Review: Alien Rock: The Rock 'n' Roll Extraterrestrial Connection

Alien Rock: The Rock 'n' Roll Extraterrestrial Connection by Michael Luckman
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

This book reads like a hastily thrown together potpourri about UFO aesthetic and dreamy inclination by musicians over the decades. There is not much of a basis for a "connection" here. No evidence that, say, plumbers are not similarly inclined in at least as great a percentage. It seems to be a bit of a pamphlet to a promote a then upcoming "Signal to Space" music festival, a bit of an odd marriage in truth between a music festival and an organization actively trying to make contact with life in the universe by beaming a signal and offering a landing pad in 2006. Did this festival ever happen?

In the rush or maybe some OCR fail, a lot 1980-something dates ended up back dated, such as this about Nina Hagen: "Nina has always tried to link her singing career with UFOs. In 1905, for example, she descended over a concert crowd of fifty thousand people at the Couto Pereira Stadium in Curitiba, Brazil, in a spectacular flying saucer." Wow, she's old!

There is a lot of supposed first-hand encounters detailed credulously, such as this also backdated report: ""Former Kinks star Dave Davies, who now performs backed up by his own four-piece band, said that his latest album, called Bug (as in alien implant), was inspired by personal contact he had with extraterrestrials in 1902"

This did make me seek out the documentary "Dan Aykroyd Unplugged on UFOs" and look into the arbitrarily cancelled Out There series.

I didn't expect much, so it met my low expectation. I enjoy reading music history and this delivered on that offering UFO flavor and believes from musicians famous and underground.

There were some things that irked me, like such errors as

Gort, the beloved hero of the classic 1950s flying-saucer movie The Day the Earth Stood Still, who came with a message of peace (and a warning) for all mankind.

Hey, The humanoid alien protagonist of the film is Klaatu (Michael Rennie), not the robot Gort (Lockard Martin).

Then, it's all worth it for "insights" like this

The Alien Twins, Taharqa Aleem and Tunde-ra Aleem, who once shared an apartment with Jimi and were background singers on Hendrix’s Cry of love, War Heroes, and Rainbow Bridge albums, claimed, “Jimi was able to make visible musical entities from the ethereal world of sound, and on numerous occasions he actually performed that for us…. Jimi would take us into a room and he would perform an act that would summon up entities that we were able to see. Of course this was mind-boggling.

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