The strange case of John Cage’s mushroom foraging obsession: “Much more than a hobby”
John Cage experimented with everything and with no limits. His legacy as a composer and music theories is a pioneering one as his avant-garde approach to sound and what a person could do led to some groundbreaking performances and inspired a whole lineage of artists across all mediums. But his experimentation went beyond the studio and the stage, as the man himself would have considered his experiments in mushrooms to be some of his life’s greatest work.
Everybody has to have their hobbies. Especially in the world of music, artists regularly take up a hobby outside of their main talent, giving them a way to express themselves elsewhere or destress from their careers. Bob Dylan and David Bowie both turned to painting, Lou Reed did Tai Chi, Paul McCartney mixes up cocktails, Morrissey collects flowers or even used to go grimly wandering around the Moors, fascinated by their grizzly true crime history. An artist needs an outlet, and John Cage, who spent so much time in the studio pushing the sonic limits of sound or in the dark theatre figuring out a performance, found relaxation outside, on a forest floor.
However, for a man as left-field as Cage and so intent on pushing limits, it was never going to be a simple and innocent love for gardening or running an allotment. Instead, he was fascinated by mushrooms: poisonous mushrooms, mind-altering mushrooms, delicious edible mushrooms.
It all began in the 1930s during the great depression. “I didn’t have anything to eat, and I knew that mushrooms were edible and that some of them are deadly,” he recalled as he foraged around his home looking for food, “So I picked one of the mushrooms and went in the public library and satisfied myself that it was not deadly, that it was edible. And I ate it and nothing else for a week.” After that, he was obsessed.
Sometimes, that obsession had a near-fatal effect. In 1954, during one of his many foraging trips, he began to feel unwell. His knowledge had let him down as he ate poisonous hellebore, having mistaken it for skunk cabbage – an easy thing to do. Within minutes, he was violently ill as his blood pressure dropped rapidly. He was rushed to hospital to have his stomach pumped to save his life. It was a dramatic scene, yet all Cage noted about the experience was simply the fact; “hellebore has pleated leaves, skunk cabbage does not”.
Nothing deterred him. Even through brushes with death, he remained hooked on this fascination, taking it way beyond a hobby. “It was certainly much more than a hobby,” academic Kingston Trinder noted, adding, “He also, it has to be said, resisted all efforts to connect his interest in mycology to his musical practice.”
In his 1954 essay entitled Music Lovers’ Field Companion, Cage wrote, “I would like to emphasise that I am not interested in the relationships between sounds and mushrooms any more than I am in those between sounds and other sounds.” The thought of merging mushrooms and music simply didn’t interest them as he loved both worlds deeply and separately.
However, out of all of Cage’s work and his powerful legacy as an avant-garde name, it was really his mushroom obsession that almost broke him into the mainstream big time. In 1959, Cage appeared five times on a popular Italian television quiz show called Lascia o Raddoppia? (Double or Nothing), not to talk about music but to talk about mushrooms. He also worked with many renowned New York restaurants as their resident mushroom man, specialising in bringing in seasonal varieties.
It was a deep passion of his life, existing outside of his career but being just as important to his life. In fact, out of all of his achievements, Cage would have undeniably considered his co-founding of the New York Mycological Society amongst the biggest.
