Moondog - Bird's Lament

Louis Thomas Hardin was a fixture on 6th avenue between 52nd and 55th streets in New York City for years. At night, he often slept in doorways; in the daytime, he was out on the street, selling his poems for a quarter each, busking for tips or selling music, posing for pictures with curious tourists and sometimes simply being a still and silent presence. He cut a striking figure...tall and slim, he could be found decked out in full Viking gear, complete with a horned helmet. His long hair spilled from under that helmet, merging with the long, full beard he wore. He carried a spear, perhaps as an affectation, and perhaps as a cane, as he was blind, and had been since his early teens.

Moondog (Louis Thomas Hardin)

Hardin also was a respected composer and musician who was mostly self-taught, but he kept company with the music elite such as classical luminaries Leonard Bernstein and Arturo Toscanini and jazz musicians such as Charlie Parker and Benny Goodman. Composer Philip Glass offered to give him a place to live for a while; he lived with Glass for about a year, and the two would play music with composer Steve Reich once a week. That trio went on to tour Europe.

And his music...minimalist is probably the description that fits it best. The melodies are deceptively simple and beautiful, often accompanied by rhythms that pulse and throb like a heartbeat. It's easy to hear elements of both classical and jazz music in his compositions, not to mention influences from his friends and musical colleagues Glass and Reich.

Meet Moondog, the Viking of 6th Avenue.

Born in Marysville, Kansas in 1916, Hardin showed an early aptitude for music when he began playing a homemade set of cardboard drums when he was five. His missionary family relocated to Wyoming, where his father opened a trading post at Fort Bridger. His father once took him to an Arapaho Sun Dance, where he played a buffalo-skin tom-tom while sitting on Chief Yellow Calf's lap. The experience must have had an effect on his musical sensibilities, since Native American rhythms would be a recurring motif in his compositions later in life.

His family would relocate again, this time to Missouri, where Hardin would play drums in his high school band until he was 16, when he was blinded by an exploding dynamite cap in a farming accident. From there, and upon studying at a succession of schools for the blind, he began teaching himself ear training and composition, supplementing his self-education with studies at the Iowa School for the Blind.

By 1943, Hardin had moved to New York City, and his musical career began in earnest. In some radio interview excerpts highlighted in the trailer for the documentary "The Viking of 6th Avenue," he describes himself in very simple terms: "I'm a composer and a poet. I was born in Kansas in 1916, lived in Wyoming as a boy, and eventually I got to New York in 1943 and began recording in 1950. 6th avenue was my stamping ground, and I would sleep in doorways mostly around 54th and 55th street "

From an interview by Jason Gross (May 1998) in PerfectSoundForever:

PSF: When you were first in Manhattan, you were performing on the streets. Why did you decide to do that rather than working in a club or hall?

I made my living that way and I got exposure. It really worked because I hadn't been on the streets for more than a few weeks of the fall of '49 when I was written up. By January of '50, I was sitting in the doorway of Spanish Music Center on Sixth Avenue (which isn't there anymore) owned by Gabriel Oller. He said 'I like the music you're making. I made records. Would you like to make some singles?' We did three singles together and then I got other offers including a Columbia album. The first one was with a forty-piece orchestra that (producer) Al Brown got together. He really did a lot for me.

PSF: At that time, you got to meet Arturo Toscanini and Leonard Bernstein also.

It was strange about Lenny. I came to New York in November of '43 and the next day, I went to the Sunday broadcast at Carnegie Hall. I wanted to sit right in front, not realizing that Bernstein was making his debut. Within a few feet, he was standing there and I thought 'I'm going to be the first one to applaud' because I knew it was going over coast-to-coast. I didn't know I was giving him the first clap of his coast-to-coast debut.

Joseph Shuster was playing the cello solo in DON QUIXOTE and he saw me. A few days later, I was standing at the stage door entrance and the man there said 'you're not getting any farther.' There was an open door leading to where the musicians where and they were taking a break. Joseph came over to me and said 'I saw you Sunday, would you like to go to rehearsals?' He came back with (Artur) Rodzinski, the conductor. He took me and said 'you sit here and enjoy yourself.' So, for years, I was allowed to go to all rehearsals.

