and chaos the last few years, no tomorrow can be taken for granted. I feel emotional already, imagining that tonight's show might be the last time I ever see Bruce Springsteen in concert. He appears healthier than me. Still, I remember watching Clarence Clemons when I was a teenager and thinking that the Big Man's vigor and strength meant that he was immortal. You can't see the E Street Band without thinking of the men no longer standing, and wondering about the day when this will no longer be part of your life.

It's also not lost on me that several friends I attended Springsteen shows with are now gone, lost way too young for it to make any sense.

Backstreets Supersub Number One, Mark Zabel, who once used his four-wheel drive Jeep to deliver a print run to the post office when the snow was too high for my car, took his own life, a tragedy that still saddens me deeply. I often went to shows with Jared Houser and Stan Gutoski, two legendary tapers. Both have died since the last Bruce tour and are probably rolling over in their graves to know that I can get a download of tonight's show almost immediately.

My best friend Carl Miller, who saw a couple dozen Springsteen shows sitting next to me, died of cancer a few years back and left me his Fender Telecaster in his will. He knew I couldn't play guitar, but he said on his deathbed, "I want you to have it for all the music we shared." He was my "Terry," my "Bobby Jean," and in the duo of the two of us, I am, against all odds, the last man standing.

Adding to those obituaries, we now have Backstreets magazine, which I started in 1980 when I was a student at the University of Washington, and I still hadn't grown enough facial hair to shave often. This will be the last piece I ever write for Backstreets, which ceases publication after over 42 years, 92 issues, countless Internet posts, and some renown.

This magazine began in the analog world, when information came via printed newspapers or magazines, via crackly and expensive long distance phone calls, or via Maxell UD-XLII cassettes sent in the post. Four decades later, Backstreets ends in the digital age where immediacy is the norm, and where Bruce's setlist tonight will be known worldwide two seconds after he plays a chord.

I've written before that the genesis of this mag began from an experience I had in 1975, writing about Springsteen's Seattle date on the Born to Run tour for my college newspaper The Daily. The arts editor said I could do a preview, but when it appeared he'd taken my story, put his name on it, and turned it into a rant that said Springsteen sucked. He cut up my personal copies of Time and Newsweek with Bruce on the cover to spell out the word "HYPE." He was so wrong.

Five years later, in 1980, I was still in college but already working at alternative newspapers, and I decided it was necessary to start a fanzine to explain why Springsteen and the E Street Band were indeed the best live show around. I managed to get radio station KZOK to spring for the printing bill, and the first issue of Backstreets was launched.

I titled my zine Backstreets after my favorite song, but you all know that your favorite song can shift like the wind. Perhaps "New York City Serenade" was just too long a title for a magazine name. I printed ten thousand copies and handed the free, four-page issue to people going into the Seattle show on the original River tour. It was raining that night, and most of the copies I gave out were used as umbrellas. When I left the venue after the concert, I saw piles and wads on the ground. This is Seattle, so I dutifully picked them up and recycled the trashed issues.

The next Backstreets didn't come out for a few months, and to be honest it only did because I realized that having my post office box address in a magazine connected me to a like-minded community, which meant I was connected to the tape world, which meant more music in my mailbox. Backstreets became my fiber optic line of the day, all of this through snail mail and a post office box.

I managed to publish eight more issues over the next four years; issue #10 in 1984 was the first in a true magazine format. Anyone who got an issue in the mail for the first few years saw my handwriting on their envelope because I couldn't afford a computer — I just hand-wrote all the labels. Those early issues were typed on my typewriter and pasted-up with wax on non-repro blue paper.

It always was — and frankly remains — an insane idea: an actual magazine, with journalistic standards, about one artist. It was mostly a financial failure when I was publisher, through 1998. Every magazine in the world (except Consumer Reports) survives through advertising revenue (which is why you've seen the majority of magazines and newspapers fail in the Internet age). We had no advertising, except classified ads from people like me, looking for outtakes or live tapes.

