Intro
Point Blank Magazine was a Bruce fanzine published from 1980-1992 by Dan French and a number of contributors.
These files used to be live on Dan’s website (see header) but the links stopped working, so I sent him an email asking about it. He responded shortly after by sending everything over.
Like the Backstreets Archive, these have been uploaded to the Internet Archive. I also plan to upload these to MEGA. Do note that these files have NOT been OCRd. Many of the issues have faded typewriter text, and OCR software gave a very poor result after running it through. The files on IA will be OCRd, but since I use the same Tessaract OCR process locally that they use, it will also probably have the same poor result.
No major edits were done to the PDF files, and are exactly as received from Dan with two exceptions:
- E Street Express #1 had to be opened and reprinted to PDF to fix an odd error on uploading. The file opens fine so I’m not sure why that happened. It does come with the downside of making the file like 5x larger in size, but oh well.
- “Songs To Orphans” was originally published in 5 volumes from 1982-1986. I merged all of these into a single file for convenience sake.
Contents
Included in this archive are the following issues:
- Issues 1-10 of Point Blank magazine, which were published from 1980-1992.
- 2 Editions of “E Street Express”, which was sort of an “in-between issue news update”. These are also included in issues 9 and 10, but the standalone copies are higher quality.
- 3 “Special Editions” of Point Blank, published in-between issues.
- “The Best Seat In The House”: Transcript of a Lecture/Q&A given by Max Weinberg at London’s Astoria Theatre on August 10, 1986
- 4 Point Blank/Fever Collaborations, done by a collection of people from both Point Blank mag and Fever mag.
- 2 editions of lists which compile every known Bruce publication, published in 1986 and 1989.
- TOL Tour Special: published in August 1988 and covering the entire TOL/Human Rights Now! tour.
- “Let Freedom Ring”: a manifesto detailing the plot by CBS to send a fake Bruce out on tour while keeping the real one locked up to write music.
Conclusion
This piece is much shorter than the Backstreets one, simply because much less work was needed. All the files were sent over and needed much less work.
Thanks to Dan for sending over all of his files.