I talked to Bernstein later and I told him about all of that. We got very friendly. The last time I met him was in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He was having his shoes shined and I was out on the street. He said 'what are you doing in Santa Fe? I'm on my way to Israel.' It was 1948, just when they were forming the nation.

Rodzinski introduced me to Arturo Toscanini. I was so impressed that I bent over to kiss his hand. He pulled it away and said 'I'm not a beautiful woman!' (laughs) When they left, Rodzinski said 'Louis, remember this.' And a few years later, they were both dead. That was at Madison Square Garden where the NBC Orchestra and the Philharmonic did a joint concert together. Over a hundred musicians there.

PSF: It's amazing that in such a short amount of time, you went from playing on the streets to having symphonies perform your works. Was that a dizzying pace for you?

I had been working for it, even on the street. I had problems like with Alan Freed, the rock and roll king. He was coming out of Ohio, using my name and one of my singles 'cause it had a howling wolf in it. Word got around that he wanted me to work with him but then he was calling himself Moondog. Then, when he came to New York, he had a program and was calling it the Moondog Show. I took him to court. He tried to settle out of court but I told him no. He said 'you might lose' and I said 'you might lose too.'

In the meantime, Igor Stravinsky heard about this thing and he knew about me because he must have seen me at the Carnegie rehearsals. He called up the judge in the case and said 'Do right by this man, he's a good musician.' I don't know if that decided the case or not but I won the case against Freed and he stopped using the name. On the radio, he said 'I can't use the name Moondog anymore so now it's [going to] be the Rock and Roll Show.'

From Meet Moondog, a Blind Genius in Circus-Freak Clothing and a Great, Forgotten New Yorker
by Jordan Hoffman, published June 25, 2014, Vanity Fair

Moondog, who died in Germany in 1999 at the age 83, was the most celebrated of New York street denizens from the late 1940s through 1974. He dressed like a Viking, spouted short-burst poetry in a stentorian voice and cranked out unlikely consonant music on homemade instruments. The Don Drapers of the world saw him on the way to work, perched as he was near 6th Avenue at 53rd Street, near CBS’s building (a fortuitous location, as we'll soon see).

The Beats took him in, later the counter-culture hippies, then the art crowd ferried him overseas. And if you turned on a television for more than 10 minutes during the year 2003, you heard his music remixed for a Lincoln Navigator ad that played nonstop. He collaborated with the young Philip Glass, was promoted by a top rock producer, has been covered by artists as diverse as Janis Joplin and Antony and the Johnsons, and had a booster in Elvis Costello. He's the 20th century’s avant-garde in one strangely cloaked package.

“There were a lot of extraordinary people there, Ginsberg and Reich were there, Bob Weir of the Grateful Dead, and Moondog conducted by banging a drum,” Elson (British documentarian Holly Elson, "The Viking of 6th Avenue") explains, teasing scenes that will be in her forthcoming film.

In addition to his influence on music and poetry, there's his stamp on design. “Right from the 1950s, there's stuff in Jet Magazine,” Elson says. “Bonnie Cashin does some stuff. There's a guy called Mads Dinesen in Berlin who did a collection entirely based on Moondog just last year.”

There's a reason DJs still sample him and he is also increasingly part of the new classical canon. Despite the cultural changes, his extremely catchy, one-of-a-kind sound was a constant. Songs like “New Amsterdam” tap into an underground, hidden history. But Moondog's story is also an urban legend the predates the pervasiveness of of YouTube.

Why the viking garb? We return to PerfectSoundForever:

PSF: Part of your heritage is Scandinavian. I know that for a while you were wearing a Viking costume. Was that a way for you to show pride in your heritage?

It started out differently. When I first got to New York and I was attending rehearsals of the Philharmonic, they wrote me up as 'a man with the face of Christ.' I put up with that for a few years, getting compared with a monk or Christ, then I said 'that's enough, I don't want that connection. I must do something about my appearance to make it look un-Christian.' At that time, I was studying the Norse and I felt much closer to that than Christianity so I'd do something to make it look more Nordic. That's what was behind it.

 And the source of his nickname? That's explained at the site Moondog's Corner:

The name Moondog didn't occur until 1947, reflecting on how he came by the title he remembered fondly a dog he owned way back in Missouri:

"We used to howl at the moon."

If only we had a few more Moondogs to howl.