Two of my former editors have died in 2024. Dawn Anderson, publisher and editor of Seattle’s Backlash and Backfire magazines, had recently been diagnosed with advanced lung cancer.
Dawn published the first interview with Kurt Cobain, in 1988. For many fans, that alone is qualification for “legend” status. And she was a fucking legend, someone who was really in the thick of it for at least 20 years. She was there before “grunge,” heralded all of your favorite SubPop and other indie bands before you’d heard of them. Dawn was at ground zero with half a hazmat suit and a six-pack of PBR.
The news of her passing broke on Friday, and her last post – an update, and thank-you, was on Christmas Eve. She pretty much vowed to keep fighting until her last breath, and kept her promise. The written word is so powerful… and goddamn, it’s so surreal to read words on Facebook from someone who was here yesterday, gone today.
She did an admirable job on FB with her “Backfire/Backlash” page, but I had been hoping the magazines would get a more complete, digital exposure as The Rocket recently enjoyed – not long before Charley Cross died.
I wrote for her glossy-covered “Backfire II” magazine, here and there, after the Rocket crashed and until she quit publishing in 2003. I’ll have to go dig this weekend to see exactly what I wrote, what I have. Mudhoney, I remember that one.
I think that this passage, borrowed from her Backlash FB page, sums up Dawn, heart-of-gold badass legend, pretty nicely:
“Backlash hit the streets at a unique time in Seattle history—we talked to bands like Alice in Chains, Soundgarden, Mudhoney, and so many more just as these bands were on the verge of selling their souls to the devil—sorry, signing with a record label—five minutes after playing to 50 people at the Central Tavern on a Tuesday. (We never did any articles about Pearl Jam, because that band didn’t exist yet. I have no doubt we would’ve ribbed them mercilessly.)
I knew which band I wanted on the cover of the last issue of Backlash, and I knew I wouldn’t have to schmooze my way up a ladder of snakes to get in touch with them. I had already promised Nirvana the cover—I was out of beer money at the Vogue and Kurt said he’d give me a dollar if I put Nirvana on the cover. was hardly a difficult sell—I loved those guys ever since I heard that first demo tape.
I’ve always felt that the triumph of real rock music over radio fodder, as brief as it was, validated everything I’d been trying to say for years in both Backfire and Backlash. As crazy as it sounds to stop publishing a rock music magazine in Seattle just as the grunge money started flowing, I’ve never regretted it.”