Backstreets survived in the early days only because the printing bill was less than the money I was spending on cassettes. It survived in the middle years only because subscribers were kind enough to let me sleep in their spare rooms and serve as Backstreets ambassadors, getting their friends to sign up or helping me hand out flyers at concerts. It survived in the later years, when we had an actual office, because we were able to sell official Springsteen t-shirts (which made Bruce money, too, and kept our lights on). On nights when I was too tired to drive home, I would pile those shirts into a bed and sleep on them. I've made a lot of stupid financial decisions in my life, but when I think back on how much those 1984-era T-shirts are worth now on eBay, I wish I had them all back.

I rarely wore those shirts myself. The truth is, though I was in the clan, there were aspects to the fanaticism around Bruce that I was uncomfortable with, even though I edited Backstreets. Springsteen was just one of dozens of musicians that I loved, and seeing The Clash in 1979, or a U2 show at a 300-seat venue in 1981, or the Pretenders, Patti, Van, Marley, Carole, James, Joni, Neil, Dylan, Nirvana, and on and on, also shaped me. Backstreets and Springsteen were one in the 52-card deck of the music I loved. But for years they were the ace.

Many others felt the same way. Backstreets was always about community, and community-building. Thousands scored tickets at face value through our BTX webpage, snail mail, or getting info from the old Backstreets Hotline phone number, which had the most precious of all things in the pre-Internet era: information. Just finding out when a show was going on sale in a different city was a huge deal decades ago, and Backstreets was a conduit for that. We wore out six answering machines for the Hotline because of constant use. If you were a Springsteen fan in the pre-Internet '80s age, the Backstreets Hotline was the entire world wide web of info.

Backstreets was also unique as a fanzine because it remained independent of the artist and his management, and we didn't always take the company line. I remember that my critical review of Arthur Baker's remixes of the Born in the U.S.A. singles earned a rebuff from Springsteen's organization. This was the height of hypocrisy, I felt, as Jon Landau essentially invented the culture of independent reviewing at Rolling Stone, and his own reviews were biting and often critical.

While the Christic Institute benefit shows with Jackson Browne and Bonnie Raitt in 1990 were a creative apex in my opinion, the Human Touch and Lucky Town albums that followed represented Bruce's first album overreach. When Backstreets said as much, we were again rebuffed. So much for freedom of the press (blame it on the truth that ran us down). Still, so many in the larger organization, and in the band, supported Backstreets, and to them, a huge thanks. They were part of that community we created, too.

But this was never a magazine written to management — it was created to speak to the community, and it kept that standard through thick and thin. When this year's ticketing mess happened, it broke everyone at Backstreets' heart, just as it broke the hearts of many fans. Almost immediately a text stream started among longtime fans with the line, "What happened to 'No one wins unless everyone wins'?" Bruce had said that often during the Born in the U.S.A. tour food bank speech. Springsteen and Landau's eventual short comments addressing the issue — saying, essentially, that this was par for the course, "nothing to see here" — were an even bigger disappointment.

The entire ticketing industry is broken at present, and yes, many acts have used dynamic pricing. But I never saw numbers as inflated as they were with Springsteen. When I signed in for the Seattle on-sale, with no set cap, a $400 ticket showed up as a $5,000 ticket, meaning it would have cost me $11,500 with Ticketmaster's insane fees to take my son. (A friend eventually got us tickets that weren't dynamically priced, but even they were priced dearly.)

There were other ways to do this. That was obvious in January 2023, when country singer Zach Bryan, who is hotter than Bruce in today's music world, announced a tour with a ticketing system that was fair and equitable. I never thought in my lifetime I'd admire Zach Bryan on any topic more than Bruce Springsteen. Maybe Zach Bryan's chart-topping album titled American Heartbreak was preparing us for the ticket fiasco.

So many of my friends and Backstreets subscribers were simply priced out of seeing Springsteen on this tour, even if they were lucky enough to avoid dynamic pricing. For a teacher I know, who had seen Springsteen on every other tour, the dynamic ticket prices he bought for himself and his wife represented nearly ten percent of their yearly take-home pay. This all gives me mixed feelings about tonight, and it taints the show even before I see it.

