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Urban Spacemen and Wayfaring Strangers: Overlooked Innovators and Eccentric Visionaries of '60s Rock
This book explores the evolution of 19 intriguing artists bred by the unique 1960s music scene, and traces the musical and cultural threads that gave birth to their electrifying innovations. From folk-rockers to blue- and brown-eyed soulsters to rock satirists and beyond, acclaimed rock author Unterberger uncovers the lives and music of the key visionaries in a mesmerizing decade, The Pretty Things, Tim Buckley, Arthur Brown, The Fugs, Bobby Fuller, The Bonzo Dog Band, Fred Neil, The Beau Brummels and many more. Includes cool photos throughout, and audio samples highlighting the sounds of some of the featured artists.
“Comprehensive and engaging. Clearly, Unterberger has done his research.”
– Billboard
“Comprehensive and engaging. Clearly, Unterberger has done his research.”
– Billboard
- GenresMusicNonfictionHistory
296 pages, Paperback
First published October 30, 2000
6 people are currently reading
124 people want to read
About the author
Richie Unterberger
29 books45 followersRichie Unterberger's book "The Unreleased Beatles: Music and Film" details the incredible wealth of music the Beatles recorded that they did not release, as well as musical footage of the group that hasn't been made commercially available. His other books include "Unknown Legends of Rock'n'Roll," the two-volume 1960s folk-rock history "Turn! Turn! Turn!"/"Eight Miles High," and "The Rough Guide to Shopping with a Conscience." He's also a frequent contributor to the All Music Guide and MOJO magazine, and lives in the San Francisco Bay Area."
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
October 28, 2020
When my Goodreads friend David put Urban Spacemen and Wayfaring Strangers: Overlooked Innovators and Eccentric Visionaries of 60s Rock by Richie Unterberger onto his to-read list, the title alone was enough to sway me into adding it too. I'll admit, though, that I was misled to begin with—at first I thought this book would be about the many musicians who have also been inventors, like the late Eddie Van Halen with his celebrated patent for a wearable guitar rest.
Instead, Urban Spacemen is something else entirely: a deep and intensely personal dive into a few relatively obscure musical careers from that most-scrutinized decade of rock-and-roll, The Sixties™. Such attempts to universalize individual taste are doomed from the start, of course—de gustibus non disputandum is a cliché for a reason—but they can still be entertaining.
And, since I have my own all-time favorite Sixties obscurity to obsess about—The Family Tree's one LP, a musical biography entitled "Miss Butters"—I really dig that. Although The Family Tree doesn't appear in Urban Spacemen, I know Unterberger's aware of the band, from his liner notes for a couple of Bob Segarini's later bands (including Roxy and The Wackers).
Unterberger does devote quite a bit of space in Urban Spacemen to another of my own favorite 60s obscurities, though: The Fugs. I was first introduced to The Fugs through a reference in Lillian Roxon's amazing Rock Encyclopedia, which I read back in 1985. Unterberger cites Roxon at least twice as well, on pages 113 and 232.
Actually, Unterberger's interests seem to parallel mine in lots of ways—he's just one year older than I, so he and I were both unable to experience The 60s™ while they were happening, a bit of bad timing which led to an abiding fascination later on.
*
Unterberger's focus here is rather narrow, I must admit. The photos tell the story: almost all of his "urban spacemen" really are men, and they're almost all white men at that. There's exactly one woman pictured, and you could be forgiven for thinking her name is "and Mimi" (Mimi Fariña, that is, who is almost always mentioned in the same breath with her husband Richard).
Urban Spacemen begins with a 10-page Introduction justifying the project, which seems redundant—you either understand his interest, or you probably aren't interested yourself.
The book is also, without a doubt, repetitive and verbose, with awkward prose throughout—like, for just one example, the phrase "highway-to-doom-tempoed" (on p.72)—but these are sins of enthusiasm, after all, and they are ones I know intimately as well.
What always shines through Unterberger's prose is that he is a man deeply in love with his subject—and, by and large, Unterberger's self-indulgent obsession delivers on its promise. Eventually.
