At home with Nick Drake, Sandy Denny & John Martyn in the golden year of 1970

When he was 19, New Yorker Brian Cullman covered the London music scene for Crawdaddy, landing at the birth of folk-rock and the singer-songwriter boom and watching its leading lights from unimaginably close quarters - Sandy Denny, Nick Drake, John Martyn among them. He even played on the same bill as Drake at Les Cousins club, all this recorded in his book ‘How To Prepare for the Past: Travels in Music and Time’. He talks to us here about that golden age and the American stars he met later, stopping off at …

… Ed Sullivan at the shoe-shine: “in six months the Beatles will be lucky to be playing a bowling alley!”

… Nick Drake in the same clothes he wore on the cover of Five Leaves Left

… Sandy Denny: “She knew she was extraordinary but didn’t know if she was any good”

… Jackson Browne, onstage from the age of 12

… being hired by rock encyclopaedist Lillian Roxon, “my fairy godmother”

… Tim Hardin making Bird On A Wire, “so wasted they followed him round the room with a microphone”

... and “14 hotdogs”? The cavernous appetite of Big Joe Turner.

Order ‘How To Prepare for the Past’ here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/How-Prepare-Past-Travels-Music/dp/B0FTS8ZPTW

Or here: https://www.zebooks.com/books/how-to-prepare-for-the-past

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