On July 15, 1976, at the opening of the Albert Einstein Spacearium in Washington, D.C., I met Karlheinz Stockhausen (most well remembered, not for his music, but for the incredibly self-centered comments after 9/11 about how he "Was nothing" because he "Couldn't do anything (great) like that").
I was so star struck when I met Stockhausen that I couldn't speak and my friend had to say "John Cage says to say hello"
At first he asked if Cage was still living in the rural Stoney Point, upstate NY, but then there was a sudden thundercloud of venon which overtook his face and he thundered, "He's drowning his brain!".
Stoney Point
Now, I knew that he and Boulez had summarily thrown Cage out of Europe in the 30's when he was trying to play in the sand box with the rest of the young European composer boys and that they recognized his genius was greater than theirs, and that they hated him for it...but that comment, while hurtful and insulting, really stuck with me.
The truth is that Cage always outdrank me...always.
I have mixed feeling about that. I never saw it affect his judgement, except once when he was writing Mesostics. I saw him pause and just rationalize changing the rules. He was an unbelievably accurate, diamond hard, precision worker, so I felt stunned.
On the other hand, in all honesty, his mind was greater than mine and he may have simply understood something that I didn't.
It was the only time, besides the interaction with Stockhausen, that I wondered about his drinking and it's effect on him.
Stockhausen