s.The 1960s sometimes elevated the mere eccentric to the status of hero. Beneath the kinky glamour, the political vitality, and the shimmering variety lay a confusion that a hundred antiheroes could not dispel, and shaky underpinnings of a rebelliousness that was a symptom, not a cure. Today, free speech, free love, and peace before dishonor sound like charming artifacts of an adolescent sincerity. Some journalists of the 1960s have tidily covered their tracks, either subtly altering their previous positions or excusing themselves, with latter-day sobriety, for getting caught up in the moment. Skirts have come down and gone back up again, many times; entertainers still go into politics; rock stars are idolized in platinum with the same fervor (though their lyrics no longer seem to have biblical resonance). Those who lived through those bright, complex times, and who thought they confronted the issues honestly, may now wonder to what extent they were taken in. There was, in addition to a primal innocence and a radical response to social injustice, a great deal of mere surface glitter.
Other periods of history have seemed invigorating to those passing through and dubious to those looking back. Much good came out of the floods of energy playing over a nation plagued by dissension, generating a plethora of new ways of living, art forms, and ethical codes. To place Moondog accurately, one must remember the froth of the 1960s: the shiny patina, the nervous gesture, the dramatic over-response. In other words, while it brought forth much authentic, constructive activity, and generated an effective, muscular outrage at government arrogance, it also pandered as no period before it to the American teenager, fixing an unanchored idealism and skewed scale of significance into the national paranoia. One of the more predictable reactions by prosperous citizens to internal problems that dwarf exterior threats is to glorify self-awareness, to examine quirks and tics so closely that what in more tranquil times is background and trivial acquires gravitas and centrality. When many thought a revolution in consciousness was imminent, some of the energy for reform dissipated rather than crystallized: self-contemplation had slipped into solipsism. The Great Society died in the vise of the Nixon years. The Vietnam War ended through Kissinger’s cynical shuttle diplomacy. Camelot turned into Watergate.
In this awesome, ironic decade Moondog was where he had been since he came to New York. With the exception of his few retreats to his upstate property, he spent the 1960s on the streets of Manhattan. After so many modest successes through the 1950s, no album appeared, no single event had the symbolic importance of the Freed case, and after the paralyzing loneliness of his separation from Mary and June, he formed no durable relationship for over ten years. There were concerts, appearances, readings, publicity, but little would have more than a brief and local impact. His old professional alliances gave way to new ones, and he was never without a wide circle of friends. But until the 1969 Columbia album, Moondog was, involved and outspoken as he always was, paradoxically quiet.
On the surface, this is surprising, for who was a more likely focus for the surge of counterculture happenings than Moondog, self-generated symbol of the anti-establishment and contemporary Diogenes? No explanation of how someone did not become a celebrity can pretend to make sense, but it would be interesting to try to understand why Moondog did not seize the day despite the loyalty and fervor of his fans, many themselves luminaries. The story of his obscurity illuminates the changes he underwent while the world changed all around him, for everything he was, all he stood for, made him appear other than he was.
To begin with, the Viking dress that became his trademark did not evolve until the mid-1960s, so while trends were born and died in rapid succession under the close scrutiny of the media, he was still struggling to achieve a new identity and philosophy. When he finally became recognizable as a rugged individualist, even a mythic figure, many of the ideas he won for himself in the process were against the grain. Scratch a rebel and you might get a reactionary: his myth was so far-out that it was too far to the right, and too old-fashioned, for those far-out times. Although he shared a horror of middle-class America with the young, the poor, and the outcast (he was one of the first and the most famous of the street people of our time), he did not lust after the lifestyles or ape the codes of these other outsiders. Moondog was sympathetic to the right causes, and gave them his time and support. He spoke out in public against the war and performed in civil rights concerts. Adding to his countercultural credibility, he had written music inspired by Indian rhythms, Latin rhythms, and black jazz. He preached about marching to a different drummer. But he was not, could not, become part of a “movement”; he fit none of the star-molds then current. The moment was never ripe for the man who matured at his own pace.
By far the greatest difference between himself and his erstwhile admirers was ideological. He acknowledged, with all of the critics of the technocracy, that civilization was diseased and in desperate need of regeneration. But his criticism was not born out of the struggle for equality by minorities, nor from the superimposition of Eastern dogmas. He held that our modern cancer was centuries old and stemmed from the loss of a culture that had been annihilated by the very forces still in power. When the “Christian state” wiped out the old Nordic infrastructure during the so-called “Middle Ages,” a world-view disappeared, or went underground. Once there were benevolent dictatorships whose armies of loosely confederated bands struck terror into the inhabitants of southern, eastern and western Europe. After being converted and absorbed, the men of Thor lost their fire, became docile citizens of Christian Europe; the old beliefs became literary appendages. He would revive that ethos, if only in himself. In doing so, however, the Viking of Sixth Avenue could only give so much to the causes proliferating around him, for with his new system came a harsh reckoning of those who would call him their brother. To him, the new revolutionaries were often as much tinsel as the establishment they scorned, both committing the same fallacy. The new orders were as far removed from his concepts as the order they sought to replace. To return to a world-view only dimly recollected in Icelandic saga, after the oral tradition was finally written down, to ages and peoples untouched by the Christian state: this he would preach. He would write poetry that confused and embarrassed even his allies; he would compose building blocks of a Nordic sound saga; he would undermine his opponents by showing them how his gods would undermine theirs.
Aggressive, complex men with unpopular views almost never live comfortably. To make them into curiosities is easier than to take them seriously. Although Moondog was respected by some, few of those who heard him out could follow him to the limits of his engagement with the old order. In this sense, the 1960s could not absorb him. He was always “in,” but he had far too many rough edges to be chic.
THE 1960S BEGAN for Moondog in olive drab, the dominant color of his clothes as well as the mood of his new daily life. By August 1960, after he left the House of Correction on Hart’s Island, he was back at the Aristo Hotel, now paying child support (soon, alimony too). Ten years after his first stay at the creaky old building, his was hardly a triumphal return. Since the place no longer exists, we can only trust descriptions by visitors to 101 West 44th, and the consensus was not flattering. His home was, according to one caller in winter 1960–61, “a nasty little place of dreadful stench and dubious clientele. We made our way past a couple of passed-out drunks on the stairs and through dark halls to Moondog’s door.” Another visitor describes Moondog “huddled in a small, cockroach-infested room…with barely enough room to move after the mattress was propped against the wall.” Another called it “depressing, a dump.”
To those who remember Moondog as colorful, startling, and bizarre, the image of a blind beggar with the face of Christ, covered with dull, heavy garments made of army blankets, might seem surprising. For over twenty of the thirty years Moondog spent on the streets of New York, however, his garb was unspectacular (albeit unusual), and his life something less than a poor, suffering artist’s romance. His unorthodox dress alienated him from Rodzinski and the Philharmonic, and figured in the Freed case as an ingredient of his public identity as an artist, but his ultimate sartorial statement was neither inevitable nor smooth. The progress of his life as he approached his fiftieth year, and his ideas as reflected in his clothing, were hard-won and sustained by devotion to his craft.
Now that he had left domesticity for solitude and had to manage his affairs with little aid from others, he resumed, with a renewed independence, his characteristic methods of remaking himself. In 1961 he showed a group of friends his new shoes, which were “splendid, made of squares of leather.” Most of his garments were still made out of squares of materials hand-sewn together, and aside from “dress uniforms” would always be. The color scheme of choice at the time was “green, preferably olive drab,” not only because it was cheap, but also because he was comfortable with the innocuous and meaningless then. In 1962 an out-of-town guest at the Warwick Hotel described his nocturnal encounter with Moondog near 54th Street and 6th Avenue:
I stopped still and looked intently at that shadowy figure until I could make it out more clearly, though still dimly. I was startled as some of the features of a huge apparition came into focus: cowl, robe, strange footwear, alms-cup, beard, and, as I finally realized, unopen eyes. I took the person—if such it were indeed—for a Russian monk of some sort.
Weeks later, his courage bolstered by daylight, the man approached Moondog at 53rd and 6th to speak with the apparition: “He described the various articles that made up his garb, each of which was a square, even to the heavy cloth footwear.” Moondog was now in his element: “He was himself, he said, a square, and all the music he composed was square.”
