How To Prepare for the Past

Writer and musician Brian Cullman’s rapturous evocation of life in the bike lane, before the world was digital, when music was everything and magic was everywhere, encompassing friendships with Lester Bangs, Nick Drake, Big Joe Turner, Tim Hardin, and Paul Bowles. When people asked Brian Cullman his favourite song, he would say the radio. It was all one sound. It was all one song: the drums and the words, the words without words, the rhythm and the static and the joy and amplified tears. TV was a clunky box in the corner, nothing but images on a screen telling the same story over and over. The stories were old and small, over before they began. Yesterday’s gossip and twice cold toast. They gave him nothing. But Smokey Robinson crying like a flower with a hangover, The Ronettes, so carnivorous & tender, the sound of eternity in bed with the night: this was love and death and a ticket to places the buses don’t go. These were the dreams of the dead, the regrets of the living, stolen prayers from the broken church where God & The Devil relax after work and trade places. He went to sleep to it, woke up to it. The idiot announcers and jingles and calls from New Jersey, the news and guitars, all one. He wanted to walk in it, dance in it.

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