In rock music, not only are big-time successes rare, most musicians don't even make it out of the basement or garage. As the former editor of Option magazine, Richie Unterberger knows this. He also knows that a good deal of music that goes overlooked shouldn't be. So here's Unknown Legends Of Rock 'n' Roll, his tribute to 61 artists whose followings, at best, don't extend beyond a small cult. While Unterbeger is hardly the first person to cover this territory, he's certainly one of the most respectful. Acts like the collins kids, a clean-cut teenage rockabilly brother-sister act, and the Monks, a rock group composed of former U.S. soldiers who lived in Germany and dressed like monks down to the tonsures, are treated seriously as musicians and not as mere novelties. After all, Larry Collins played the double-neck guitar years before Jimmy Page did, and no less a curmudgeon than The Fall's Mark E. Smith has deigned to cover the Monks' songs three times. It's not primarily oddities that interest Unterberger (although both Screaming Lord Sutch and Swamp Dogg merit entries), but also genuinely interesting musicians who simply never got their due. Love, Syd Barrett, Scott Walker, and Can are probably the most famous artists covered here; the rest of the book is taken up with the likes of Joe Meek, the mentally unbalanced, Phil Spector-ish British producer; the hippie punk band Crass; and Martin Newell, the home-taping pop poet and wit so opposed to capitalism that he used to offer his music in exchange for groceries. Nearly all the stories are interesting, and Unterberger does a nice job conveying each artist's place in music history. If the book disappoints, it's only because there's something inherently frustrating about raising interest in musicians whose work is largely unavailable, a frustration at least somewhat offset by the inclusion of a CD with songs from 12 of them.