Moondog’s incredible life was not only interesting, but also instructive, in many ways as much a cautionary tale as an adventure. Many remember him as the Viking of Sixth Avenue during the Sixties, a true eccentric in a city famous for every imaginable form of anti-hero and bohemian: his broadsides against government, the monetary system and established religions—coupled with his unconventional modes of dress in juxtaposition to his serious devotion to music—brought him both fame and notoriety. He appeared often in the media and was scrutinized from a variety of viewpoints: he was, in short, a sort of celebrity against the grain at a time when an anti-establishment stance had great appeal.
Moondog was, however, and had been from the start, a rebel whose roots were not nearly as shallow and ephemeral as some made them out to be, a man who had a religious devotion to, of all things, the past. Although he evolved, despite his wishes into a cult figure, and welcomed, despite his deeper powers of discernment, his moments in the spotlight, his unpopular beliefs about Western civilization and his commitment to traditional tonal music, on the surface an unwieldy dichotomy, were the twin halves of a world-view he had built up steadily and laboriously for decades, and which he refused to abandon when they ceased to be fashionable. Although he will be recollected as the proto-hippie (or beatnik, if memories extend that far into the past) or remembered nostalgically as the consummate blind street-poet-musician of his day, the supreme loner articulating an extreme position, Moondog was quite serious about what stood behind him and what, as a consequence, he figured forth. Fortunately, many know him as a serious musician, primarily, and an interesting versifier whose work has evolved steadily through the apparent chaos of his life. Even after all of the images have been shed, and labels like “primitive” and “naïf” properly understood, his music may last. He was, in short, more than a symbol for a generation on the road or in revolt: he was a man of talent and discipline committed to living the life of the artist in order to make music when he might as easily have lapsed into bitterness or, worse, self-pity.
A biography of a life so variegated, filled with so many changes and contradictions, puzzles and paradoxes, must account for the growth of the mind as well as the adventures of the body. Music, therefore, is embedded in the text quite simply because Moondog’s life breathes music. His search for his roots and his identity, which consumed so much of his time, he pursued for the most part alone, as he lived so much of life by himself. The alienation he experienced in childhood evoked responses that frustrated his orientation to the world; blindness made him more vulnerable and wary. Only a strong man, with a strong sense of self-survival and an even stronger commitment to his ideals, could have made it through unscathed, let alone remain sanguine, productive, optimistic. Out of the chaos of a life with challenges, hardships and disappointments, he found refuge not only in rebelling against the enemies of traditions he revered, but he also found comfort in perfecting certain conventions through the creation of new cultural artifacts.
Those who knew Louis as the Viking probably have little idea how long it took for him to arrive at his name, his dress and his credentials. His “conversion” to Nordic dogma and ritual, for instance, was not merely a pose nor simply a reaction against the faith he had surrendered at childhood’s end, but an expression of concepts won through harsh experience and patient, if erratic, research. Louis Hardin was not only searching through his bizarre childhood and paralyzing blindness for a sense of who he was: he was trying to find a continuum within which his hard-won ideas could comfortably fit. He became “Moondog” in 1947, at about the time he also began to compose music seriously, soon settling into a mode of life in New York City which he sustained, despite frustrations and partial successes, until 1972, for just under three decades: musician, poet, seer, and “beggar” (according to police records), living on the streets of Manhattan. His self-reliance, in light of his handicap, became legendary.
The patterns of his evolving dress are an interesting measure of his evolving philosophy of history. By the early Sixties he had become one of the most photographed street figures of his time, but his importance as a composer, and, to a lesser degree, as a performer, mattered more to him. He had to teach himself everything he later transformed, and in so doing created his own idioms. Philip Glass, an early friend and younger contemporary, said on the liner notes to one of his CDs (Violin Concertos of John Adams and Philip Glass, Telarc 80494, 1999), when asked about those who influenced him the most: “You know there is a maverick tradition in American music that is very strong. It’s in Ives, Ruggles, Cage, Partch, Moondog, all those weird guys. That’s my tradition.”
