John Adams wrote in his memoir about trying something similar around the same time, but with less success. When he moved out to the Bay Area he ended up taking a job as a longshoreman at the port. He wrote that he had this Marxist fantasy of laboring with the proletariat during the day and composing avant-garde music during the night.
But the job left him so exhausted when he got home that he could barely read a few pages of a book let alone compose any new music.
He didn't really pick up composing again until he happened to get a job teaching music in SF.
And Laurie Anderson got a job at McDonalds. But somehow I think with her it was kind of part of her art, ha ha.
> Standing behind a cash register in her uniform, Anderson became practically invisible, even to her friends. "They would come in and I would be like 3 feet away from them," she says. "And I wasn’t trying to disguise anything. But I wasn’t supposed to be there, so I wasn’t."
But the job left him so exhausted when he got home that he could barely read a few pages of a book let alone compose any new music.
He didn't really pick up composing again until he happened to get a job teaching music in SF.