About the Book

When people asked me my favorite song, I 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 and over before they began. Yesterday’s gossip and twice cold toast. They gave me nothing.

But Smokey Robinson crying in the night like a flower with a hangover, The Ronettes, so carnivorous and 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; the dreams of the dead, the regrets of the living, stolen prayers from the broken church where God and the Devil relax after work and trade places.

I went to sleep to it, woke up to it. The idiot announcers and jingles and calls from New Jersey, the news and the drums and guitars, all one. How can I choose my favorite part of the rain? I wanted to walk in it, dance in it. Get wet.

When people asked me my favorite song, I would just say the radio.

Praise for How to Prepare For The Past

“Brian Cullman always knew where the great music was hidden and writes about it with wit and elegance. His descriptions of close encounters with Nick Drake, Big Joe Turner, the Master Musicians of Jajouka, and so many others are as good as music reportage gets.”

—Joe Boyd, record producer and author of And the Roots of Rhythm Remain

“A fantastic memoir of a lifelong love affair with music, intertwined with recollections of a time when Music functioned as a Power in the Earth. Cullman’s recollections are written from a wry, wise, and witty vantage point: that of an undaunted, participating witness to an extraordinary time in history. A great book.”

—Vernon Reid

“Brian Cullman has found himself at the very inside of so many of music’s defining moments that his place as a discerning observer gives way to a kind of unguarded poetry that never fails to lift everyone out of the drabness of this world. What an artist!”

—Youssou N’Dour

One way, this is about how artists make the good stuff: they sell blood and brain cells and hang and hustle and remember the best parts, fight in the studios and sleep in the hallways. But behind everything is a deeply, casually stylish secret autobiography, of a musician and writer smart enough to find the meaning in the moment, over and over, for decades. A life in the arts.

— R.J. Smith, author of Chuck Berry: An American Life

“True coolness. A revelation.”

—Danny Fields

“Brian Cullman knows music from the inside out, as performer, scribe, and keen observer of those who make wonder out of soundwaves. His new collection of tales is a candid earwitness account of artisans and their process, personal and revelatory.”

—Lenny Kaye

“A downtown NYC Almost Famous by a de-facto rock critic godfather, though he was other things, too. Literary, elliptical, electric, hilarious, these are snapshots of a disappeared world, and they’re as good as music journalism gets.”

—Will Hermes, author of Lou Reed: The King of New York and Love Goes to Buildings On Fire

“Wherever you found yourself, The Bottom Line, Tottenham Court Road, Miss Cranston’s tea shop in Glasgow, Brian was  there at the epicentre of everything. He saw and heard some things and we are lucky to be able to read about them.”

—Linda Thompson

“Brian has always been drawn to the most elect and unusual people. He opened for one of Nick Drake’s rare live concerts, sang back-up for Sandy Denny, burrowed in with the Master Musicians of Jajouka, talked record-making with George Martin and so much more. These vignettes are so beautifully written—worldly, poetic, full of curiosity and confidence while inviting the reader along as a companion. I cannot imagine hanging out with a wiser guide.”

—Tim Page, Pulitzer Prize–winning writer

About the Author