I was an informant for Mike Hummel’s 2007 PhD thesis. This is an extract:
“As noted earlier, Carl was fiercely independent in his thinking about music, and because he had been living outside the musical “box” for so long, he had not had to accept limitations in terms of style and canon that others did to survive. Carl wanted back in, but on his own terms. He had his own ideas about music, forged initially during a decade of intense training in his youth, then slowly modified by influences and experiences both inside and outside the established classical musical world. A concert in Buffalo in his early twenties had been a pivotal experience:
MH: In terms of your musical education, when was the biggest part of your crisis? In your 20s? When did you become aware of the crisis?
CB: Well, I’ll tell you, the one critical memory. It was a series of events, really, but it was in Buffalo in late 1969 or early 1970. I was 21. I was performing in a fairly legitimate venue with a violinist from the Buffalo Symphony and he was a strait-laced Viennese. And we were playing some wonderful music but he played it absolutely cold. No emotion at all. And so, I was very…increasingly upset about it. And um, in those days, I was doing a lot of drugs and took mescaline, and uh…I thought for some reason I thought that I would take mescaline before the concert. And so, I got out there on the stage just as the drug was taking effect, and I felt like I’m playing something which is supposed to be music with this idiot, and the audience looked hostile to me, and I thought, ‘I don’t think so,’ and so I played one movement of the first piece and then I walked off the stage and told the people that I wasn’t feeling well and was going home. My friend, another musician, was backstage, was quite alarmed, and he said, ‘Look, why don’t you just take off your coat, because it’s hot.’ I was wearing a suit or a tux, I guess. So I went back out…he convinced me to go back out on the stage. By this time, I’m ‘tripping.’ So I said to myself ‘what do I have to lose, I’m gonna be absolutely there.’ So I played without…the concert completely full throttle out. The consequence was that I played real music, the violinist was completely beside the point, and the reviewer in the newspaper the next day commented on the contrast between the violinist’s “lack of depth of feeling” vs. the pianist’s “more impassioned playing, sometimes overpowering him.”
MH: Did you play with your Viennese “idiot” again?
CB: No, no. Fortunately, I never spoke with him again. But I learned something there that I really took to heart, which was that you could be way way out there and play music. Now for years after that I played most of my concerts stoned and it was only gradually that I realized that I had changed enough that I could risk going out on the stage straight.
MH: You could still get to the same place.
CB: Still get to the same place. It took awhile to convince myself that that would be the case, but it was like the crutch I didn’t need anymore. You know, I don’t tell this story to everybody. It’s not something I recommend. I don’t think that’s how you do it. It’s what helped me. It certainly calls into question artificial structures that you might have put together, and if those are in your way, you know, it gives you a handle on dismantling them.”