Another Backstreets editor said the upcoming concert felt like a date you had scheduled with your ex-girlfriend. I know one person who bought "dynamically priced" tickets for thousands of dollars because they thought that was the only way to get them, then saw prices tumble close to show day, then lost their job and needed to sell, only to find their tickets were worth ten percent of what they had paid.

And these tickets — just to be clear — weren't tickets purchased from a scalper: they were tickets purchased as a verified fan from Bruce Springsteen's official dynamically priced on-sale. Tickets at most shows on the tour dropped in price after the on-sale, selling for as low as $7 in markets like Houston. In the world of the Internet, that news gets around quickly, and even the New York Times wrote about how longtime fans were suckers to buy tickets from the official on-sale.

The ticket debacle is not the sole reason for the end of this magazine, though — like The Buggles' song about MTV and radio, it was video, the Internet, and social media like TikTok that killed print in general, and not just this rag. If you think the geniuses at Backstreets magazine should have been able to figure out how to keep a print magazine going when folks at countless other real magazines couldn't, you'd be wrong. But between the hit to the community of fans from the ticketing fiasco, and the struggles to do any magazine in general, it feels like this is not a tour that a nightly diary of nearly identical setlists is worth detailing.

I know some will lament the end of Backstreets, some won't, and many likely will just support Meta or Elon's social media sites for their connections. I only realized when I started working on this piece that it was an obituary, really, like so many I've written recently for musicians we've lost over the years. But just as one should say at a funeral of anyone who lived a long life, the real miracle was that the departed ever existed in the first place, and thrived for so long. Kudos to all of you who helped make it happen.

I always had other real jobs while working for Backstreets, even before Chris Phillips took over as Editor, so this magazine's legacy is just one part of my life. But I'm proud of what Backstreets became after Chris took over, and how he used the Internet to do in two minutes what it sometimes took months to do in the era of snail mail. The magazine itself created a community of staff as well, and we all remain friends. It was the incredible work and passion of Erik Flannigan, Jonathan Pont, Mary Schuh (RIP), Adem Tepedelen, James Halada, Dan Johnson, Rob Nyberg, David Dubois, Robert Santelli, Lisa Pritchard, Drew Whittemore, Dan Halligan, Andrew Massimino, John Howie Jr., and most of all Chris Phillips, plus too many others to name, that made this possible.

And along with those people, there were the hundreds of unofficial Backstreets staff that helped in countless ways, whether that be by subscribing, buying a T-shirt, offering me a couch, or a ticket, or a coffee, or a cassette, or a supportive postcard, and who were the true believers in this magazine. They include Bernie, Holly (RIP, miss you), Stu, Andy, Josh, Jim, Arlen, Marty, Bobby Z., Jimmy, Jesse, Art, Grant, Steve S., Steve B., Billy S., Jim S., Rex, Debra L., Debbie M., Robert A. (RIP), Dan, Caryn, Ken V., Lou, Sarah E. (miss you, get in touch), Marietta, Margie, Flynn, Rob B., Steve J. (RIP), Shawn, Jon, Lisa, Phil J., Dan F., Mike S., Salvador, Sergio, Dave, Rene, Eddy, A.M., Andrew, Dave D., Ed S. (RIP), Phil C. (RIP), Peter J., and special thanks to Max, Danny (RIP), Clarence (RIP), Garry, Stevie, Roy, Nils, Patti, Charlie, Barbara C., Marilyn, Thom Z., Danny C., and SO many others I'm leaving out, because even in the Internet age there's a limit of space. Kudos for all you did, which was so much appreciated.

Back in time, back in that analog era of October 1980, we used printed "hard" tickets for concerts. To get them for the Seattle Center Coliseum River show you had to actually go to an outlet to buy them. I had gotten up early on the on-sale day and gone to the local record store only to find dozens of people in front of me. I got in my 1978 Ford Fiesta (one of several cars I would ruin the shocks on by using them as Backstreets delivery vehicles) and drove ten miles to a suburban record store where, glory be, I was the first in line.

In that age, there was always the luck of the draw as to which outlet got which tickets. I walked into that record store in Shoreline, Washington, plunked down just under $30 total for two tickets (that figure is going to be the most amazing part of this story), and walked out with two front-row center seats to that concert. Kismet, luck, a blessing, randomness, and never repeated again.