Life at the Aristo was difficult for quite some time. Moondog recalled:
It was hard for me to make enough money to pay rent, copyist and traveling expenses up to my place in Candor. There were times when I couldn’t go up for over a year at a time. It was a case of either/or. Sometimes I would check out, putting my things in the hotel’s storage room, so that I could spend a few weeks upstate. This was not so good, for when I came back, it was not always possible to get the same room, or any room, for a while. This went on until 1967.
Through the hard times people tended to be good to him. One instance of supererogation came about when Moondog, to make a little more room, tried several times to dispose of a foot-high stack of audio tapes. The New York City sanitation men kept returning them to him in spite of his expressed wish to be unencumbered. It turned out that they were the master tapes of his 1950s recordings. Although the tapes managed to get lost once more, others were watching out for his interests. Whenever he got a little more elbow room he spread out the papers for the more ambitious works he was composing, and much important music came out of this “Aristo period.” He wrote the Der Grosse Kanon for piano and some large symphonic works indoors. Most of his other new compositions were written, as they had been in the 1940s and 1950s, on the street: “Good for Goodie,” “Ode to Venus,” “Theme.” For seven years, until he moved out of the Aristo in 1967 (shortly before its destruction), this was his life: a cycle of street scenes, occasional trips, infrequent appearances, and diligent work. During one feverish month, February of 1961, for instance, he wrote Book I of his Art of the Canon. “I set myself the task of doing a piece a day, through all the keys and ending in C, where I began: a total of 25 pieces. I did it in 28 days, including writing, editing and proofing.” Each piece fills a page, with the exception of number 24, which is two pages long. Through this long and arduous period his work evolved, he became less occupied with public issues and more with his music, and his outfits began to take on some color.
Because Moondog found it hard (financially and logistically) to leave the city, any outing, any engagement with the wilderness, was welcome. One opportunity came in 1961, when two married couples invited him to go camping at Stokes State Forest in New Jersey. The junket began when Moondog was picked up at his spot, but had to enter the Dodge station wagon from the driver’s side, parking being awkward in mid-Manhattan. A bus pulled up alongside, and the driver yelled: “Hey, Moondog, are you going to drive that thing?” Tranquil as always, he struggled in with his homemade canvas pack, and they were off. During this weekend in the high hills of the Appalachian Trail Moondog impressed his hosts both with his excellent survival instincts and his calm. Not aware that he was at home in the woods, thinking that he had not been out of the city for over a decade, they were somewhat amazed when a map sketched onto his palm relating the campsite to the road and stream was all he needed to settle comfortably in. They were even more surprised when he began to break up dead wood for a fire: he would smack a limb, listen for its impact on the ground, and unerringly track it down. After they had eaten dinner, he sewed a shirt out of six handkerchiefs, something he could do by then in ten minutes. The campers noted how he appeared to be bestowing a blessing when he pulled out the thread with an upraised hand, but he answered that there was a fat chance of him blessing anyone. On the next day, Moondog easily paced the hikers up an enormous hill, listening for “The Holly and the Ivy” sung out from ahead. A rattlesnake was encountered and killed in a furious mêlée, through which Moondog sat serenely, pointing out the names of the various birds cheeping and twittering in the trees. The frontiersman insisted that they cook it. When he proposed adding another entrée—a newborn porcupine retrieved by one of the party’s dogs, with umbilical cord still attached—other sensitivities prevailed. One of the men, a Swedish reporter who considered Moondog “a living work of art,” took numerous photographs of the trip. He also took several at the Aristo that ran in a Swedish magazine two decades later, in 1982. Moondog was one of the most photographed New Yorkers of his time.
A friend, Willa Percival, also a professional photographer, spent much time with him in the city and on the road in the early 1960s. She recorded a rooftop scene with the Empire State in the background during a cookout with a woman and child, Moondog by the fire; Moondog with a tourist on the top deck of the S.S. Essex in harbor; standing under the statue of George Washington with arm upraised, on the steps of the Federal Reserve Bank (a line of Hell’s Angels motorcycles in the foreground); close-ups of Louis’ profile framed by George’s. There were many others: at the Cloisters, with the Hudson River in the background; on Fire Island; on the Avenue of the Americas; and even a few with “a family in Cornwall at a New Year’s Day dinner (white table cloth)” as he sat on a sofa, chatting.
On Moondog’s ideas the activity around him had little effect, and even the causes he embraced and the campaigns he waged tended to be personal and solitary. For a few Thursdays (rain date: Friday) during February and March 1961, for instance, he took his attack on the concealed church-state (what he now called “panchristianity”) right to the power brokers on Wall Street, an action he had been mulling over for fifteen years. His theme and his charge were specific: the immorality of the Federal Reserve System, the grand legalized trust of all trusts in a nation that publicly prosecuted conglomerates and cartels. His plea was for monetary reform and a thorough revision of the existing antitrust laws. As in 1955, when he confronted his “opponent” (WINS) squarely and dramatically, the gestures were deliberately theatrical. He handed out one thousand little green slips of paper, printed up at his own expense. Thus, during the lunch hour of the business capital of the world, this eccentric from uptown appeared to be distributing cash. The passers-by snapped them up quickly and walked away with seven Moondog couplets on “The Monetary Issue.”
One week he would attack the Federal Reserve, wielding Jefferson’s warning (“a central bank is more of a menace to the liberties of men than a standing army”). The next week he would try to undermine what he considered the hypocritical “civil” code he saw as “bristling with Christian morality” (anticipating his Thor by a few years). Even though he made many new acquaintances during these weeks, among them some staunch bulls from the Stock Exchange, he did not maintain the pilgrimage for very long. As events in the age of petitions and marches and sit-ins began to accelerate in intensity and frequency, Moondog began to disengage, seeking seclusion with greater conviction. He predicted his retirement to Candor in 1968, four years before it actually came about; yearning to see his “root” culture at first hand, he longed to go to Europe for more than a decade before he did. As he turned inward and became more serious about composing, his attachment to the net of subcultures that tried to display him as a splendid catch loosened, and he and his age began to go different ways.
The Viking took his time emerging, as did the reclusive composer, since both were wrestling with the soul of the performer and activist, and Moondog had not, as far as is known, planned or contemplated a change in direction in the early 1960s. When the highlights of a decade are compressed into a couple of pages, the pace seems feverish, but noteworthy events might have gaps between them of months, seemingly uneventful stretches in which the work gets done. These quiet moments of increasing momentum elude biography. Many artists work best in peace, not when they must grapple with words in a crowd. Moondog had chosen the latter.
He was an engaging speaker who thought little of conversation as craft. (Probably with good reason: recorded conversations often fall flat as literature. What had seemed to be brilliant spontaneity reads as coarse or vapid, especially when compared with the writings of those conversing.) The “art” of conversation today seems little more than a social skill, inferior to its illustrious sire, the oral tradition, in which each trustee refines and polishes the myth, legend, and history he transmits. Moondog worshipped the oral tradition, be it of American Indians or of Norse scops, and knew that he was not a part of it. His public utterances may seem contradictory or banal, then, as most do. He conversed, often for hours a day. It went with the job, usually enjoyably. He learned new ideas and ways; the blind man’s education centers around the spoken word. Yet however much he embraced the public, he always worked alone. The haunting realization that visits Elijah (I Kings) comes to mind: the real presence of God (the best part of ourselves) is not found in the fire or in the wind, but in the still, small voice.
Like Moondog the recording artist, Moondog the performer had bad luck. Timing, life kept reminding him, is the chief god in the pantheon of the celebrity. One of the most urgent reasons for abandoning his stage career was his cynicism about making it in show business; another was the time and energy (best spent composing) it took to mount even the slenderest of acts. Finally, he was deeply pained when he was typecast, even though every performer shares with his public the responsibility for his persona. Moondog’s “costumes” were not part of an act, but living emblems of his convictions. Yet he had to earn money, begging being undercompensated, and many of his professional friends were anxious to make the right connection for him or to give him the proper exposure. But most, like Bob Dylan, still saw him as the paradigmatic drop-out and pariah. In his poem “Blowin’ in the Wind” (not to be confused with the later song), published in the December 1963 Hootenanny, he writes:
an Moondog beatin’ his drum and
sayin’ his lines —
an Lord Buckley’s memory still movin’…
(Moondog never met Lord Buckley, but the juxtaposition is instructive: Dylan sees both as satirists of the middle class, and Moondog’s oddity therefore coincides with his emerging world-view. What Moondog was sayin’ is never specified—another example of his admirers seeing in him what they wanted him to represent.)
