Backstage & Beyond

Jim Sullivan — a 2023 inductee into the New England Music Hall of Fame — 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. An intrepid journalistic explorer who gets close enough to his subjects for real human interaction, Sullivan penetrates the publicity machine veneer to reveal the artists beneath the artifice. The profiles gathered here — the result of numerous encounters and conversations over time — have weight and depth, illuminating familiar names and music with fresh insights and personal reflections, the sort that rarely appear in the music press any longer. Backstage & Beyond contains a rich collection of ideas, experiences and remarks, many from greats who are no longer with us: David Bowie: "I probably drive people around me mad with my enthusiasm." Peter Gabriel: "My attitude has always been to make the music that I want to make … and then, when it's finished, try to sell it." Nico: "I find it very tiresome to be famous." David Byrne: "If you play music outside the alternative rock spectrum it's hard for people to conceive that you can like this music the way you can a rock band." Warren Zevon: "It's a danger to exaggerate your own emotions. We do that, but it's probably a greater danger to hide from them or conceal them." Jerry Lee Lewis: "[I] would never harm a hair on nobody's head, much less take someone's life. I'd die for someone, but I would never hurt nobody." Leonard Cohen: "If you think by saving the forest you're going to redeem your soul, you've got another thing coming." In 2023, Trouser Press Books published two volumes of Backstage & Beyond: one about artists whose careers began in the 1950s through the early 1970s, the other focusing on artists from the mid-1970s onward. This 2027 e-book assembles all the pieces from both, updated and augmented, deepening the examination of aging and the quest for relevance and purpose over the course of long careers. It also includes eleven bonus chapters not in any of the print editions. Chapters on: Alice Cooper Beastie Boys Billy Bragg Bono / U2 Brian Eno Bryan Ferry and Roxy Music Buzzcocks Cramps Darlene Love David Bowie David Byrne and Talking Heads Edgar Froese & Tangerine Dream Elvis Costello English Beat Enya Flipper Frankie Goes to Hollywood Gang of Four George Clinton & P-Funk Ginger Baker Ian Hunter and Mott the Hoople Iggy Pop Jerry Lee Lewis Jethro Tull (Ian Anderson) Joan Baez Joe Perry and Aerosmith John Fogerty John Lydon, Sex Pistols and Public Image Ltd. Joy Division/New Order Judy Collins k.d. lang KISS Lemmy and Motörhead Leonard Cohen Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground Marianne Faithfull Mark E. Smith / The Fall Mission of Burma Morrissey Neil Young Nico Patti Smith Pete Townshend Peter Gabriel Peter Wolf and the J. Geils Band Pixies Police Richard Thompson Ringo Starr Robert Fripp and King Crimson Roy Orbison Ryuichi Sakamoto Shane MacGowan and the Pogues Spiritualized Stiff Little Fingers Suicide Swans The B-52s The Cars The Clash The Cure The Damned The Kinks The Ramones The Rascals Tina Turner Warren Zevon