Richie Unterberger has been writing about little-known and well-known rock and popular music of all kinds for more than 20 years. Backbeat Books has just published his seventh book, The Unreleased Beatles: Music and Film, a mammoth 400-page, 300,000-word guide to 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 sixth book, Eight Miles High: Folk-Rock's Flight from Haight-Ashbury to Woodstock (Backbeat, 2003) , is the second book in a two-volume history of the 1960s folk-rock movement. Eight Miles High covers folk-rock from mid-1966 to the end of the 1960s, drawing on more than 100 first-hand interviews, as did its predecessor, Turn! Turn! Turn!: The '60s Folk-Rock Revolution, which covers the history of folk-rock through mid-1966. 

His book Unknown Legends of Rock'n'Roll , published by Backbeat in 1998, profiled 60 underappreciated cult rock artists of all styles and eras.  Its sequel, Urban Spacemen & Wayfaring Strangers: Overlooked Innovators and Eccentric Visionaries of '60s Rock , was published by Backbeat in the fall of 2000. Both of these books draw extensively upon first-hand interviews with the musicians profiled, as well as interviews with many of their close associates. These volumes cover important artists that have rarely been covered in depth in print, and have often rarely had the opportunity to tell their stories and put forth their perspectives. 

He is also author of The Rough Guide to Music USA , a guidebook to the evolution of regional popular music styles throughout America in the twentieth century, and the first two editions of the travel guidebook The Rough Guide to Seattle.  Since 1993, he has been a prolific contributor to the All Music Guide , the largest on-line database of music biographies and album reviews, for which he has written thousands of entries. He is the co-author of The Rough Guide to Shopping with a Conscience, published by the Rough Guides in early 2007.

He has also contributed travel and music pieces to various publications, including MOJO, Record Collector, Pulse, rollingstone.com, the San Francisco Bay Guardian, the Rough Guide to Rock, The Rough Guide Book of Playlists, the East Bay Express, 100 Albums That Changed Music, the Oxford American, the Daily Telegraph, No Depression, Ugly Things, American Songwriter, and Perfect Sound Forever. He has written liner notes to several hundred CD reissues for the Collectors' Choice Music, Sundazed, Rhino, Water, 4 Men With Beards, Sunbeam, Raven, and Top Sail labels. He has traveled to more than thirty countries, and is a passionate advocate of independent travel and alternative culture in general. When not on the road, he lives in San Francisco.