Plus, the book includes a companion CD, something I didn't even notice until I actually had the book in my hands. It's short, to be sure—only 17 minutes long, containing six songs selected from the many referenced in Unterberger's essays—but provides a nice audio addition to the text.
*
I didn't think Portland Oregon's music scene was quite as well-known in the 1960s as it has become later on, so I was pleased and a little surprised to see a reference to a local landmark in my adoptive hometown, the Crystal Ballroom (although Unterberger calls this venue the "Crystal Dog," which I had to find out elsewhere was its nickname when Chet Helms' Family Dog was presenting shows there in 1968):
I think Unterberger would understand the wistfulness I felt while writing this. His essays often lament what might have been, if only, had the world not been as it was. In that way, Urban Spacemen also put me in mind of Lewis Shiner's fabulous novel Glimpses, in which an audio engineer gets to hear some of those roads not taken.
*
Despite its nostalgic focus and often elegaic tone, Urban Spacemen reminded me that the Sixties themselves were forward-looking, a decade of turmoil but also, for many who were young then, a decade of hope. Tuli Kupferberg of The Fugs died in 2010... but if anything his message, as Unterberger relays it, seems even more urgent today:
Instead, Urban Spacemen is something else entirely: a deep and intensely personal dive into a few relatively obscure musical careers from that most-scrutinized decade of rock-and-roll, The Sixties™. Such attempts to universalize individual taste are doomed from the start, of course—de gustibus non disputandum is a cliché for a reason—but they can still be entertaining.
And, since I have my own all-time favorite Sixties obscurity to obsess about—The Family Tree's one LP, a musical biography entitled "Miss Butters"—I really dig that. Although The Family Tree doesn't appear in Urban Spacemen, I know Unterberger's aware of the band, from his liner notes for a couple of Bob Segarini's later bands (including Roxy and The Wackers).
Unterberger does devote quite a bit of space in Urban Spacemen to another of my own favorite 60s obscurities, though: The Fugs. I was first introduced to The Fugs through a reference in Lillian Roxon's amazing Rock Encyclopedia, which I read back in 1985. Unterberger cites Roxon at least twice as well, on pages 113 and 232.
Actually, Unterberger's interests seem to parallel mine in lots of ways—he's just one year older than I, so he and I were both unable to experience The 60s™ while they were happening, a bit of bad timing which led to an abiding fascination later on.
*
Unterberger's focus here is rather narrow, I must admit. The photos tell the story: almost all of his "urban spacemen" really are men, and they're almost all white men at that. There's exactly one woman pictured, and you could be forgiven for thinking her name is "and Mimi" (Mimi Fariña, that is, who is almost always mentioned in the same breath with her husband Richard).
Urban Spacemen begins with a 10-page Introduction justifying the project, which seems redundant—you either understand his interest, or you probably aren't interested yourself.
The book is also, without a doubt, repetitive and verbose, with awkward prose throughout—like, for just one example, the phrase "highway-to-doom-tempoed" (on p.72)—but these are sins of enthusiasm, after all, and they are ones I know intimately as well.
What always shines through Unterberger's prose is that he is a man deeply in love with his subject—and, by and large, Unterberger's self-indulgent obsession delivers on its promise. Eventually.
Plus, the book includes a companion CD, something I didn't even notice until I actually had the book in my hands. It's short, to be sure—only 17 minutes long, containing six songs selected from the many referenced in Unterberger's essays—but provides a nice audio addition to the text.