The unusual, unclassifiable, strange and haunting originality in the best of Moondog’s compositions certainly entitles him to serious consideration as an original American composer. Clothes do not make the whole man, though they do create an image which may become, for better or worse, indelible.
Moondog spent the final twenty-five years of his life in Germany, perfecting, if not completing, his life work. (For those into numerology, which Moondog certainly was—see his discussions in The Overtone Tree—it is a tantalizing but otherwise no more than titillating datum that his life falls into three roughly co-equal periods: his childhood and young adulthood, 1916–1943; his New York period, 1943–1974; his German period, 1974–1999.) Thus that singular man in the street and in the doorway, that bohemian Nordic rebel and antiquary, composed several huge tone poems celebrating Norse myth; that apparently improvisational jazzman (he almost never performed or conducted save with a minutely detailed score) settled down at peace with an ancient world-view, writing by admission in the tonal, Western tradition; that broadside balladeer took his ironies, satires and prejudices and honed them into a unified, imagistic—if bizarre—story of civilization and its discontents. He became in the eyes of many, especially in the Europe he chose to be a part of, something like an archetypical blind seer, respected with caution, poetically celebrating permanence through the fluctuations of the moment. Despite physical disabilities in his final decade, the creative spark remained as vibrant as ever, as did his devotion to loveliness and form in the face of the grosser realities of the quotidian. His idealism, though less naïve, was still as intense, and his diligence, patience and labor were if anything ratcheted up a notch. Like so many original people, Moondog seemed to grow younger with age.
THE BIOGRAPHY DELINEATES the stages of Louis Hardin’s growth into Moondog, presents his ideas as he formulated them and interprets them in terms of the logic of his life; it also explores, in some detail where it is unavoidable (the Alan Freed case, the first Columbia album), the people and places, the masks and the faces. His development as a composer will be traced historically. Moondog himself participated from the start and cooperated until his death: this is an authorized biography. All of the passages not specifically cited in the text come from hours of personal interviews and hundreds of pages of private correspondence, some of it on deposit at the Oral History of American Music Collection at Yale University. His verse autobiography, which is frequently cited, is, like all of his other published materials, available from Managarm (managarm.com). Opinions and assessments are either those of Moondog or the author, unless otherwise clearly indicated.
I tried not to write a bloated, glacially-paced story, so I deliberately chose to omit scores of anecdotes, program notes and reminiscences, especially those which largely duplicated details already presented. (Moondog, for instance, in practically every one of his interviews, and there are many, said essentially the same thing about his working habits, theories of composition and philosophy of life.) I want to think I have written an annotated chronology with critical commentary, and, thanks to my editors, Shane Davis and Adam Parfrey, who pruned my academic tendency toward the prolix, the book has a lot less redundancy and fewer lists.
I beg the indulgence and forgiveness of my many committed correspondents over the years whose generous contributions of materials are, therefore, unacknowledged. Many people afforded me invaluable help, of course, in some cases beyond my expectations. Ilona Sommer (Goebel) and Frank Goebel, first and foremost; Paul Jordan, who was involved in this project from inception to production, and who carefully and meticulously and kindly pointed out errors and recommended alternatives; Thomas Heinrich, Stefan Lakatos, and all of the other trustees of Moondog’s legacy; June and Lisa, his two daughters; Hammond Guthrie (3rdpage.com) and moondogscorner.de for publishing parts of the biography on the web; the administration at Baruch College, CUNY, and Dean Chase, for their generous support, both financial and academic; the contributors who are cited specifically in the text and the scores more who gave anonymously.
To them, to Lu, my family (especially BJB), my colleagues and students at Baruch College, my friends—all of whom did more for me than they can ever realize, and I can ever adequately acknowledge: thank you.
— Robert Scotto, New York, revised, Spring 2013