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Graham Nash has plenty of experience with the vagaries of rock & roll documentaries. Take Woodstock, for one: "There were three days of really good music and the movie was three hours," he says, "so there are a lot of great performances that have never been seen apart from bootlegs." No one knows that more than Nash, since Neil Young refused to be filmed during Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young's career-making set at the festival. In the film, you'll hear an announcer say, "Crosby, Stills, Nash" – but no Young. "Neil threatened to deck anybody who filmed him,...

Ask Leon Russell a straight question — say, about the documentary made about him in the early Seventies that's just now seeing the light of day — and the iconoclastic singer-songwriter's answer will eventually wind its way back to the subject after rambling down the crookedest of backroads. "We had a guy at the studio at the time, a harmonica player," he begins. "And one day he put a mic on his heart and started playing harmonica. He played more and more as his heartbeat got faster and faster, until he finally passed out.

Our universe may be but one of perhaps infinitely many universes in an inconceivably vast multiverse. -- Cosmologist Bernard Carr The best job I ever had was reviewing singles for the trade magazine Record World in the early '70s. It was a thrill when a record I picked became a smash and disappointing when a track stiffed after I predicted it was heading for the Top 10. When a record I loved didn't make it for reasons having nothing to do with its quality -- say the band disbanded or the label's promo man was tardy with the payola -- I'd imagine a parallel universe in which it soared to No. 1 with a bullet and sold a million copies. It's fun to conjure a world in which Graham Parker has had Bruce Springsteen's career; Jesse Winchester, Paul Siebel or Eric Andersen was...