Brian Cullman “How To Prepare For The Past” is a Satisfying Ride Through Music, Memory, and a Vanished World
What a fun and wonderful thing it is to stumble into a book that doesn’t just tell stories about music, but also makes you feel like you’re right there in the room with a radio in the background, cigarette smoke curling toward the ceiling, and the ghosts of songs still hanging in the air. Brian Cullman’s How To Prepare For The Past: Travels In Music and Time via ZE Books, does exactly that. It’s addictive music journalism that hits every pre-requisite. It’s part memoir, a quasi travelogue, and certainly all heart. If you’re someone that’s ever found yourself lost in the crackle of an old record or wondering what it was really like when music felt urgent, communal, and a little bit magical, this one’s for you.
Brian Cullman is a writer and musician with deep roots in New York with stints across Europe, and has spent decades brushing up against many greats. We’re talking Nick Drake, Lester Bangs, Big Joe Turner, Tim Hardin, Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, George Martin, Van Morrison, Miles Davis, and the Master Musicians of Jajouka, among countless others. He doesn’t just namedrop; he brings you inside the moments in vivid detail. One minute you’re in a candlelit downtown apartment watching guitar strings get plucked while Edie Sedgwick looks on and Jim Morrison dozes on the couch. The next, you’re drifting through London folk clubs with John Martyn, Sandy Denny, and Richard and Linda Thompson, or even chasing transcendent sounds in the mountains of Morocco.
The book unfolds in a series of vivid vignettes. These are short, tight pieces that read like perfectly crafted songs. Cullman’s prose has that poetic, incisive quality that’s full of wit and a kind of unguarded honesty. He manages to capture the feel of the analog era before everything went digital. It was a time when musical discovery happened almost as if by accident, and a time when the radio was almost everything. The music wasn’t simply background noise, but a living, breathing force. As he puts it in one chapter, the radio was “all one sound; 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.” You can practically hear the static and feel the pull.
What I liked most is how personal and participatory it all feels. Cullman wasn’t just observing from the wings. He was playing music, writing and editing for Crawdaddy, The Paris Review, Rolling Stone, CREEM, and The Village Voice. He opened for some of Nick Drake’s rare shows, sang backup for Sandy Denny, burrowed in among those Master Musicians of Jajouka and even helped to clean out Lester Bang’s apartment after he died. There’s a real sincerity throughout the book that never insinuates any forced coolness. It’s wry, wise, and generous, and invites you along as a companion rather than just bragging from on high.
Reading it, I kept thinking about how much has changed. We live in a world of algorithms and instant access, yet Cullman reminds us of a time when music was pervasive, mysterious, and tied to places and people in ways that now seems rare. His encounters with Lester Bangs circling like a confused dog, or Big Joe Turner’s booming unamplified voice filling a club carry the weight of a lived experience as well as the ache of nostalgia done right. It’s not all rose-colored glasses. There’s grit, humor, and the occasional beautiful mess. If you’re the type of music fan who digs deep into liner notes, hunts down obscure reissues, or just loves a good tale about how the music that defines us got made, as well as those in it’s orbit, How To Prepare For The Past is perfect for you. It’s got that soulful, heartfelt joy mixed with a touch of melancholy for what’s slipped away. Cullman writes from the inside out, as a player, a scribe, and a keen observer. The result is something special. Cullmun’s book is a candid, ear-witness account that lifts you out of the everyday. I connected with it immediately, read it over the weekend and found myself lingering over passages, much like I do with albums that refuse to leave the rotation.
In a time when we’ve lost so many musical heroes, this feels like a timely reminder of the power and the stories that endure. Pick it up, put on the accompanying playlist Cullman curated (Nick Drake, John Martyn, Fairport Convention, and more), and let yourself get wet in the rain of it all. Highly recommended. The book is an entertaining, quick and easy read, a perfect companion for a beach or park day. Brian Cullman has given us a gem.
Find out more by visiting Cullman’s website here: https://www.briancullman.com
or Ze Books here: https://www.zebooks.com/books
Brian Cullman’s Companion Spotify Playlist can be found here: