Moondog: The Viking of Sixth Avenue

Knowest thou of the Moondog (Louis Hardin, 1916-1999)?

Moondog is notable for multiple reasons: he was a highly influential composer, musician and recording artist; a pioneering figure of the counterculture; and for a time, one of New York’s best known local “characters”. He’s the kind of brilliant nut one would be tempted to love whole-heartedly, but there were some less loveable aspects of his character as well, ones that, let just say, were harmonious with the wearing of a Viking helmet.

The son of an Episcopalian priest, as a youth and young man Hardin had lived all over the country: Kansas, Missouri, Wyoming, Iowa, Arkansas, and Tennessee. He was interested in percussion from boyhood. Among his earliest influences was the native Arapaho music he encountered while his family was living at Fort Bridger.

Hardin’s life changed forever when he was 16 years old. He was walking across a field when he came across an unusual object and curiously picked it up. Unfortunately, the object was a discarded dynamite cap. It exploded in his face, permanently blinding him. During his period of recovery, his sister read works of philosophy and mythology to him. At this time, he also began to study music seriously, and it became his life. He was interested in all kinds of music, not just the ethnic folk sounds of Native America, but also classical and jazz, as well. He absorbed these sounds, studied them, and reflected them back.

In 1943 he moved to New York just in time to take part in the be bop and beat movements. Among his circle of acquaintances were figures as disparate as Charlie Parker, Leonard Bernstein, Benny Goodman, Arturo Toscanini, Lenny Bruce, William S. Burroughs, and Allen Ginsberg. He would park himself on the street on or near 52nd Street, which at the time was a strip of small jazz clubs, thus he became widely known to a large number of musicians. Taking the name “Moondog”, which he had done by 1947, was reflective of his interest in Native American culture. He attended and performed at a Blackfoot festival in Idaho in 1949. This was around the time his recording career began.

Meanwhile he continued to occupy his daily perch on Sixth Avenue, in the lower 50s. From his little outpost he sold his original poetry, sheet music, and used records, and performed. Blind, and sporting a long beard, at this time time he resembled a prophet. Many probably assumed that he was homeless, although he rarely was thanks to his many revenue streams. In addition to his New York apartment, he actually had a country place in upstate New York. Meanwhile, although that time on the street inspired him to incorporate ambient street sounds into his music, as well. In addition to the many record albums he released between 1953 and the end of his life, he also invented numerous musical instruments, the most widely known is the trimba.

1969 album

The well known musicians who either admired Moondog, covered his songs, reflected his influence, or referred to him in their own songs includes Charlie Parker, Igor Stravinsky, Frank Zappa, Janis Joplin, Marc Bolan and T. Rex, Pentangle, Philip Glass, Steve Reich, Kronos Quartet, and Rufus Wainwright.

We alluded to the fact that Moondog was not an exception to the universal law that nobody’s perfect. Interest in Norse mythology from boyhood eventually turned Moondog into something of a white supremacist. He started wearing a Viking helmet and carrying an eight foot tall staff in the 1960s. In this light it is interesting and compare him with such diverse but related phenomenon as the Nazis, the hippies who were influenced by Tolkien and Sword and Sorcery fiction, and heavy metal. Like Nietzsche he was anti-Christian, but he was also an anti-Semite, and despite being blind, anti-black. You can hear elements of Wagner in his music. In 1974 Moondog moved to Germany itself, and that is where he spent the last quarter century of his life.

On the other hand, as we’ve seen, some of his biggest fans were Jews and black people. Culture is complicated. Once I might have said “How seriously should we take the beliefs of a cat who wears a Viking helmet and calls himself Moondog?” But that was before I witnessed the activities of the QAnon Shaman. So nowadays, I would say “Pretty seriously, I guess.” Yet, not to excuse Moondog’s attitudes, but the fact that he borrowed from the sounds of ALL people, and those peoples responded to HIS sounds in kind speaks to the universality of music, and how words, ideas, and categories can actually be impediments to harmony and understanding. Just putting that out there.