In his Chronicles, Volume One, published in 2004, Dylan describes Moondog performing at the Holy Grail of the new folk experience, Café Wha?, around 1961, where he recited “monologues, played bamboo pipes and whistles” as he did on the streets, and wore a blanket with fur boots. But surely Dylan’s description of the Viking helmet he says that Moondog sported at this time is anachronistic, an overlay of later memories of shared space and time.
Others made him out to be even weirder than he was. A bizarre coincidence occurred on stage in Greenwich Village. On a few evenings (in 1961 and 1963 at the Big Fat Black Pussy Cat, in 1962 at the Long Theatre, and in 1963 in a midnight revue at the Living Theatre, for instance) Moondog shared the bill with an obscure and freakish act. This countertenor who strummed a ukulele and wore a tuxedo that stressed his pot belly and hermaphroditic shapelessness was soon to rise as a star, albeit meteorically. A review in The Village Voice by J.R. Goddard (July 25, 1963) starring “TT, Hugh [Hugh Romney] and Moon” captures the moment perfectly. The picture alone was worth the ten cents, with Tiny Tim beaming and Moondog, looking gaunt and spectral, gazing off to the side, abstracted. The article concludes:
And then there’s Moondog, resplendent in his long grey hair [not yet 50!] and beard, his hermetic monk’s garb and even more hermetic voice. Usually seen around 53rd and Sixth…he reads couplets while a lovely young woman with strawberry blond hair named Suzanne Frenon (a Juilliard graduate who’s just started working with him) plays his Bach-like canons on the piano. Just watching them is a delight—Moondog’s peripatetic hands “playing” his couplets on a Braille sheet while Suzanne energetically plays at the decrepit upright. Aphorisms come out, some of them only corny doggerel, some of almost Haiku precision, some with a shocking aptness for our time.… Neo-Baroque and very Humanist, in spite of his aridity, Moondog leaves us close to reality, weird costume or not.
Lenny Bruce once joined TT and Moon, an ungodly trinity.
Moondog struggled through the early 1960s, poorer than he liked. Royalties had dried up, and his meager savings had drained into the reclamation of his wilderness retreat. The occasional commercial or soundtrack adapted from his scores funded at most a brief holiday alone upstate. Most of his appearances served as showcases for his varied talents, but until 1966 none of his more ambitious orchestral works had been performed. A typical program included some verse recitation and some percussion pieces, usually solo. He made several appearances at Town Hall, throughout the 1960s, with many of the jazz originals of his era. He was on stage several times at the Village Theatre, once doing an early rendition of Thor the Nordoom, another time with a sextet, reading antiwar poetry while Allen Ginsberg held the microphone. He read Thor at Steinway Hall and at Queens College, both with small ensembles. At Alfred College he rehearsed some singers to perform a selection of his madrigals and arranged a dance contest in which couples stepped to his five-four waltzes. (The first, second, and third prizes, $15, $10, and $5, came out of his fee.) In 1965, in the basement of a Lutheran Church, he performed “a medley of strange sounding musical canons” with “a couple of assistants.” (Phil Tracy, “A Happy Story,” National Catholic Reporter, December 10, 1969) He was front and center at this amateur night benefit for the grape strikers, as for so many other worthy causes. In spring 1966, aided by the director of Spectrum Gallery on 57th Street, he staged a “Moondog Concert.” (Charles Giuliano, “A Recollection of a Sidewalk Viking,” Boston After Dark, October, 15 1969) A contract, witnessed by Mack at the desk of the Aristo, provided for four musicians, “symphony men,” at $25 each. The quartet finally booked were members of the New York Philharmonic. The specificity of his demands underscores the rarity of the opportunity. After “hollering” in the hall to test the acoustics, and after appearing for three hours on WBAI in what amounted to an extended media notice, he “delighted” the gallery on May 20 with the following program: his Symphonique No. 9, arranged for string quartet; an interpretive dance by Linda Gudde; and Moondog reading canons and couplets “to fill out the skimpy program.” (In his Moondog Yearbook I, earliest printings, he notes: “I call [the Symphonique No. 9] ‘Bird’s Lament,’ in memory of Charlie Parker. We were to have cut a duet together. I wrote it after his death. Bernstein has been sitting on the score since 1960.” It appeared on the 1969 Columbia album, rescored for reeds with alto sax lead.) Later, in summer 1966, Moondog gathered enough money together to hire actors and musicians for “an evening at the Cinematheque.” There, with the help of Maggie Dominick, at 44th Street between Broadway and 6th Avenue, before what one observer described as “a dazzled psychedelic audience from New York’s underground,” he acted in and had enacted his most elaborate mounting of Thor the Nordoom, A Norse Saga. This anticipated his later work on the Columbia album and beyond. In keeping with his new image as the Viking of the avant-garde, he has a small part in the film Chappaqua, also featuring William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, and Ravi Shankar, who wrote the music. On October 15, 1967, with the help of his new agent, Al Brown (who was with him through the Columbia albums), he had an even more rewarding experience. As he put it in the Moondog Yearbook:
My greatest ambition is to conduct my own work from memory. That ambition was realized…at the Village Theatre, thanks to Ron Wolin, who had me appear, but especially to Al Brown, violist, who gathered a group of fine players together to form my Mini Sym….
Once again, they first performed earlier scorings of several of his Columbia album selections. A few times during 1968, Jack Kalish had Moondog appear at the Folk Dance Center, 69 West 14th Street. Under the title “Moondog at Midnight: Poetry and Dance,” with or without a recording of Beethoven’s piano sonatas as accompaniment, Moondog read his poems, played his drums, and sold his music. He could not afford musicians at this time. Also at midnight, again in 1968, he appeared at the Vicki Hayes Theatre Workshop, 1741 Broadway, on Saturday evenings. A photograph of Ms. Hayes, “accepting reservations at 212-JUdson 2-3058,” appeared in the earliest Yearbooks.
Others also performed Moondog’s music. Elliot Finkel (a longtime admirer and internationally noted pianist) played the Grosse Kanon and selections from The Art of the Canon, Book I, several times and did a recital with his brother of Book I complete at Little Carnegie Hall. (American Music Digest and Music Journal printed good reviews—1970.) Moondog’s ballet, Nocturne (originally Suite No. 2 on the Epic album), was conducted in Central Park by John Draper, a longtime professional friend, and performed by the Donald McKayle Dance Company at the City Center, May 22 and May 25, 1969. (A contract from 1965 signed by Bethsabee de Rothschild of the Batsheva Foundation for Art and Learning in Tel Aviv promised Moondog $10 for every paid performance and $5 for every free performance of “Nocturne” mounted by their dance company.) Tony Schwartz paid to use “Theme” in a twenty-second television commercial for Hubert Humphrey’s presidential campaign of 1968. There were others, less known, with little or no compensation.
Towards the end of the 1960s Moondog entered a new relationship toward himself on stage, along with the emergence of newer idioms. The seemingly impressive tally of appearances was spread over nine years and confined mainly to small venues. During that time his ideas on Norse mythology, history, and culture were beginning to coalesce. In turn, a fresh aesthetic and cultural mission guided his passion for expression. He lost interest in performing his work in fits and starts.
In 1964, in the second of three appearances (the others were in 1953 and 1969), Moondog filled a major time-slot on NBC’s Today Show. An extravagant crew of technicians flew up with him to Candor to film him at his primitive best, reading his poetry and playing his drums in the woods near his shack, casting him again in a role he had to his chagrin repeatedly accepted. He bore a stigma that he was desperate to erase: the public saw and wanted him only as a street musician, based mostly “on the strength of the record I did fifteen years ago when I was playing on the street.” This image was hard to change:
“They’re just as content to let you stay in that category. If you are a street musician they’ll assume you are nothing else. They would never dream you could write a symphony or a quartet.” (Corpus, 1960)
His belated realization that the glitter of his reputation as a performer had sidetracked his composing came with powerful undertows. His resolve to write rather than to give himself to an audience solidified when he became the Viking of Sixth Avenue. It is a paradox that he was more colorful then than at any other time, but it is not a coincidence.