*
I didn't think Portland Oregon's music scene was quite as well-known in the 1960s as it has become later on, so I was pleased and a little surprised to see a reference to a local landmark in my adoptive hometown, the Crystal Ballroom (although Unterberger calls this venue the "Crystal Dog," which I had to find out elsewhere was its nickname when Chet Helms' Family Dog was presenting shows there in 1968):
"The place had been a roller-skating rink. It was on the second floor, and it had a couple-feet thick ball bearings in the floor. Don't ask me why. They were going to repossess {the organ}. David had a succession of managers that he picked, were just fabulously bad. This particular batch had really soaked us, so I decided I'd throw it off the stage and destroy it, 'cause it was like an eight-, nine-foot stage. I tossed it, it hit the floor, and it bounced, I don't know, eight feet in the air. It was a Hammond M-3. It went down, across the floor, and people scattered like this fucking train was coming through. It must have got about twenty, thirty feet out onto the floor, and it didn't destroy the fucking thing! So I did it again the next night, and when it hit the floor, it separated in two halves, and they flipped off in different directions. It was very spectacular."Those ball-bearings, by the way, make the ballroom floor springier, "like dancing on air." The Crystal Ballroom was restored in 2014 and is a popular dance venue again—or at least it was, before 2020 and a global pandemic.
—Chester Crill of Kaleidoscope, pp.87-88
I think Unterberger would understand the wistfulness I felt while writing this. His essays often lament what might have been, if only, had the world not been as it was. In that way, Urban Spacemen also put me in mind of Lewis Shiner's fabulous novel Glimpses, in which an audio engineer gets to hear some of those roads not taken.
*
Despite its nostalgic focus and often elegaic tone, Urban Spacemen reminded me that the Sixties themselves were forward-looking, a decade of turmoil but also, for many who were young then, a decade of hope. Tuli Kupferberg of The Fugs died in 2010... but if anything his message, as Unterberger relays it, seems even more urgent today:
We haven't retreated from 1968. Almost everything we believed in is correct. We're biding our time, and still keeping in shape. The world is going to hell in a computer; we need radical changes. The problem is no one knows quite what to do, since the old theories of Marxism and anarchism are rather inadequate. So we need a lot of new ideas and ways of putting them into reality.
And everybody who is reading this better get to work. That's my message.
—Tuli Kupferberg, p.107
March 23, 2011
Ten to fifteen page essays on nineteen somewhat underappreciated 60s artists. Arthur Brown, the Electric Prunes, Tim Buckley, etc.
July 15, 2025
I think sometimes artists are obscure for a reason. This book recounts reasons why: indulgent and eccentric behavior, bad management, indifferent record companies and sometimes the artists themselves choose to steer clear of fame and fortune. They're artists and surprise, their art takes precedence over seeing a piece of their soul marketed like chewing gum. Silly artists.
Or take the case of Michael Brown and the Left Banke: Brown sabotaged himself on more than one occasion but having followed through on his work beyond the obvious hits, I found to my dismay that Michael Brown still knew a lot of chords but ran out of things to do with them. After "Desiree", it was all downhill. And although both Left Banke albums were wonderful and unique, it turns out Brown wasn't solely responsible for their music, it was often a case of successful collaboration. That's especially clear when you hear the subsequent drear he came up without those original band members. You want to believe your hero always had the goods, but often, it just isn't so.
Richie Unterberger champions the artists in his series of books on Why They Weren't Successful. I don't always agree with him. That's okay, apparently a lot of other people didn't either. Anyone who does more than wade through music will have their own guilty pleasures and unrecognized geniuses. But one person's unrecognized genius is another person's crap. The author helpfully steers you to more than one place to look for their music so you can be the judge.
Another thing to consider when reading the book: Arthur Lee and Love was a band who made one and a half classic albums, side one of Da Capo and all of Forever Changes. There was cult enough to result in a well-attended live performance of the latter album and a subsequent concert dvd. (By the way, it should be noted that Bryan McClean wrote a couple of the standout numbers, not Lee). I asked a friend why this album and this band weren't more successful. His response was that all that mattered was that they mattered to me. So maybe that's enough.
One final thought: I should point out that reading a succession of failure stories can be a bit depressing. Back to Michael Brown-I chanced upon a YouTube video of him late in life looking bedraggled and glassy-eyed, declaring he had accepted Jesus as his savior. Pity Jesus didn't tell him to clean himself up before making and posting that video. And despite seeing videos on YouTube of the original band reunited without him in the 21st century and performing with a string ensemble and even a choir, looking and sounding very musically adept as late as 2012, it's sad to note that in the meantime, they've all passed away. Every one. Just be prepared, there are very few happy endings here.
