How Moondog Captured the Sounds of New York

Synchronizing his work to traffic and footsteps, the musician and composer translated the clamor of street life into song.
Moondog
A serious musician and a familiar figure, Moondog stood on a street corner selling political broadsides and compositions.Illustration by Mike McQuade; photograph by Bob Willoughby / Getty

Anyone who lives in New York for a while will eventually begin to mourn, in some vague way, the idea of an Old New York. The feeling is less one of nostalgia than of having just missed something remarkable. For some people, Old New York is subway tokens and street crime; for others, it’s merely Greenwich Village without a salad franchise on every corner. In the nineteen-fifties and sixties, the musician and composer Moondog stood on the corner of Sixth Avenue and Fifty-fourth Street, wearing an elaborate Viking costume, selling his political broadsides and musical compositions, eating chocolate bars, and chugging grapefruit juice out of a jug fashioned from an animal horn. Moondog is a potent symbol of Old New York, both as a collective fantasy and as a real and absent place. He translated the clamor of street life into song.

This month, “Moondog: On the Streets of New York,” a compilation of his early music, including several previously unavailable pieces, will be co-released by Mississippi Records and Lucia Records. When Moondog died, in 1999, an obituary in the Times suggested that he was “as taciturn and unchanging a landmark of the midtown Manhattan streetscape as the George M. Cohan statue in Duffy Square.” Most New Yorkers who passed him on Sixth Avenue—by nearly all accounts, he stood there regardless of the weather—were unaware that his musical scores, usually for wind or percussion, were celebrated in Europe and admired by composers such as Philip Glass and Steve Reich.

Moondog was born Louis T. Hardin, Jr., in Marysville, Kansas, in 1916. He released more than a dozen albums in his lifetime, some on major labels, and often designed his own instruments, such as the trimba, an assemblage of triangular drums and a cymbal, and the Oo, a small harplike device made with piano string. His work was informed by the classical canon, various eras of American jazz, and the Native American music he heard as a child. Moondog’s best pieces are minimalist and percussive, and incite a kind of woozy, placating trance. In 1967, Big Brother and the Holding Company, Janis Joplin’s band, put out a cover of “All Is Loneliness,” a dazed but imploring hymn. (“All is loneliness before me,” Moondog repeats on his version, his voice sweet and layered, like a children’s chorus.) In 2002, a sample of “Lament 1 (Bird’s Lament)”—which he released in 1969, fourteen years after the death of Charlie Parker—was featured in a commercial for the Lincoln Navigator.

In 1932, when Moondog was sixteen, he lost his eyesight in an accident involving a dynamite cap. His family eventually relocated to Batesville, Arkansas, where his father was the rector of an Episcopal church. He studied composition at a school for the blind, and learned how to read music in Braille. In 1943, he took a bus to New York. For five dollars a week he rented a room with a skylight on West Fifty-sixth Street, where he kept a sleeping bag, a portable organ, and a small electric stove. He worked as a model for figure-drawing classes, befriended the conductor Artur Rodzinski (Moondog would stand outside the stage door at Carnegie Hall, waiting for the musicians to arrive), and began attending rehearsals of the New York Philharmonic. In 1947, he took the name Moondog, in homage to a three-legged farm dog back home that howled relentlessly at the moon. By 1949, he was playing homemade drums on Sixth Avenue and busking for change.

In 1949 and 1950, Moondog released a series of 78-r.p.m. records on S.M.C. Pro-Arte, the record label of the Spanish Music Center, a studio on Sixth Avenue run by Gabriel and Inez Oller. The Ollers let Moondog stay in their basement and use their studio at night. Moondog was mostly left alone by the New York Police Department, though he was charged once, in 1950, for “being disorderly while soliciting alms.” There were stretches when he was homeless, but he usually found a safe place to sleep. (For a while, he rented a broken-down panel truck parked near the Polo Grounds.) Once, when Philip Glass read in the Village Voice that Moondog was looking for a place to stay, he offered his own home, on Ninth Avenue and Twenty-third Street. Moondog spent a year living with Glass and his wife. He was not a particularly courteous roommate, and Glass recalled having to retrieve empty doughnut boxes and chicken bones from his room with some regularity. In the preface to “Moondog: The Viking of 6th Avenue,” a biography by Robert Scotto, Glass writes about Moondog’s racism, sexism, and anti-Semitism—he seemed disappointed that most of his own friends were black or Jewish, Glass notes, and he believed that his blindness might protect him from any sexual-assault prosecution. Glass describes him as “a difficult guy,” though it is clear that he loved him. He and his cohort often turned to Moondog for inspiration. “We took his work very seriously and understood and appreciated it much more than what we were exposed to at Juilliard,” he writes.