I’m not really an entertainer; I don’t know how to sell myself and I don’t try. I can’t put myself over like Jolson. I don’t have stage presence; I think that one of the things that is a disadvantage to a performer is not to be able to see his audience. I don’t know how to beat down that fifth wall—the wall between myself and the audience. I can’t beat it down; I’m much happier writing.
The habit of composing became more natural as his commitment hardened. He had lived, now he wanted to write. Driven to solitude, not by it, his idioms shaped by new myths, he used the years without new recording projects to test himself as a composer.
THE VIKING’S EMERGENCE from the near past to a more distant one was a splendid metamorphosis: in dress, from drab squares to color and costume; in philosophy, from cause consciousness to poetic myth; in music, from the percussive and the primitive to canonic form and sound saga. Private yet garrulous, open yet firm, soft-spoken yet unshakeable, he danced between extremes. Some of his ideas were outrageous in their implications; some of his verse was chillingly effective, for those who knew no poetry at all as well as for those who thought his poems in the main amateurish and trendy; some of his music intimidated the uninitiated traditionalist and impressed the open-minded, flexible professional. His activities, like his creations, cut across boundaries, castes, and cultures. The sophisticated admired the complex expressions of primal experience, and the undemanding enjoyed the familiar if slightly unusual tonalities so comfortingly close to what they knew and felt.
But what did it feel like to create, with so many obstacles to overcome? What was a typical day like for a man whose life was so enigmatic and strange? He had to live, whatever occupied his mind, in physical time and place. The images he cloaked himself with created distance through violent distortion, making a statement as they shielded him. Blind Tiresias, prophet of doom, a benevolent instrument of the gods; Father Time, with Olympian serenity reading the pulse of a decadent, nervous culture; Viking foot-soldier and bard, reasserting archaic values in the most cosmopolitan and urbanized of civilizations. However, most of his days passed by without special revelations, impressive discoveries, or grave setbacks. Even pariahs live in clock-time and meet the tax man. The life of a public man is measured by the impressions he leaves on those he touches, on the illuminations he transmits through his works and his deeds, seldom by the manner in which the work and the image is produced. While the exterior may be glitter and gloss, the long hours spent in lonely labor are barely worth mentioning.
And yet, working during spare moments on the streets, and through the night while the sighted slept, Moondog, step by step, garment by garment, note by note, remade himself. His ideas, which previously he had let his life or music speak for, or spread like fertilizer on the public with irregular pronouncements, tightened around several mythic concepts. The seeds of Thor the Nordoom and The Creation took root. The second half of the 1960s (unlike his first twenty years in New York and unlike the anarchy erupting all around) seems in retrospect a steady and orderly flow of music (orchestral suites, canons, rounds) and print (couplets, calendars, linguistic and numerical inventions).
Moondog was used to indulging his talents in a variety of fields, and his research, as arcane as his style, was fruitfully eclectic. It would be easy to dismiss his unconventional theories for all the conventional reasons (that autodidacts are prone to advance sweeping and hole-ridden theories, or that blind people have limited access to specialized sources, for instance). But this would be to say that, if their ideas make us uncomfortable, eccentrics live in a universe of extremes and have nothing instructive to say to normal people. Any of these arguments, like the facile ad hominem that Moondog merely tried to be a gadfly, are evasive answers for complex questions.
The periodicals Moondog produced in the late 1960s articulated his positions more thoroughly than any of his previous writings had. In order to leave behind several time-worn images (the street singer, the fey crusader, and the unfocused anarchist) and shape some new ones, he published the conspicuous and ambitious Moondog Yearbooks of 1967–1970, all puzzlingly called Moondog Yearbook I: Number II, though frequently promised, never appeared.
The five or more editions varied in minor details, but the core of each, four fifths of the whole, was always the long sequence of couplets arranged “in a strict mathematical formation” (according to Susan Lee Merrill, who wrote the 1967 introduction, replaced in 1970 by Moondog’s foreword). The “root” is nine, “a sacred number to the Goths.” Each couplet, though, represents a day in a year “based on the pre-Julian 10-month Roman calendar” (Martius, Aprilis, Maius, Junius, Quintilis, Sextilis, followed by September, October, November and December). Nine couplets make one “canto”; forty cantos, or weeks (of nine days each), with a five-day “year-end,” (the Saturnalia) complete the cycle of 365. Soon he would eliminate all reliance on the inherited and hated Roman artifacts, but not yet. These are discursive, bizarre, and bold productions, varied in content and uneven in form. Nearly every “day” (couplet) of the year deals with a new item, and rarely does an idea last more than a “week” (stanza). From 1967: “Nothing is unimportant to a poet…I like to juxtapose the most irrelevant things to get violent contrasts. My poetry is a kaleidoscopic view of my mind.” Three years later: “Most couplets are self-contained, having nothing to do with the one preceding or following.” The meter is as free-wheeling as the matter it fleetingly regulates: the lines are long, enjambments abound, and the rhymes are virtually indescribable. Of his couplets he goes on to say that they are “in seven iambic feet per line, or iambic septameter or heptameter.” This is the form of Thor the Nordoom in its earliest versions, comfortable for Moondog despite its inherent problems and peculiarities. To some extent his interest in the long, highly alliterative line came from reading Anglo-Saxon and Icelandic poetry. The major stumbling block to poets writing fourteen-syllable lines in English has invariably been the unavoidable sing-song of the iambs and the breathless length. Ms. Merrill, by implication, seems to offer one explanation for the evolution of his verse form: “Moondog is first a musician and it shows in his poetry.” Vague slogans will not explain what he did, however, or say whether he did it well. The couplets are juvenilia, but are fascinating nonetheless. Later, in the program notes to his 1969 Columbia album and in interviews around that time, he said more simply that he liked regularity of form in his verse as well as in his music.
The peculiar and unusual subjects of these verses merit attention. Poems are about something, however strong the aesthete’s argument that ideas do not make poetry. Moondog’s couplets in the Yearbooks are formally impure and wander freely, uninhibited despite the numerical architecture, touching upon standard 1960s themes. His biases leap jauntily about, alluding to sources and programs but seldom developing any. Although both Ms. Merrill and Moondog insist that recurrent themes, as in a musical round, form a framework, these are really threads on which to hang moods, emotions, and concepts otherwise related only by free association. For instance, if “The Voice of the Cosmos” is heard “chiding man about his pretentions [sic] and fantasies,” it doesn’t sound all that different from the author’s own chiding. The folk wisdom of the old street poet, regardless of his disclaimers, appears throughout, but it is idiosyncratic. Like his earlier music, some of his views were inspired by American Indian lore; like his later music, others reflect the Eddas. Probably, however, many drew upon the streets of New York City. The marked cynicism is underscored by a strong, masculine rhyme. In the couplets that follow, spelling and punctuation are uncorrected. Arabic numerals indicate couplets, and Roman numerals, stanzas.
In retrospect, he sees a pond and on that pond he sees two fleets of warring centipedes whose decks are lined with fleas. (XIV, 118)
If children look like mortar, surely, parents look like bricks,
that sandwich in a bit of soft mortality that sticks. (XXIII, 207)
Menace and doom are prevalent:
A sharpened whalebone coiled inside a frozen hunk of meat,
Is laying for the Artic wolf who’s fool enough to eat. (XII, 102)
The Gods are riding herd, and we who constitute the herd,
are on our way to slaughter pens, to die without a word. (XXXIX, 344)
Many of Moondog’s old pet peeves resurface, but without the same bite. He sneers at the hypocrisy of the Christian state, for instance, as well as one of his nastiest villains, the Federal Reserve System, but in these instances the rhymes are feminine. The old angers seem somewhat tamed, not freshly rekindled. The couplets seem to make obligatory criticisms rather than vital attacks, and tend to vagueness:
Through prosecuting other trusts, the Government protects
the Money Trust. This glaring inconsistency reflects. (XXIX, 258)
Or to simple statement with less than alluring rhyme:
Called “the covenant with death,” and also “an agreement
with Hell,” the Constitution should be called a disagreement
with Heaven,” for the Church, as Heaven’s agent, must concede
her “anticonstitutionality” since Runnymede. (XXX, 275–76)
Clearest in them is Moondog’s new and vital identity with his Nordic past. He devotes more narrative space, and the most consistently entertaining, original, and polished couplets, to two themes: ethnicity and religion in general, and the Nordic adventure and genealogy in particular. He tries to rise above the stereotypical Jeremiad, and to begin to “re-write history,” though through touches and glances rather than with a new program. So, on the subject of Western religion and race relations, some of his earlier views that had alienated potential allies are softened, sensitized, and politically corrected. The juvenile and derivative anti-Semitism of his Millenniad, for instance, becomes:
Jews and Arabs both are semites; therefore, antisemitism is a contradiction in Jerusalem. (XX, 176)
But he is still an autodidact whose biased readings of history can be disquieting.