Or take the case of Michael Brown and the Left Banke: Brown sabotaged himself on more than one occasion but having followed through on his work beyond the obvious hits, I found to my dismay that Michael Brown still knew a lot of chords but ran out of things to do with them. After "Desiree", it was all downhill. And although both Left Banke albums were wonderful and unique, it turns out Brown wasn't solely responsible for their music, it was often a case of successful collaboration. That's especially clear when you hear the subsequent drear he came up without those original band members. You want to believe your hero always had the goods, but often, it just isn't so.
Richie Unterberger champions the artists in his series of books on Why They Weren't Successful. I don't always agree with him. That's okay, apparently a lot of other people didn't either. Anyone who does more than wade through music will have their own guilty pleasures and unrecognized geniuses. But one person's unrecognized genius is another person's crap. The author helpfully steers you to more than one place to look for their music so you can be the judge.
Another thing to consider when reading the book: Arthur Lee and Love was a band who made one and a half classic albums, side one of Da Capo and all of Forever Changes. There was cult enough to result in a well-attended live performance of the latter album and a subsequent concert dvd. (By the way, it should be noted that Bryan McClean wrote a couple of the standout numbers, not Lee). I asked a friend why this album and this band weren't more successful. His response was that all that mattered was that they mattered to me. So maybe that's enough.
One final thought: I should point out that reading a succession of failure stories can be a bit depressing. Back to Michael Brown-I chanced upon a YouTube video of him late in life looking bedraggled and glassy-eyed, declaring he had accepted Jesus as his savior. Pity Jesus didn't tell him to clean himself up before making and posting that video. And despite seeing videos on YouTube of the original band reunited without him in the 21st century and performing with a string ensemble and even a choir, looking and sounding very musically adept as late as 2012, it's sad to note that in the meantime, they've all passed away. Every one. Just be prepared, there are very few happy endings here.
March 4, 2023
Like all excellent music comps Richie Unterberger gives you a sample of everything that makes modern music excitable. What I found enjoyable in this collection you may not care for, and vice versa, but nevertheless, the reportage in Unterberger's book is outstanding.
My favorites drifted more to the folk-rock side of things, like The Fugs, Fred Neil, Tim Buckley, and I had a morbid enjoyment of reading about uber-bully Dino Valenti. I'm surprised Kim Fowley didn't make the cut in this book, but that's just me.
Then there were hard luck stories from The Electric Prunes and The Pretty Things; I found Randy Holden and Kaleidoscope to be insufferable music snobs, so their tragic tales brought a crocodile tear or two to my eyes. I really enjoyed Urban Spacemen, well done.
My favorites drifted more to the folk-rock side of things, like The Fugs, Fred Neil, Tim Buckley, and I had a morbid enjoyment of reading about uber-bully Dino Valenti. I'm surprised Kim Fowley didn't make the cut in this book, but that's just me.
Then there were hard luck stories from The Electric Prunes and The Pretty Things; I found Randy Holden and Kaleidoscope to be insufferable music snobs, so their tragic tales brought a crocodile tear or two to my eyes. I really enjoyed Urban Spacemen, well done.
December 27, 2020
This took me a long time to get through because I kept having to put the book down to go listen to the various artists and songs, comparing versions, finding incredible connections to things I knew and discovering things unknown to me, and generally getting lost in Wikipedia digs. A very informative volume that introduced to me to so much and I'm thankful that it will get me out of my music funk. I'm off to find a copy of Unterberger's "Unknown Legends.."
February 16, 2011
Sort of Unknown Legends Part II, again for fans of psych, garage and obscure folk. CD included.
November 25, 2016
absorbing and inspiring. not for everyone, other than the few of us that can't get enough of deciphering the process.
October 15, 2012
*review pending*
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews