?, the Mysterians, and the tell-all age of social media

? and the Mysterians were a rock band formed in Michigan in 1962. You may know them as the group behind 1966′s “96 Tears,” a staple of any decent classic rock station.

“The band’s frontman and primary songwriter,” Wikipedia states, “was ?. Though the singer has never confirmed it, Library of Congress copyright registrations indicate that his birth name is Rudy Martinez. His eccentric behavior helped to briefly establish the group in the national consciousness. He claimed (and still claims) to be a Martian who lived with dinosaurs in a past life, and he never appears in public without sunglasses. He asserts that he has traveled into the future and visited other planets.”

Can you imagine trying to pull that sort of ongoing stunt today? That kind of thing might have flown in the freewheeling, pre-Twitter era of the sixties, but if a singer tried to hit the scene today with a “dinosaur-loving Martian” public persona, his embarrassing yearbook photos would be on the web within the hour.

Posted in Uncategorized