Moondog

Date: Sun, 11 Mar 2001 16:19:25 +1100
To: webmaster@expectingrain.com
From: Patricia Jungwirth 
Subject: Who's Who: Moondog

Bob Dylan - December 1963 Hootenanny Magazine:

Junkies an flunkies line the wind along side ban-the-bomb demonstrators
Girls're hustlin for dollars on one side a the street an
Girls're sittin down for their rights on the other side a the street -
The new Premise's playin
an Moondog's beatin his drum an sayin his lines -
Lenny Bruce's talkin
an Lord Buckley's memory still movin
An Doc Watson's walkin
Ray Charles's shoutin an speakin
Bertrand Russell's yellin from across the ocean
an Julian Beck's tellin the same on this side a the sea -
Jim Forman is livin an Ross Barnett's losin -
Harry Jackson's paintin -
Maybelle Carter's really standin an really strummin
an Mike Seeger's really real -
An Pete Seeger's really Pete Seeger -
An Joan Baez is still unshattered
An Marlon Brando's on the good side -
An the time's a rollin down every single street -
There's a girl waitin on every single corner -



Moondog - from 'Down And In - Life In The Underground',
by Ronald Sukenick, NY, Collier-Macmillan, 1988

"...like Moondog on Broadway wearing a big blanket"

"After a while, I also become familiar with the strange
figure of Moondog in medieval-looking leather, blanket and
Viking horns, usually stationed in the middle of the
sidewalk on Broadway or Sixth Avenue, selling sheet music.
Moondog, crackpot composer and invenotor of bizarre
instruments such as the "oo" and the "trimbas", like the
clownish Puerto Rican street poet Jorge Brandon, whom I
later encounter with his talking coconut in the East
Village, turns out to be a fairly interesting artist, or so
say those who attend his occasional rooftop concerts. Philip
Glass once let Moondog live at his place when he had nowhere
to go. It's not the oddball quality of these figures that
attract me, but rather the way they throw themselves on the
mercy of others, their willed destruction of pride,
self-respect and even ego itself."



Tricia



Date: Tue, 13 Mar 2001 17:52:28 -0800 (PST)
From: Gil Walker  gwiii@excite.com
To: webmaster@expectingrain.com
Subject: Re:  Moondog
Cc: tricia.j@aardvark.net.au


Louis Hardin/Moondog, who died in 1999, is unfairly
trivialized by the quoted excerpt.  He was a more
substantial and more significant figure than the "crackpot
composer" depicted there.  He also played a small but
significant role in rock history, with Alan Freed taking his
name for his radio program (and the Band in turn taking it
for an album title); another Grossman-managed artist, Janis
Joplin, recorded one of his songs.  He recorded at least a
dozen albums of modernist classical music, one of which,
"Moondog," was sometimes favored by the most adventurous
free-form radio programmers of the late 60s and early 70s. 
That album, and several others, are now available on CD.

In 1998, his final album took second place in the "Beyond"
[i.e., beyond jazz] category of the annual Downbeat Critics
Poll, beating out "Time Out Of Mind," which finished third. 
[The Downbeat critics did name Dylan "Beyond" artist of the
year, though.]

As I remember him, from the occasions when I saw him on
Manhattan streets in the early 1970's, he was a more
imposing figure that the photo suggests, but I've never seen
a photo from his Manhattan period that I thought fairly
represented him.  The album cover (scan attached) glamorizes
him too much, but it's closer to the impression he made, I
think.

He's an obscure figure now, little documented outside the
pages of New York City newspapers. I certainly don't mean to
criticize Tricia for turning up the quoted material, and I
don't want to rant any more than I already have.  But as a
cultural figure, he was much closer to the other folks Dylan
listed than to a "crackpot" who gave "rooftop concerts."

GW3



Louis (Moondog) Hardin, 83, Musician, Dies
          By GLENN COLLINS  [New York Times]

The gaunt, blind musician known as Moondog, who was
celebrated among New Yorkers for two decades as a mysterious
and extravagantly garbed street performer but who went on to
win acclaim in Europe as an avant-garde composer, conducting
orchestras before royalty, died Wednesday in a hospital in
Munster, Germany. He was 83.

The cause was heart failure, said a friend, Ilona Sommer.

Day in and day out, the man who was originally named Louis
T. Hardin was as taciturn and unchanging a landmark of the
midtown Manhattan streetscape as the George M. Cohan statue
in Duffy Square. From the late 1940s until the early 1970s,
Hardin stood at attention like a sentinel on Avenue of the
Americas around 54th Street.

No matter the weather, he invariably dressed in a homemade
robe, sandals, a flowing cape and a horned Viking helmet,
the tangible expression of what he referred to as his
"Nordic philosophy." At his side he clutched a long spear of
his own manufacture.