So on October 24, 1980, I was the odd guy outside trying to hand out a free fanzine to people who mostly just dropped it on the ground as they filtered into the show. I had no idea the fanzine I'd just handed out would see 92 issues published. I had no idea this four-page first issue would provide the town square for a community for the next 42 years. I had no idea that these heaps of wet papers on the ground were the start of something beautiful, important, passionate, that would connect thousands of people, be responsible for a few marriages (and probably a divorce or two, including mine), and would help form a fan community like no other.

A pundit recently noted in a news piece on the end of Backstreets that it was the longest-running and largest fanzine in the world. I can't imagine that's true, but if it was even close to that, it was an amazing ride.

I'm sure as I walked into the Coliseum that day in 1980, some of the people I walked by probably said to themselves, "there's that odd guy who is trying to hand out that fanzine, and he somehow managed to get a ticket." I walked by them all to the center of the front row, and the show began. When "Badlands" started the night, the thesis of this fanzine I'd created came to life: that seeing Springsteen and The E Street Band live was one of the greatest experiences in rock 'n' roll. This was the proof of concept for Backstreets.

And in that moment, and in many others, I believed.

Tonight, I'll be on that same hill, on that same plot of land, because I can't stop. Much of my motivation tonight is familial: My 23-year-old son wants to see another Springsteen show with his dad, as this music has meant a lot to our relationship. My son has seen two Bruce shows already, if you don't count the 2000 tour date where he was a breastfeeding baby with earphones on. I tell him he's probably already seen the best Springsteen show he's going to see, but he is undeterred.

His youthful enthusiasm isn't without conflicted feelings, though. He's wise enough to point out that this show is priced so high that Springsteen will bring in few new young fans, and that as a 23-year-old who works in a record store he couldn't afford even the cheapest tickets tonight on his own. No student, no kid, no poor person — all of which I was at the time I started Backstreets — will be at this show unless their rich parents bring them. This is not a show about tomorrows, or for tomorrow's fans — the pricing assured there would be zero of those folks, and therefore zero new discovery. This tour is only about yesterdays. I don't think this is what Bruce Springsteen wanted in the end, but that's what he's gotten.

I've got to put that aside, as I don't need to raise my blood pressure (cardio issues). With my son at my side, I'll be there on time, and I'll pay the cost. And when Springsteen plays "Backstreets," I'll pull my son close and whisper of dreams found and lost. I'll tell him that Springsteen once said that the song "Backstreets" was written about what it felt like to be an outcast, that it represented to Bruce a "place of personal refuge."

In a way, Backstreets the fanzine was always a personal refuge for me, for Chris, for all the other contributors, and, I suspect, for many of you who read it. When Mighty Max pounds down on the crescendo at the end of my favorite song, I'm sure I'll whisper "this is incredible" in my son's ear. I'm also sure I'll whisper, "You can see why I started a fanzine named after this song so, so many years ago."

And then it will end where it began.

— Charles R. Cross

- August 16, 2024

A Note From Christopher Phillips, Publisher & Editor-in-Chief

After 43 years of publishing in one form or another, by fans for fans of Bruce Springsteen, it's with mixed emotions that we announce Backstreets has reached the end of the road.

We are immensely proud of the work Backstreets has done, and we are forever grateful to the worldwide community of fellow fans who have contributed to and supported our efforts all these years, but we know our time has come.

It starts with the personal, having as much to do with where I find myself in life. I was 22 when I started at Backstreets in 1993; I'm 52 now. For all of those 30 years, there's never been a time when my heart wasn't fully in it. That's the case, too, for the editors who preceded and inspired me in the magazine's first 13 years.

A key reason something as gonzo as Backstreets has been able to exist, and for so long — since 1980 — is that it has consistently sprung from a place of genuine passion, rooted in a heartfelt belief in the man and his music. As difficult as it is to call this the end, it's even harder to imagine continuing without my whole heart in it.

