Jim Sullivan spent 26 years writing about music for the Boston Globe and two decades more writing for national publications. He has interviewed and reviewed countless musicians, many of them multiple times. Access to such A-list stars is hard to come by in the first place, but Sullivan got to know many of them well enough to engage them on a far more intimate level than journalists usually can or do.
The first volume of his music-writing anthology focuses on artists who came to prominence in the 1950s and '60s. Twenty-one of them are in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
Rather than simply collect up previously published articles as they originally appeared, Sullivan combed through his archive to find everything he wrote about each artist and worked the pieces together into a more expansive time-passages view that chronicles their changing situations, outlooks and experiences.
Backstage & Beyond Volume 1 includes fascinating, entertaining and occasionally hair-raising profiles of Jerry Lee Lewis, Ian Hunter & Mott the Hoople, David Bowie, Iggy Pop, Lou Reed, Nico, Brian Eno, Bryan Ferry & Roxy Music, Robert Fripp & King Crimson, Peter Gabriel, Warren Zevon, Pete Townshend, Ray Davies & the Kinks, Dave Davies, Ginger Baker, Leonard Cohen, Marianne Faithfull, John Fogerty, Tina Turner, Neil Young, Richard Thompson, Darlene Love, Alice Cooper, Peter Wolf & the J. Geils Band, Joe Perry & Aerosmith, Lemmy & Motörhead, George Clinton, Tangerine Dream, Joan Baez, k.d lang and Roy Orbison.
In the preface, Sullivan writes, "My hope is that the recollections contained here ... trigger some memories, bring you back to where you wanted to be - backstage and beyond, as it were. And if you weren't around then, I hope this transports you back to several golden ages of rock and roll."
