T.J.: You were also a fine interpreter of other people's ideas during this time. I particularly remember a wonderful performance of one of La Monte Young's works at Hunter College. The score says simply to try to make a grand piano eat a bale of hay, and for an interpreter, this is certainly the most difficult of all his Compositions 1960, but with your Wyoming background, you understood exactly what this Montana composer was thinking about. The piano never actually swallowed the hay, but it did chew quite a bit of it, with its ivory teeth. You also performed a video interpretation of John Cage's Water Walk as part of the 60th birthday celebration. Does that video cassette still exist, by the way, or has it been lost, like other items from that period?

J.B.: As it happened, several years after leaving NYC I threw away a box or two of scores and other papers relating to my work, in fact almost every bit of them. All I can say is that I was taken by a fit of depression; I didn't want any reminders. Why I kept all the tapes, I don't know. I still have the video tape of Water Walk, for example, but I haven't found a resource to have it transferred to a current format. I might add that the reason I didn't perform Water Walk live-in-concert was that nobody felt like transporting an old porcelain bathtub up to the Kitchen's performance space.

T.J.: But let's go back to around 1978, when you left New York City. Your friends all thought this was a voluntary decision, since your career was coming together as well as most of ours were. But now you say it was an involuntary decision, a necessary change. Can you explain that as you see it now, 25 years later?

J.B.: On several occasions, I've been asked "Why did you leave NYC, and especially, why did you give up art? Maybe this is the place to attempt a real answer.

First, I think it's erroneous to say I gave up art. That I was completely absorbed in my career as an artist/composer goes without question, and the 70's were definitely exciting times for artists. Yet everyone must look to their own survival too. I found myself having to do a great deal of construction type work even during the high points of my creative efforts. I've maintained for a long time that examples of starving artists who've stuck it out and later become rich and famous are almost nonexistent: even Vincent had his brother Theo's somewhat meager financial support.

Two or three other factors led me to realize that I simply couldn't meet the expenses of survival in the city and still pursue my career. Financially, I kept going backward. At first, loft rental in early Soho was manageable, just. Then the city changed its ordinance to legalize residential spaces in industrial buildings. Ironically, when loft living was illegal, the landlords couldn't charge exorbitant rates for fear of exposure. When it became legal, the landlords went hog wild and some of us living in lofts at that time had to move out.

At the same time, performance fees and such were correspondingly small and grants, as everyone knows, don't come around on a regular basis. It's a hell of a lot of work to apply for a grant in the first place, and it costs money up front to do so. In effect, then, I had to put art out of my mind until the day would come when circumstances enabled me to resume.

T.J.: For a while you had residencies with small musical organizations in Woodstock and Buffalo, and you also received a grant one summer to do a large installation, with 1500 feet of PVC pipe, in Art Park, near Niagra Falls. By this time, most of your New York colleagues, like Rhys Chatham, Philip Corner, Malcolm Goldstein, Garrett List, Phill Niblock, Charlemagne Palestine, and Frederic Rzewski were giving concerts in Europe more and more frequently, and you could probably have gravitated eastwards as well, but instead you went west, back to Wyoming.

J.B.: As I was nearing the end of my residency at CMS (Creative Music School), I surveyed the possibilities for another such position, or any gig that would keep me going. I had no immediate links to European outlets I could pursue, but I managed to hang around the Woodstock area by taking up construction again, hoping in the meantime I could find a venue back in the city or almost anywhere.

Then it began to dawn on me that living outside the city meant one thing more than any other: out of sight, out of mind. So not having a physical presence in the center of the art scene meant fewer opportunities. Eventually, since the Woodstock area was not exactly a boom town, I had to turn my attention fully to the issue of how and where to make my living outside of art.

I imagine that many of us, when we're down and out, gravitate to our roots and family. So I rented a trailer, loaded my pickup, and moved to Wyoming. I reconnected with my family and held a variety of jobs and the next 20 odd years are largely a tale of survival.