If you read the editorial Backstreets published last summer in the aftermath of the U.S. ticket sales, you have a sense of where our heads and hearts have been: dispirited, downhearted, and, yes, disillusioned. It's not a feeling we're at all accustomed to while anticipating a new Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band tour. If you haven't yet read that editorial ("Freeze-out," July 24, 2022), or the crux of Springsteen's response to Rolling Stone in November, we encourage you to do so; we don't want to rehash those issues, but we stand behind our positions and points.

We're not alone in struggling with the sea change. Judging by the letters we've received over recent months, the friends and longtimers we've been checking in with, and the response to our editorial, disappointment is a common feeling among hardcore fans in the Backstreets community.

When I revisit that writing now, it reads like a cry for help; most discouraging was that six months went by with no lifeline thrown. What we have been grappling with is not strictly the cost of admission ("It's not just about the money!" is a refrain we've heard from Backstreets readers) but its various implications.

Regardless, there's no denying that the new ticket price range has in and of itself been a determining factor in our outlook as the 2023 tour approached — certainly in terms of the experience that hardcore fans have been accustomed to for, as Springsteen noted, 49 years. Six months after the onsales, we still faced this three-part predicament: These are concerts that we can hardly afford; that many of our readers cannot afford; and that a good portion of our readership has lost interest in as a result.

We hear and have every reason to believe that there will be changes to the pricing and ticket-buying experience when the next round of shows go on sale. We also know that enterprising fans may be able to take advantage of price drops when production holds are released in advance of a concert. Whatever the eventual asking price at showtime and whether an individual buyer finds it fair, we simply realized that we would not be able to cover this tour with the drive and sense of purpose with which we've operated continuously since 1980. That determination came with a quickening sense that we'd reached the end of an era.

Know that we're not burning our fan cards, nor encouraging anyone else to do so. In fact, as diehard music fans, we have every hope of rekindling enthusiasm for what we've always believed to be a peerless body of work. If any of this is to reflect on Bruce Springsteen here at the end of our run, we'd like it to be that his extraordinary artistry inspired an extraordinary fan response that lasted for 43 years. That's extraordinary.

I know how incredibly fortunate and privileged I've been to be able to do this work for so long, to have had an enviable job in which I've found tremendous meaning and satisfaction, alongside so many like-minded people. It's a strange thing to put oneself out of work, let alone this work. Speaking about work as he often has, in 2012 Springsteen called it "the single thing that brings a sense of self and self-esteem, and a sense of place, a sense of belonging." The sense of belonging, among an incredible community of devoted fans, has brought enormous joy to my life these past 30 years.

I won't be able to say everything that's in my heart here, or thank everyone who needs thanking — if you're reading these words, you're on the list. For now, suffice it to say we have eternal gratitude for Bruce Springsteen and his work, for the E Street Band and the other musicians who have helped him make it, and so many of those whose work involved bringing that music to the world.

While Backstreets always published freely, independent of Springsteen's official operations — in fact, not once did they attempt to interfere — I'm grateful to those who helped us narrow the divide for the benefit of the Springsteen fan community: those who work for Bruce and all the good people at Sony Music, Shore Fire Media, and Jon Landau Management, with a special thank you to Barbara Carr.

On this side, I'm forever indebted to Backstreets founder Charles R. Cross, who trusted me with his creation in 1998 — the honor of a lifetime — after we worked together for five years. Previous editors Erik Flannigan and Jonathan Pont have also remained indispensable brothers-in-arms, insightful observers, keen chroniclers, and tireless wordsmiths, bar none. All together, they have been our de facto editorial board. Many other stellar human beings have clocked time at Backstreets HQ over the decades and become lifelong friends, with a special mention for the multi-talented John Howie, Jr., who has put in 18 years and counting.

Most of all we're deeply grateful to our fellow fans and contributors, typically one and the same. With Backstreets we've lived the very definition of "community effort" — our work would not have been possible without the many terrific people around the world we've been lucky enough to meet and befriend along the way: writers and readers, musicians and music critics, filmmakers and film critics, photographers, activists, archivists, librarians, illustrators, Shore denizens, international travelers, old-timers, new-timers, comedians, historians, educators, disc jockeys, retailers and record store managers, tapers, collectors, music geeks of all stripes… the fans, the fans, the fans. If you heard the big music and got on board, thank you.

