Backstage & Beyond Vol. 1: 45 Years of Classic Rock Chats & Rants

Jim Sullivan spent 26 years writing 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 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 them 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.”

Praise for Backstage & Beyond:

• “Sullivan has been really successful at getting a huge list of artists to share what makes them come up with the music we’ve been loving for decades. He has a knack for peeking under the blanket and finding out what makes musicians human — and sometimes inhuman. That’s what makes the book so much fun to read.” —Tom Hamilton of Aerosmith
• “These are wonderful stories across the whole range of popular music, by one of rock’s finest journalists. As history lengthens and some of these legends move on, these become increasingly precious fragments of lives lived at the sharp edge of music.” —Richard Thompson
• “Jim Sullivan is an expert interviewer with an uncanny ability to connect with his subjects. In Backstage & Beyond, he brings out the humanity in a host of rock and roll icons who are too often portrayed as godlike figures. This an intimate and revealing look at many of the major personalities of the classic rock era.”
  —Tom Perrotta, author of Election, Tracy Flick Can't Win, The Leftovers and Mrs.Fletcher
• "These chats and rants go beyond the surface bromides we already know about these larger-than-life personalities and unlock the deeper stories they rarely share — by turns triumphant, tragic and never less than illuminating." —Greg Kot (author and co-host of Sound Opinions)
• “Insightful and concise, Backstage and Beyond transports us into the minds of some the greats of rock and roll.” —Boston DJ Oedipus
• "Sullivan’s informed commentary and the professional and personal revelations he elicits from his subjects place Backstage & Beyond several leagues above the average rock read. At this late date, that’s saying something." —writer and broadcaster Gene Sculatti (The Catalog of Cool)
• “This book reads like a Norton’s Anthology, a collection, a distillation of what mattered as only the best critics with the most heart can do.” —Steve Wynn (solo, Dream Syndicate, Baseball Project)

Jim Sullivan, a 2023 inductee into the New England Music Hall of Fame, spent 26 years writing about music for the Boston Globe and two decades more writing for countless national publications, including USA Today, the Boston Phoenix, Boston Herald, Trouser Press, Record, Creem, New Musical Express, The Guardian, Rock and Roll Globe, LA Weekly, Rock's Back Pages, the Christian Science Monitor, Best Classic Bands, Newsweek, Playgirl and The Forward. He has interviewed and reviewed countless musicians, many of them multiple times.