Most of the passers-by who dismissed him as "the Viking of
Sixth Avenue," offering him contributions and buying copies
of his music and poetry, were unaware that he had recorded
his music on the CBS, Prestige, Epic, Angel and Mars labels.
Hardin's jazz-accented compositions, generally scored for
small wind and percussion ensembles, often achieved a
flowing, tonal symphonic style.

One of his songs, "All Is Loneliness," became a hit when
recorded by Janis Joplin. He wrote music for radio and
television commercials, and one of his compositions was used
on the soundtrack for the 1972 movie "Drive, He Said," with
Jack Nicholson.

Along the way, Hardin wrote Bohemian broadsides against
government regimentation, the world monetary system and
organized religion. He was celebrated by Beat Generation
poets and late-1960s flower children. His passionate
unconventionality drew praise from some critics and led to
interviews on many television shows, including both "Today"
and "The Tonight Show."

Although many New Yorkers assumed that he had died after he
vanished from his customary post in 1974, Hardin had
actually been invited to perform his music in West Germany
and decided to stay.

"He led an extraordinary life for a blind man who came to
New York with no contacts and a month's rent, and who lived
on the streets of New York for 30 years," said Dr. Robert
Scotto, a professor of English at Baruch College of the City
University of New York. "Without question, he was the most
famous street person of his time, a hero to a generation of
hippies and flower children." Scotto has just completed a
biography of Hardin, "Moondog: The Viking of Sixth Avenue,"
which has not been published.

After his performances in Hamburg, Hardin again earned a
living as a street performer, this time in Europe. He soon
met Mrs. Sommer, whose father insisted on taking him into
their home and supported Hardin in his later years. He
composed in Braille, and she transcribed his music and acted
as his publisher and business manager. According to Scotto,
they had an intimate working relationship, but neither of
them ever described it as more than that.

In his later years, Hardin produced at least five albums in
Europe, including a "sound saga" titled "The Creation," and
regularly performed his compositions with chamber and
symphony orchestras before glittering audiences in Paris,
Stockholm and cities in Germany.

Harding adopted the Moondog name in 1947, identifying
himself, he said, with a former pet who howled at the moon.

He was born in Maryville, Kan., on May 26, 1916, the son of
an Episcopal minister. He was blinded at the age of 16 when
a dynamite blasting cap exploded in his hands. A year later,
after studying stringed instruments, organ and harmony at
the Iowa School for the Blind, he became obsessed with
becoming a composer.

When he arrived in Manhattan in 1943, he established an
outpost outside the stage entrance of Carnegie Hall and met
some of the New York Philharmonic's musicians. They arranged
a meeting with their conductor, Artur Rodzinski. Rodzinski
was taken with Hardin and not only extended an open
invitation to attend the orchestra's rehearsals, but also
promised he would conduct an orchestral work if Hardin ever
wrote one.

But because he was blind, he needed help in writing out the
score.

Hardin could not afford such assistance, so he made his
living as a street musician, training himself to be a master
of percussion improvisation. He was unable to compose a
symphony until after Rodzinski left the Philharmonic in
1947.

In the mid-1950s, one of his 78-rpm recordings, "Moondog
Symphony," was regularly played by Alan Freed, the
pioneering rock-and-roll disk jockey. But it wasn't until
the 1960s that Hardin had regular access to an orchestra and
was able to make his first longer album for CBS, "Moondog."

In 1989, Hardin, acclaimed in Europe, was invited back to
the United States to conduct the Brooklyn Philharmonic
Chamber Orchestra.

Allan Kozinn, a critic for The New York Times, described
Hardin's conducting style as unusual, explaining that he was
"uncomfortable with being an authority figure, so he sits to
the side of the orchestra and provides the beat on a bass
drum or tympani."

Scotto said that Hardin told him that he married in 1943 and
subsequently divorced. A second marriage, to Sazuko
Whiteing, a musician, in the 1950s, ended in divorce in the
early 1960s, Scotto said.

Scotto and Mrs. Sommer said they thought Hardin was survived
by a younger brother, Creighton Hardin, of Kansas City; a
daughter, June Hardin, and another daughter, whose name and
whereabouts they did not know.

In the end, Hardin finally yielded to Mrs. Sommer's coaxing
and gave up his Viking outfits. He had refused to alter his
dress code even when, as an aspiring composer, it provoked
his eviction from the Philharmonic rehearsals.

"But I still love horned helmets and swords and spears," he
said in a 1989 interview. "I like to feel that I'm loyal to
my past. I wouldn't want to be on the street anymore. But
you know, that led to a lot of things."






A look back at Moondog, the blind Viking hat-wearing street musician who was a living landmark in NYC for three decades

NY Daily News May 26, 2016



   

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