Gilbert Garcia

In May 1997 singer-songwriter Jeff Buckley put on his best thrift-store suit and got a friend to drive him to the Memphis Zoo. Buckley, an ascendant alternative-rock icon and reluctant heartthrob, had decided to apply for a job as a zookeeper. The 30-year-old Buckley had temporarily relocated from New York...

In 1975 George Clinton made the album he still considers to be his career breakthrough: Chocolate City, with his band Parliament. Chocolate City's classic title song was not only an obvious precursor to hip-hop (with Clinton smoothly talking over a repetitive rhythm track), but it also was an alternative state-of-the-union...

Philadelphia's greatest contribution to hip-hop, the Roots, like to open their CDs with a snatch of dialogue. It's their way of introducing a new set of themes, of offering a kind of preamble to the state of the union message that's on the way. But the exchange that launches the...

As the film world's foremost peddler of nostalgia-driven baby-boomer romanticism, Nora Ephron is acutely aware of the crucial role that music plays in selling her three-hanky tales. The soundtrack to her 1993 megahit Sleepless in Seattle not only enhanced that film's sentimental mood, it sold more than two million copies...

In the booklet for Biograph, his 1985 career anthology, Bob Dylan mused on the differences between his rapturously received 1974 "comeback" tour and the contentious series of shows he had given eight years earlier. On the surface, these two tours were similar. In both cases Dylan was backed by the...