A Inspiriting Conversation with Richie Unterberger

Photo Credit : Richie Unterberger

Richie Unterberger is an American author and journalist whose focus is popular music and travel writing. While attending the University of Pennsylvania, he wrote for the university newspaper, The Daily Pennsylvanian, and in the early 1980s, was a deejay on the Penn radio station, WXPN-FM. Before graduating, he started reviewing records for Op magazine, which marked the start of his career as a freelance writer. He was the editor of Op from 1985 to 1991. Since 1993, he has been a prolific contributor to AllMusic, the online database of music biographies and album reviews, for which he has written thousands of entries, and many of his online contributions have been printed in the AllMusic guide series.

Unterberger is an avid contributor to various local and national publications, including Mojo, Record Collector, Rolling Stone, Oxford American, and No Depression. He has written liner notes for dozens of CD reissues from labels like Rhino Records, Collectors' Choice, and Sundazed.. Known for his vividly up close and personal musical books, Unterberger’s books draw extensively on first-hand interviews with musicians and their associates. His most recent book about Bob Marley contains never-before-seen material, including text and images.

As a committed travel writer, he has also traveled to more than thirty countries and is an advocate of independent travel and alternative culture.  Unterberger has also written on travel, including The Rough Guide to Seattle (1996), and co-authored The Rough Guide to Shopping with a Conscience (2007), a book about ethical products, investment, and related topics. Unterberger has given talks on music and popular culture at public libraries in San Francisco, Berkeley, and San Mateo County, California. He is also a speaker at area bookstores, including The Booksmith in the Haight Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco.

Richie Unterberger has written books about many legendary musicians that included, White Light/White Heat: The Velvet Underground Day-By-Day, Won't Get Fooled Again: The Who from Lifehouse to Quadrophenia, The Unreleased Beatles: Music and Film, Eight Miles High: Folk-Rock's Flight from Haight-Ashbury to Woodstock, Turn! Turn! Turn!: The 1960s Folk-Rock Revolution, Unknown Legends of Rock'n'Roll, Urban Spacemen & Wayfaring Strangers: Overlooked Innovators and Eccentric Visionaries of '60s Rock, Music USA. He co-authored the Groove, which came out last year. His latest book, Bob Marley and the Wailers: The Ultimate Illustrated History, is out now.

I had the pleasure and honor of asking Richie about what makes a great book, what he is listening to now music-wise, and so much more.

Courtesy of Motorbooks, an imprint of The Quarto Group

UZOMAH: How did you construct a book that allowed you to include as much as possible into a monumental life and career as Bob Marley?

RICHIE:   Bob Marley & the Wailers: The Ultimate Illustrated History is, like the title indicates, oriented toward illustrations. Knowing the text needed to tell the story as succinctly as possible within the space available, I wanted to pack in as much essential information about his and the Wailers’ careers as I could while keeping the story both informative and fun to read. There’s a lot of confusing and sometimes contradictory information about Marley in the wealth of what’s been reported about his life, and one of the things most important to me was tying together all of the strands in as clear a way as I could, emphasizing his music above all. Also important to me was paying a good amount of attention to the first decade or so of his career, before his and the Wailers’ international breakthrough after signing to Island Records. That’s both because it’s an interesting phase that many people don’t know much about, and also because that’s when he and the Wailers made some of their best music, though it’s not nearly as well known as what he did from 1973 to the end of his life.

U: What do you think makes a great book?

R:  I’ll address what I think makes a great music history book, since that’s the area most of my books cover, and I read many such books. I think the best such books combine very deep research with writing that’s both educational and entertaining.

U: What musician would you also like to document in a book?

R: My answer is a musical act, rather than an individual musician. This would be the group Them, Van Morrison’s group in the mid-1960s before he started a solo career. It’s a fascinating history, but unfortunately I’ve found that most of the musicians and their associates are inaccessible for the first-hand information that would make for a definitive story.

U: Can you name what music you are currently listening to? What is your go-to musician to listen to to feel good?

R:  This would be a pretty big list whenever the question is asked. Without trying to evade the question, if anyone’s curious for pretty big lists, my blog, at richieunterberger.com/wordpress, has long year-end lists and reviews of my favorite reissues of the year going back almost a decade. As an example of the range of what I’ve heard most this month, there are archival box sets for the Doors and Joni Mitchell, but also obscure records like Catherine Ribeiro’s Paix from 1972, which is French experimental/progressive rock, yet much more passionate and personal than much of that genre. My choice for the go-to musical act for feeling good is obvious, but it’s the Beatles.

Courtesy of Motorbooks, an imprint of The Quarto Group

U: Is there anything you hope people will take away after reading your newest book about Bob Marley?

R: This is reinforcing a point from an earlier question, but I think it’s important and interesting to learn about the first decade of his career to gain a full appreciation of his accomplishments, and his remarkable evolution from such modest circumstances in Jamaica and the ska music with which he started to his peak as an international reggae star. The book also covers Peter Tosh and Bunny Livingston’s crucial contributions to the Wailers when they were in the group with Marley, as well as some of their later solo work. I think it’s important for readers to gain an appreciation of how important they were to Marley and the Wailers’ work, even if they left for solo careers shortly after the Wailers started to become known all over the world.

U: Why is music unique to you?

R: That’s a pretty broad question to answer, so I’ll focus on why I find it interesting to write about. In music history, there’s a fascinating intersection of talent, the creative process involved in writing and recording, the good and bad personal interactions within bands and between artists and managers, and the obstacles to navigate in being successful in the music business.

Courtesy of Motorbooks, an imprint of The Quarto Group

U: What is something that was surprising about a musician you found out after doing the research for a book about them?

R: I could go recount many instances, but here are a few about the Velvet Underground.  I’d always assumed their song “White Light/White Heat” was about drugs, and it is partially, but much of the inspiration was from an occult book by Alice Bailey and her instructions on streaming white light. Reed deliberately constructed the first three Velvet Underground albums as novels of sorts with the songs telling a story, and was surprised few listeners picked up on that purpose. It’s still often reported their first album barely sold anything, but in fact it sold almost 60,000 copies in its first couple years.

U: What was the inspiration for your book about the Beatles?

R: Almost twenty years ago, I was asked by the book’s publisher if there was a book I could write about the Beatles, I guess because that was considered a commercial project no matter what the content. I didn’t want to just rehash what was covered in the many other books about them, so I dedicated an entire book to their unreleased recordings, a part of their work that hadn’t been covered as thoroughly. But also, their unreleased recordings and the background information to them is very interesting; some of the material (some of which has since been officially released) is very good; and no matter the quality, the unreleased material gives you much insight into their creative process and musical taste.

U: Can you explain what made the Velvet Underground so unique and rare to the music scene?

R: They were among the first rock groups to address taboo areas of sex and drugs in their lyrics. Of equal importance, though it doesn’t get as much attention, they bridged energetic rock’n’roll with avant-garde and experimental musical sensibilities in their incorporation of electronics, feedback, drones, and viola. They had an underrated knack for combining this with songs about human emotion that often projected joy and empathy as well as investigating more difficult experiences. They weren’t very commercially successful when they were active, but they built a huge cult over the last half century that demonstrates that artistic quality is more important and enduring than record sales.

For more information about Richie’s current and past writings, along with his many book titles, please visit his site here.