Our old Manhattan pal and World of Wonder veteran, Gabriel Rotello, has had an almost eerie relationship with that dilapidated second-floor loft he rented in Manhattan back in 1979 as a live-in rehearsal space. David Johanson called it “Gabriel’s basement in the sky,” but as Rotello tells it in today’s New York Times, it sounds like the stuff of a poignant Twilight Zone episode in which time really does stand still.

Inside the loft, under six years of dust, my former life sat silent, entombed. I needed to touch everything. Ratty old microphones and amps. My bed with its comforter that reminded me of a dead lover. An old bass drum, weighted down with a brick inside. I could almost see Ronnie Spector rehearsing “Be My Baby,” right on that rug, Solomon Burke crooning “Cry to Me,” right in that chair. I thought of dead friends for whom this little world had been their final world. It seemed as if I could make a few phone calls and pull together a rehearsal and no time would have passed at all, except that in the world outside, no one would have answered the phone.

(Photo: Nicole Bengiveno/NYTimes)