I agreed with Malcolm X concerning “separation of blacks and whites,” as I agreed with his “repatriation
to Africa” alternative, as Malcolm X agreed with Lincoln. You who do not know what Lincoln wrote, should read. (XXII, 195–96)
In light of his previous broadsides these are quiet sentiments, expressed delicately. Only when he addresses his Nordic past does his poetry begin to breathe. In the 1968 Corpus interview, published during the height of Yearbook fervor, he makes his position clear:
I was heading in the direction of Norse religion because I was tired of being called a Biblical character; not being a Christian and at the same time [sic] I was delving into my own ethnic past and I came up with what I really was and with what I really wanted to identify myself as, which is a Gothic. That is my background and I’m as proud of it as anyone should be of what they are.…my idea of salvation is a modern one, not of being saved from sin but of being identified with my past. It’s very much like a tree that is pulled up by the roots: it dies; but as long as those roots are in the ground it lives and that is very much the same situation with people. When they are uprooted from their own ethnic and religious past, they die culturally. If they don’t know what their ethnic past is, and if there is no inner urge to find out, they will float around without any ties.
Reverend Hardin had been a forerunner of the new northman in his own inimitable style. Although a Christian, he was a marauder who could not be subdued by the pan-Christian west. Moondog, by becoming the Viking, completed the rebellion his father had started, rejecting Christian dogma and assuming pre-Christian rituals.
No longer drifting and criticizing, Moondog put down roots. Few of his data were new, but their assured, jaunty presentation was. His five-billion-year calendar, included in the 1970 version of the Yearbook under the rubric “Universal Reckoning,” lists five names and dates in the last two millennia. The first is Jesus Christ, the middle Mohammad, and the last the “atomic age.” What revaluations are implied by the remaining two! The second is the Battle of Teutoburger Wald (9 A.D.), when two of Augustus’ finest legions under the command of Varus were annihilated in the Black Forest of Germania (a victory Moondog celebrated elsewhere, in verse and song). The fourth is Leif Eriksson’s discovery of America. In canto (“week”) XVI, there is an account of Columbus’ apprenticeship to the explorers of Iceland, from whom he learned the route to the Americas.
Columbus rediscovered Iceland fifteen years before he rediscovered North America, and nothing more. (139)
Columbus knew his voyage was not “a way to India,” but toward “a place to stay,” and he sold “the greed of royalty” on the idea of a “promised land” in order to open up as a mystery what he already knew was there.
Why, in Odin’s name, would Christopher have made a trip to Iceland fifteen years before, unless he had a tip? (141)
Pushing even further into the past, he tells how southern Europe was not only behind the northman in discovery and exploration, but also genealogically an offshoot of conquerors in the prehistoric past.
Some nineteen years before the common era, Goths would conquer Hatti, setting up the kingdom of the Ghas.
They introduced the wheel of half a dozen spokes for light
and speedy chariots of war they drove in ev’ry fight.
These Men of Iron introduced an iron which was nearly steel, which taught all towns, as far as Babylon, to fear. (XXV, 217–19)
Language, as well as warfare, traveled south:
English, German, Swedish, Danish, Dutch, Norwegian, Ghaik,
Italian, Spanish, Frankish, Czech and Greek are merely Goik
dialects all emanating from a Sanskrit source, Central Europe North, referring to the Go, of course. (XXVI, 230–31)
He goes even further back, lightheartedly:
I smile each time I see and hear the phrase, “In God We Trust,”
because I know, as Noah knew, it means, “In Go We Trust.” (XXXI, 272)
Hyperbole, maybe, or poetic license, but nonetheless a refreshingly weird angle on prehistory. There is as of yet no poetic myth strong enough to pull all of the information together, but his immersion in things Gothic was still new in its fact-gathering stage. The first, now lost, version of Thor was on stage at roughly the same time the yearbook was being produced. The concept and design of reordering history through myth played over his sensibilities, Machiavellian and otherwise, as he searched for a fitting vehicle. Thor resurfaced, a more mature vision, when he reconstructed it after settling into his new German home more than a decade later.
THE MOONDOG YEARBOOKS WERE a compendium of wild and zany material, worth every penny of the dollar he sold them for. In the earlier editions he mentions his mid-decade concerts and prints the score for “Bird’s Lament,” Symphonique No. 9, arranged for string quartet, a mainstay on these dates. There is also a photograph of him reading poetry with the quartet on the last page. In the 1970 printing, a photograph of Moondog conducting his Columbia album at the 30th Street studio he loved replaces the other; beneath is a press release about the “New York legend” whose “original compositions, which were written in Braille and subsequently transcribed,” are “now available at your local record store.” On the inside back and front covers of most of the editions are scores for various selections from The Art of the Canon, Books I and II. The front cover, designed by Sharon Seftel, announces the title in Gothic lettering; the back cover is an etching by S. Einhorn of Moondog wearing his sloping square hat, holding his spear in his left hand and a drum stick in his right, with his trimba. Additional photographs show him leaving the Aristo (“Its manager, Jack Brooks, was my host for seven years”) and holding up his moose foot: “Mr. Moose, the use to which / I’ve put your foot was up / to me alone: I own I’ve used / it for a beggar’s cup.” Snippets and biographical notes fill small gaps: he celebrates his twenty-fifth anniversary in New York; he notes, with pride, that he has added a thorn to his typewriter; he apologizes for printing the thorn upside-down in the first edition. In 1970, his new signature, an “eight-legged M” derived from Odin’s octopede Chleipnir, takes up a whole page.
Moondog had always been fascinated by numbers and symbols. The years 1968 and 1969 saw many old conflicts come to a head, and the fusion of ideas shed new light on conventional wisdom and history. Big changes in his musical idiom and in his appearance accompanied an explosion of other activities typified by his idiosyncratic reconsideration of dating, numerology, and linguistics. Although his theories seem like quirky excurses from his historic myth, in his mind they were central. Because of Moondog’s peculiar way of tying arcana into new schemas, these exercises are part of his revised world-view, his attempts to superimpose his readings of the past on our present.
To accompany his couplets and their panorama of the year (365 couplets, 730 lines), Moondog provided in all of the Yearbook printings his “comparative calendar” with a restructuring of the past ten thousand years and a fresh look at the earth’s five billion. He proclaimed: “To Science and Religion: Geocentric Reckoning is offered in exchange for Theocentric Reckoning,” and established the Committee on Universal Reckoning in 1966 (9966, new time) at the Aristo. For example, in 1967, he proposed that the dates from 8000 B.C. through 2000 A.D. be renumbered 1 through 10,000. By the 1970 edition of the yearbook, 0 has been pushed back five billion years.
Alluring as this is, only its formulation is original. More impressively, he issued in a separate booklet in 1969 (and again in 1972, enlarged) his “Perpetual Calendar.” Conceived in 1958, the first product of his Candor retreat, it is an ingenious chart for locating the day of the week for any date from 44 B.C. to 3200 A.D. For any independent amateur to see a project of this scope through would be a triumph; that a blind man living alone in poverty, immersed in several careers, could follow its conception into publication, at his own expense, is astonishing. This booklet was so ergonomic and thorough that information librarians at the famous New York City Public Reference Room preferred it for many years. The whole scheme encompasses eight pages: two for the Julian Calendar (44 B.C. to 1581 A.D.), two for the Gregorian Calendar (1583 to 3200 A.D.) (the “Chronologues”), two for the seven year tables (leap and non-leap years, days, weeks, months), and two for complete directions. The user who wants to know what day of the week he was born on, or the Declaration of Independence was signed on, can locate it in seconds. Unlike the more outrageous proposals for numerical and linguistic reform he published in the late 1960s, the perpetual calendar is a model of utility.
