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 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.