In the early fifties, Moondog met Tony Schwartz, an archivist and a sound designer who had a radio program, titled “Adventures in Sound,” on WNYC. Schwartz made amateur field recordings of street life around Hell’s Kitchen—he was agoraphobic, and preferred not to wander very far from his apartment—using a lightweight custom tape recorder and microphone. Like the photographers Bruce Gilden, Diane Arbus, and Weegee, Schwartz was eager to document the spiritual and cultural magnitude of New York, and to preserve some small measure of its wildness.

Between 1953 and 1962, Schwartz made dozens of recordings of Moondog, who was usually stationed just a few blocks away. Shortly before Schwartz died, in 2008, his archives were acquired by the Library of Congress. (Schwartz, who was hired by Johnson & Johnson to create ads for baby powder, also made political spots. He was part of the team behind “Daisy,” a commercial for Lyndon Johnson that invoked the prospect of nuclear war and included a grave caution from the candidate: “We must either love each other, or we must die.”) The curator and writer Jeremy Rossen, who runs Lucia Records, believes that Schwartz was driven by an “excitement and enthusiasm for vernacular expressions of folk culture, the sounds and stories that are rooted in the traditions of different ethnic groups, be it Puerto Rican, Jewish, Italian. He wanted the everyday-life things.” Rossen told me, “He hated sound recordings made in a studio, because he thought that robbed the material of any life.”

Rossen transcribed three unpublished interviews Schwartz did with Moondog, from 1953, for the liner notes to “Moondog: On the Streets of New York.” In them, Moondog expresses a deep love of the city. “I object to the noise and bustle and hustle and all that, but when I go away, I miss it terribly and I have to come back,” he says. “There is no city in the world like it.” He also tells Schwartz that he’s comfortable being thought of as a beggar. The radio broadcaster Walter Winchell “calls me a mendicant, but that’s a euphonious way of putting it,” Moondog says. “I don’t feel self-conscious or apologetic about begging for a living. I’m blind and I do my composing and writing while I’m standing here.” He often had a Braille slate and a stylus tucked under his robes, so that he could make a notation at any moment.

New York is a place that respects mavericks and romanticizes hardship, and Moondog was never a particularly obscure figure; in fact, he was covered seriously by the Times as early as 1953, when a reporter called his work “unique, individualistic music, neither primitive nor extremely sophisticated, yet a little of both.” Though Moondog could write an elegant melody, I tend to prefer his more esoteric material. The new collection features an unreleased version of “Why Spend the Dark Night with You?” and the first full recording of his “Nocturne Suite,” performed with members of London’s Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. It also includes “On the Streets of New York,” from a seven-inch EP that Moondog released in 1953, on Mars Records, and a series of song sketches and experiments, with titles such as “Untitled Percussion Solo in Traffic #2.”

Those snippets—which were recorded on the street by Schwartz, and are generally around a minute long—sound like stolen transmissions, secret missives from another era. There’s something urgent, almost holy, about hearing Moondog perform in his preferred context, synchronizing his work to the sound of traffic, footsteps, the door of the Warwick Deli clattering shut. In my richest fantasies of Old New York, I often imagine Schwartz and Moondog huddled together on the corner, Schwartz with his bespoke reel-to-reel machine, Moondog holding his Oo. Each uses the sound of the city to orient and steady himself, finding peace in its tumult. ♦