There were always two Moondogs: the struggling artist whose explorations led him down strange paths, and the down-to-earth, practical outdoorsman who sought, when he left Manhattan, quiet harmony with his surroundings. It is not surprising; his childhood was torn between two parents, torn from many homes, torn between conflicting patterns of belief, and torn apart by tragedy. His push into the world of adults followed no well-marked roads; he went ever further from the mainstream without ever leaving the good earth. As he grew older the paradox he lived expanded at both extremes. His appearance seemed calculated to put off; teenagers were frightened by (yet fascinated with) the wild man who danced in the streets and talked to himself. Yet his warmth and humor, often at his own expense, dominate the recollections of his acquaintances. His theories could be elitist, estranging weaklings, waverers, and parasites, yet among his closest friends were society’s lowest. The same man who would attempt a new myth for his time could also harness a leather strap around his head and haul a two-hundred-pound stump out of the woods. Scratch a rebel tied to the past and (because sightless) even more tenaciously to his roots, and you’ll get a survivor. Calendars are necessary, so why not have one that does it all, in one handy, compact package? This is imagination at the service of the real world, not escapism.
MOONDOG LIVED WITH PHILIP GLASS at 366 West 23rd Street for a little over a year, from the summer of 1968 until the early winter of 1969. We are left to speculate about how these two formidable personalities affected each other’s work, since neither has a great deal to say about this time, though both are polite and affectionate in their recollections. It was, according to Glass, a time that was both stimulating and a bit off-putting. Moondog’s musical talents are described in glowing terms in the preface: his ability to play all of his music, his facility in duplicating the sounds of others, and, of particular note, his interesting way of working lyrically with odd rhythms. Both men were respectfully aware that they were trying something new. Moondog was clearly modifying his idioms and styles as he evolved from a predominantly jazz-oriented to classical composer, and Glass was discovering and refining his own voice. Since Moondog was older, and had been writing in “minimal” forms for two decades by then, it would be natural to assume that the compression and repetition of his rounds, for instance, must have appealed to the younger man, and, indeed, stories abound. One evening (June 4, 1969) they and two other friends (Jon Gibson and the 31-year-old Steve Reich, who thought Moondog’s rounds “good, solid music,” and would appear at BAM when Moondog returned to the U.S. in 1989) had great fun recording some of the “old” madrigals (“All Is Loneliness,” “Be A Hobo,” “My Tiny Butterfly,” among others) as well as a rash of “new” ones. A little later, downtown on Duane Street, Martin Scorsese, not yet a famous film director, taped Moondog, Glass, Reich and several others singing rounds on the sidewalks of New York. But these moments are the exception: once again, Moondog insisted that his proximity to other creative people seems to have left much less of an impact on his career and ruling passions than we might have anticipated. Of course, ego can never be dismissed, and few artists consider themselves members of “schools,” and rightly so, yet it is also impossible to dismiss the inevitable cross-pollination that had to have taken place. Although Moondog would later aver that their outlooks on music were “as different as oil is to water,” similarities and correspondences do exist. One day, when all archives are finally open and all reminiscences recorded, the inevitable interplay of creative minds can be more fully evaluated. Until then, we just have to listen to the music written in Moondog’s “middle” period and Philip Glass’ earliest compositions and note the echoes, citations, resemblances (as well as the differences, of course). The mesmerizing repetitions, in which short phrases are expanded into much longer statements, for instance, would seem to originate in (to mix a metaphor) water drunk from the same well.
It could not have been easy to cohabitate with such an eccentric, and Mr. Glass gives several indications in his introduction of Moondog’s startling eccentricities. But his cavalier treatment of women’s bodies and his garbage disposal habits were probably less offensive than some of his arcane ideas about race. Although not overtly anti-Semitic, for instance, a difficult position to sustain in the entertainment industry of New York City, he was asserting a new kind of “Aryan” identity that may have been myth to him, but which could easily be offensive to those who remember how easily such ideas became lethal historically. Despite philosophical differences, however, Philip Glass did help Moondog mount several bizarre and peculiar booklets, and they parted amicably just before the Columbia album restructured his public life.
UNLIKE HIS PERPETUAL CALENDAR, his new system of numbering and his modern version of runics did not catch on. Although too esoteric to be absorbed by their intended audiences (businessmen and purists “in the modern world”), they reveal the limits of his passion for imagining alternate ways of reading history, right up to the present. The proposals, too, are more condescending than was Moondog himself, and another manifestation of his paradoxical nature emerges in them, that of a man who thought himself superior but cherished all human contact. Consumed by his visions, he offered them whether they pleased, befuddled, or angered. Like any original, prolific, and versatile mind, his was uneven in its output, but everything he touched somehow seems as interesting as the energy of his excursions seems prodigious.
“Monumeriks” appeared several times in slightly modified and enlarged versions during 1968, the fullest dated September 18; all were signed by “Mondhunt,” his spelling of Moondog in German. (One of the clearest signs of a rapid, radical change in his opinions and ideas is his changing signature. In similar documents published in 1968 and 1969 alone, his nom de plume had at least three refinements.) A picture of Moondog in time present at his spot dominates the cover: Braille binders on his lap, canvas wrap over his shoulders, legs crossed and bare, head uncovered, his long gray hair in a ponytail, hands quietly at work, face contemplative. He is alone, and behind his right shoulder, tied to his resting spear, some booklets are displayed; above them, in a separate holder, a cup sits, inviting donations. Beneath the photograph is this legend:
The System of the One Number and the System of the Number One
Announcing the Third Numerical Break-Through in the History of Numbering
Attention, Business Community: If Time is Money, so are Space and Weight
Where Numbers are Concerned, Cut Your Costs in Half with Monumeriks.
The back cover of the booklet depicts him and a Mrs. Eliot at the Warwick Hotel, “He and [sic] Outside, and She an Inside,” ending, in part, thus:
“With the Creation of Inglish, and Monumeriks, the Numerical Division of English, Moondog Finishes his Twenty-Fifth Year in New York, Come This November Sixth.”
“Monumeriks” is difficult to translate without confusion, even with its explanatory apparatus at hand: like many esoteric new systems of communication, its theory is plausible and simple, but its applications are harder than its creator intended. Perhaps to make up for his hard line on the business community as an accomplice of the Federal Reserve, he offered this pre-computer-age mathematics. As he promised, he proceeded rapidly, one paper after another, to “go the limit.” The “nupiks,” his coinage for the symbolic element in his system of numbering, “in Monumerik House,” however, led Moondog nowhere, and the venture remains today only a footnote to a fertile period. The effort in conception, transcribing in Braille, translating to type, proofing, printing, and distributing had to be substantial, and the consequent dead-end disappointing. But, as his track record by now clearly predicted, failure never slowed him down. New ideas always came; new directions opened up. Moondog had seen his work shelved, his music plagiarized, his credits dropped. The energy he was drawing from his new posture in the world made him even more resilient in 1969 than he had been. He had greater worlds to conquer.
Language reform came next. In several of his “street sheets” in late 1968 Moondog shared his interest in Nordic with the public. The first one, from December 14, 1968, was illuminated and lettered by the same Sharon who had designed the Yearbook cover. She also, along with Phil Glass, found him an apartment at 449 West 56th Street after he left the Aristo for good in 1967. There he remained until summer 1968. (While there he never knew that an old friend, Tony Schwartz, lived a few doors down. Because he was so productive and so mobile, this example makes it easy to forget how hard it is to be blind.) With Sharon’s help Moondog conceived a grand new program. The leaflet promises a fuller development of the theme: “Moondog is working on a modern runic alphabet which will be out shortly.” A brief history provides a background for Inglish. The runic alphabet “was a gift of the god Odin to the Gothic people”; from the Rhine valley, “the cultural cradle,” the Germanic language “radiated.” (Recall that his couplets also claimed a stupendous range and impact for the Goths.) “Rune” means “mystery, secret,” as a passage translated from the old English of Beowulf illustrates.
On the hilt of glistening gold
Was carefully carved in runic letters
Especially for the one whom the good blade,
The spiraling sword, serpent stamped,
Had first been fired.
