Backstage & Beyond Vol. 1

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 '...