Between the magazine (91 issues and counting — see below!) and thousands of online features, reviews, and editorials, Backstreets published a million and one words on the music that mattered to us the most. We stood humbled when Springsteen mentioned Backstreets in public after 20 years, when we helped create and organize the Bruce Springsteen Special Collection (which became the basis for the Bruce Springsteen Archives and Center For American Music). While it was deeply meaningful to hear him acknowledge the work we did, the real reward came when our readers cheered.

In the end, that's what This Thing of Ours has been for and about — fans and fandom. If Backstreets can have any kind of legacy, I'd like it to be that we blurred the line between fan effort and professional publication: to cover someone like Springsteen, we insisted on solid musical journalism, high editorial standards, honest writing (which often meant not toning down enthusiasm in order to appear cool or objective), and professional photography — while never losing sight of the connections and community that have given meaning to it all on the listeners' side of the equation.

The shared love and joy, the camaraderie, the minutiae and close attention paid, the passion, the post-shows.… if you're still on the train, may all of that continue for you. Rave on. We have every hope of meeting you further on up the road.
- February 3, 2023

Our work is not yet done.

Though we're freezing the website at this moment, work at Backstreets HQ will continue for some time.

First, we'll get back to the magazine that started it all; we'll complete a blow-out Final Issue of Backstreets. As the 2000s have gone on, with the internet becoming increasingly present in all of our lives (alongside skyrocketing costs of paper, printing, and postage), we made the choice to put more and more of our work online instead of in print. The decision was largely driven by the immediacy that I felt I'd want, as a fan, and that the times seemed to demand. If you're a subscriber to the magazine, we sincerely hope you feel you've gotten your money's worth in what we've published on the website over the years, far more than we could ever print in the pages of a magazine (just compare the show-by-show tour reports). Still, we're supremely grateful to everyone who has supported this effort, subscribers and supersubs most of all, and we don't want to go out without doing right by you. We'll now be able to focus on finishing and delivering issue #92, in digital form at the very least, to collect more final thoughts and present an accumulation of unpublished Backstreets content, interviews, and photography. Charles R. Cross will return for the finale, with one last "On the Backstreets" column. We're also exploring the digitization of the previous 91 issues, in hopes of presenting our subscribers and supersubs with the full run of PDFs.

The Backstreet Records shop is still open for business. We have pre-orders to fulfill for Nicki Germaine's new SPRINGSTEEN: LIBERTY HALL book, as well as a great number of Boss items on the shelves — CDs, records, books, T-shirts, and beyond — that we'll be happy to send your way. It's doubtful we'll be restocking, so please check out our current inventory for maximum availability and help us reduce it. To that end, use coupon code BOBBYJEAN for 10% off your entire order — everything other than LIBERTY HALL.

We also have an assortment of rarer and one-off items that we'll be adding to the shop as we clear out the office, from long-"sold out" issues of Backstreets magazine to unusual promotional stuff, so we hope you'll stay tuned to the Latest Additions.

The Backstreets Ticket Exchange (BTX) message boards will remain open for a short time. We want to give everyone a chance to finish transactions, save any posts, and preserve any important content. We'll plan to keep the boards running for another couple of months to allow ample time. We've been pleased to see other ticket exchange boards crop up in the wake of BTX, which we hope will continue the effort to keep tickets between fans, at their original prices, and out of the hands of scalpers.

With no intention of taking our toys and going home, we currently plan to keep the remainder of the backstreets.com website — the News Archives, etc. — up and available for the foreseeable future.

Our social media and email list will remain active. While we won't be tracking the events of each day, we'll be maintaining our accounts on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook, as well as our "Outskirts Dispatch" email list (signup form below).

In the short term, we'll surely uncover much worth sharing as we sift through 43 years of history in the Backstreets office. These accounts will also keep key lines of communication open for any updates, announcements, observations, or future projects. If you don't already, we hope you'll follow our accounts on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook, and opt-in to our email list below.

Enter the News Archives