He then prints the runic alphabets with their equivalent sound values and stave (“futhark”) formation: the Germanic (“24 letters, divided into three groups of eight each”), the Scandinavian (sixteen letters, with simplifications, as different sounds were represented by the same rune), the Anglo-Saxon (“28 letters, later increased to 33”) and finally the Completed Pointed (twenty-five letters, a “blend of all runic alphabets producing a systematic representation of all sounds in the language,” used in Scandinavia during the Middle Ages by “cultured laymen”).
Several four-page booklets announcing “Inglish, or Modern Gothic” appeared in early 1969, signed once again by good old “Moondog,” found still “by the Warwick,” and produced this time with the acknowledged support of Philip Glass. (Glass has consistently taken on challenging and alien subjects for his more ambitious works over the intervening years: opera in ancient Egypt, music for a film about the Dalai Lama of Tibet, music for three films with titles in the Hopi language, for instance. One can visualize his “runic” collaboration with Moondog serving as some kind of seedling from which future grand conceptions could sprout. They must have at least talked about American Indian music and culture.) Other than the program notes for his Columbia album, this was Moondog’s last publishing venture of the 1960s. Excluding the albums of 1969 and 1971, Moondog wrote very little that saw print until he reconstructed Thor in Germany, over five years later. Discouragement might be a reason, since so little came of his discoveries, but that is not all. A more immediate cause was his exclusive devotion to music, for he returned always to what he did best and wanted to do most whenever other ventures proved troublesome. Two major albums were imminent.
But now that all of the juvenilia had been exposed and the personal investigations brought to light, to grow in stature and sustain his originality required a different kind of struggle. Moondog was famous in New York by 1969, but he no longer chose to remain merely a street person. He would seldom again stride down the avenue of outrageous behavior and popular wit or patronize those whom he wished to convert. He took on a quieter humility to accompany his deepened commitment, and grew as a man and as a composer. In his last five years in America he was on the streets less and less; he devoted himself more selflessly to music and came to dislike the elaborate appearances he had to make to publicize albums.
LOOKING BACK FROM 1969, even Moondog would have to have been impressed by the music he composed in the decade before his Columbia albums. The volume is impressive, considering his blindness and comfortless working conditions. More significant, however, was the definition he gave to his early eclectic styles. He wrote many of his seminal works during the 1960s. His devotion to rounds and canons, first offered in his “Prelude and Fugue No. 1 in A Minor,” 1961 (“from The Well-Tempered Pianoforte), was realized both in the Grosse Kanon (1961–62) and in the two books of the Art of the Canon (1968). His career-long devotion to rhythm, percussion, and song culminated in his madrigals, especially the schema for “Around the World of Sound” in his 1971 album. Just as he began constructing a new myth, so he expanded his oeuvre to more and larger orchestral pieces, his earliest soundings for The Creation. He coined “minisym” and “maxisym” to denote the way a piece of music can be scored, either for full orchestra or for a handful of musicians. Moondog was a realist: since he did not have the good fortune to conduct a sizeable ensemble until late in 1969, whenever and wherever the opportunity occurred to perform his work, he was ready.
This is called stock arranging. The least number of musicians I can get by with is six, but that same piece is scored for one hundred or fifty or twenty or whatever I can get hold of. Stock arranging has never been used in classical music to my knowledge.
In addition, occasional pieces, program music for special events, songs all poured out through his Braille stylus and transliterators into final scores. He managed all this while surviving in good health and mostly in good spirits. The fleeting moments of glory that lay ahead could not repay him for what he gave to his craft. He carved out what many consider important music on the pavements of New York, in the wilderness of his acres, or in the “overheated” flats of his friends. Despite the hardships, his music was serene and disciplined, orderly and unstrained. He labored to transmute his darkness and the decay surrounding him with his own brand of sweetness and light.
Other serious musicians found his music. Artur Rodzinski looked at his early pieces; Bird Parker and Pete Seeger sought him out and wanted to collaborate with him; Duke Ellington and Benny Goodman praised his work; Philip Glass offered him lodging and support. There was, however, no consensus about him; different people liked different things. His eclectic music, like his eccentric publications, is as a whole unclassifiable. In an age of specialization this is limbo. Each of the many things Moondog did has found a small audience, but few will commit themselves to the whole corpus. Those who like the canons may dislike the madrigals; those who admire the unusual tonalities and subtleties of his early percussion pieces sometimes find the orchestral works predictable and academic. To some he is too far out; to others he isn’t even avant-garde. But then by now he was accustomed to straddling two worlds (past and present, reactionary and counterculture), suspected by all, comfortable in no known school.
Nonetheless, he was a musician from the start. Excluding parts of his 1969 Columbia album, Moondog recorded none of his 1960s music during the time he wrote it, but his rate of composition accelerated. Those who performed his music knew it well enough to defend it staunchly. Suzanne Bloch called the selections in Book I of The Art of the Canon “little gems.” Eliot Finkel and Susan Fremon were so devoted to the canons that for decades afterwards, on stage, in clubs, in New York, in New Haven, on The Today Show, on Morningside Radio, all over the Americas and overseas, they held recitals. Paul Jordan, who has performed Moondog’s works for organ throughout the United States and Europe, has often praised the elegant and powerful compositions of the 1960s: the “hypnotic quality” of the madrigals and later organ pieces written in Germany (gathered into the Lögründr); the “lightness, transparency, clarity and wittiness” of the canons.
MOONDOG TURNED 53 in 1969, having lived in New York City for nearly half his life. In those years he changed his ideas and his dress, but the cynic might say that beneath some superficial changes in affectation he was still a boy performing on street corners for attention (psychoanalyzing: for his mother’s or father’s). To Moondog, however, the evolution was real. Poses might extract a momentary thrill, and outrageous utterances might attract a crowd, but in the long haul play-acting with Moondog’s burdens would prove smothering, and he always seemed fresh.
There is another side to the lonely, sanguine eccentric who (critics of his attention-seeking might argue) brought upon himself much of his grief. Moondog had a host of friends, collaborators, and aides. He could not, despite his pride and independence, handle the details of publishing a pamphlet or musical score by himself, for example. Unsurprisingly, he had affairs with several of his female helpmates. He was a New York cult figure, after all, single and magnetic.
He almost married a third time, and lived at 449 West 56th Street with the young woman from Queens who bore him his second daughter, Lisa, on September 22, 1967. Her family objected to Moondog personally and forced mother and infant to leave him. Concluding that the sixteen-year-old girl could not take care of a child on her own, a social worker placed Lisa into a foster home. Twenty-two years later, when Moondog returned briefly and for the last time to the U.S., he again met his second child, and remained happily in touch with her during the final decade of his life.
It is easy to overlook the necessity of Moondog’s closeness to those who helped him, just as it is easy to forget how fraught with peril his everyday life was, or what an undertaking it was for him to travel, whether to a concert down the street or to the country. Recall that one of the major reasons for his heavy headgear was to protect himself from the many metal parking signs at head level. The tedium involved in doing what others take for granted might have discouraged Moondog, had he not had many loving hands in support and many creative solutions.
Copying is an excellent example. Few can transcribe Braille or score music from dictation. Moondog in the 1960s, after being spoiled by Mary for eight years, found several he could work with. John Draper, who conducted “Nocturne” in Central Park, stands out. For $2.50 per hour (far below union scale), this patient and thorough professional inked the masters for the two books of The Art of the Canon as well as the Great Canon, gorgeously. When John Draper became too busy, Mark Unger took over. Pam Gross transcribed the four books of madrigals that in 1971 became the basic text for “Around the World of Sound,” another lovely booklet. She was “a whiz when it comes to dictation, proofing, inking and paste-up. In proofing I can hardly keep up with her. She took down Book I in pencil and proofed it in one sitting, and inked it up in another.” This includes reading each note back to him, of course. In the Spring of 1968 she did Book I; in the fall of 1969 Books II, III and IV. Moondog tried hard to hold on to such good help: “I take a cross-town bus to get to her house at 443 West 48th Street.” The elaborate, repetitive process, equally demanding for each pamphlet as well, was a mutual labor of love.
Moondog had to leave the Aristo in 1967 when it finally closed. Although soiled and Spartan, the hotel had been for seventeen years (with several hiatuses) his home. He worked there, was photographed and interviewed there, played music in its lobby, and used it as a business address. For the next five years he stayed nowhere longer than a few months, sleeping on the streets more to afford bus fare up to Candor, where he would finally “settle down” in 1972. His madrigal on country life and city life sums it up. He hurried from one to the other because he “needs them both,” having his cake and eating it too. But “going some, in going to and from” exacted a high price:
[I]t was hard to maintain a hotel room, food, copying, plus transportation costs, all at once. So, I couldn’t have a room when I kept going up there: either one or the other. So I got to the point of sleeping on the street.
There he was until The Village Voice printed a “plea” in its “Scenes” column: “On April 1, he was forced to leave his apartment [on West 56th Street]. Since then he has not left his corner between the Warwick Hotel and the MGM building, sleeping upright, attached to his seat. Where are his friends?” Swiftly, “hippies” took him in. Their apartment on West 82nd Street (“Hippie House”) was a maelstrom of arrivals and departures. The drugs and loud rock music were too intrusive for Moondog’s sober work habits, but he still composed a host of madrigals during the months he “crashed” there. After his year with Phil Glass he was again on the streets (in February 1969) until an offer from Ms. Ronnie Keath convinced him to stay on her barge, the S.S. Clyde, docked at Port Richmond, Staten Island, and there he remained until May of 1969 when work on the first Columbia album was beginning. In a life as bizarre as his, one of the lighter intermissions was this three months when Moondog, in costume, commuted to Manhattan on the Staten Island Ferry and thence north, via subway, to 54th and 6th. How many sets of eyes fixed this voyager? What legends did his fellow passengers concoct? To some, this would be an odyssey. To Moondog, it was going to work.
Moondog worked everywhere he settled—when he was lucky, in the long lulls of his rustications up north. He was through the 1950s mostly an occasional visitor, however, and his experiences with the curious noisemakers and the vandals had soured him on the place somewhat. Blind and alone, he could not exploit the possibilities in separation from his “father and mother,” among the sounds he had incorporated so successfully into his early short pieces. During the 1960s Candor attracted him more and more strongly. From 1961 until 1974 he worked to make a home that was a respite from the city. His spread evolved into a permanent home by 1972.
Moondog did not get back to Candor to begin a permanent structure until 1961. His first effort, a little log cabin, the inevitable intruders all but leveled. “Most every time I returned to my shack it would be broken into.…I could have spared myself a lot of worry if I had left nothing…without a lock on the door, thinking: nothing to steal, nothing stolen.” Faced with starting over each time he went back, Moondog rose to the challenge by going one step further, with a new refinement each time.
The original shack was made of huge logs, many weighing several hundred pounds, dragged out of the woods nearby by tying them with ropes and then securing the ties to a leather band around his forehead. The work was so grueling that he could only do it in good weather and at night, to the astonishment of local friends. However difficult the pull, his sense of hearing was so acute that he knew someone was approaching, and he always stopped to offer a hearty greeting.
But it was for several years merely a primitive retreat from the city, shelter against the elements, barely a cut above his Jersey pine box. Gradually he improved it. First, to the awe of the utility, he requested a telephone (to stay in touch with his New York “office”). The installer found what amounted to a raised cave, with a nest of snakes living over the roof, unknown to the nocturnal and blind resident. He got his phone.
Beside his lintel he constructed a stone pyramidal altar to Thor. As he noted in a later interview:
Yes. Yes, I do believe in the Norse gods.…The way I go about worshipping the Norse gods is very much like a Moslem who would worship Allah: he can do it in a desert or anywhere, it doesn’t have to be in a mosque. If you want to think up when you think of the deity you raise up your head, you just salute the invisible; it can happen any time; if you feel like communicating with something beyond humanity, you just do it.
Only at Candor did he build a permanent altar. Despite (or because of) what he had to overcome, there was a certain magic in the place for him. Willa Percival, who had traveled by his side to photograph him at his work, described him “building an addition to his cabin where he wintered—howling wind down the mountain, lighting a fire on top of the monument he erected, and with heavy clothes on inside the cabin by a wood fire—his only heat.” Moondog liked to cook on this open fire: the first pit was near “Moondog rock” under “Moondog tree.” Eventually he acquired a potbelly stove which he cooked inside of, reportedly with great success. After the fire started, he would rest a coffeepot or a large soup can on a ledge above the open flame and fish out the victuals with his hands, sometimes enduring nasty burns. His stews became famous (fresh meat and vegetables only), his strong coffee (brewed by boiling water in a can with the beans) a necessity everywhere he went. His spirit of adventure never flagged. One Thanksgiving, for himself and Bobby Ayers, a young boy “up the road” who remained Moondog’s friend and companion through 1974, he roasted a large turkey, with stuffing and vegetables.
Bucky Moon, from “over the hill,” became Moondog’s closest Candor friend, and stayed so until Moondog finally left for Europe. Bucky, a farmer, was a great help. Along with Bob Dutton, another neighbor, he helped Moondog finance and construct his first permanent building in 1962, a 16-by-8 tarpaper shack that later became the bedroom of the larger house that evolved in the Seventies. There was a lone window opposite. In one of the two full corners was a built-in bunk bed and a table, and in the other was his stove. For Moondog this was opulence. Yet the journey (eight hours by bus to Owego, eight miles uphill to the place) and the life there were not without peril. One winter he almost died when he trekked up in a blizzard (cabs being unavailable) and missed the final turn. He got hopelessly lost in huge snow drifts, but Bucky Moon rescued him. Another winter Bucky found him nearly dead with pneumonia in his cabin after he had been too weak to start a fire. This time he was taken in by his good neighbor and nursed back to health by Bucky’s mother, an octogenarian whose energy amazed the bed-ridden Viking. Another time a car hit him on the eight-mile strip of Route 96 north from Owego, leaving him “lame for a month.” This “bad show” of June 6, 1969 lingered as a cautionary example, working some reverse magic. He wrote one of his most opulent and optimistic madrigals (Book I, 3) the day after the accident. “What’s the most exciting thing about life?” it asks, and answers: “Love.”
Some of his fondest Indian memories, no longer ambiguous and unresolved, colored his “stamping ground.” He hunted (with an arrow tied by string to the bow) and fished. But when he built, “Thor’s hammer” drove the nails. Friends helped, rewarded with good music and the stuff of memorable anecdotes.
After the new place was finished, Moondog went up more often to work. In a 1970 article in the Rochester Democrat, when he had become more famous and started to attract regional interest, he showed his visitor around what had evolved over ten years into a modest retreat:
On a little wooden table near the bed is an old skillet, a fork lies in the middle of the pan, left over from Moondog’s last meal, whenever it was. A few empty and a few unopened cans are stacked and piled up together behind the frying pan.
At the front edge of the table a one-foot square space has been cleared away and it’s here that he sits and writes.… For Moondog, that one square foot is about it for work space because that’s all there is in the shack.
We can actually try to “see” him write his music here, and try to ascertain why the physical constraints he endured made him create the way he did. Because he was forced by his blindness and his living conditions to work in small spaces with small cards, whether it was in a room in Manhattan or on the streets or up in Candor, over the years he had come to realize his music in a new way: he “saw” it vertically, rather than horizontally. Instead of moving across large sheets of staffed paper, he worked through from one card to another and forged a method whereby little statements could, by repetition with variations, be expanded into bigger, grander visions. Minisyms could become maxisyms. A round or a canon or a madrigal could become an integral part of a far more ambitious undertaking, like Around the World of Sound or The Art of the Canon or The Creation: one square foot was all he needed to create a sound saga made up of canons or an epic poem written in rhymed couplets.
So Moondog’s “spreading out” is relative, to say the least. He was certainly more comfortable here and now than when he worked on his lap in the middle of a city sidewalk: it was his own space, at last. Of course, things could be better:
Tending the stove is all right, but it’s awfully time-consuming when it’s really cold and I can’t concentrate on my composing. An electric heater would be nice.
But things had been much worse.
So Moondog faced the last year of the decade in which “the man with the face of Christ” (an image he had come to abhor so intensely that he began to look like Thor) dissolved into the Nordic apostle to New York. He was about to become a mysterious sort of media happening. Moondog’s “quieter” 1960s, the Aristo, Candor, and the rest, gave way to a strenuous burst of publicity. What he did in these nine years, though, shaped the grander visions of the rest of his life. To many, for whatever reasons (respect, nostalgia, whimsy, incredulousness, …) and regardless of whatever else he did, he will always be the Viking of Sixth Avenue.