68 THENEWYORKER,DECEMBER16, 2019
THE CRITICS
POP MUSIC
SONGS OF THE STREET
How Moondog captured New York.BYAMANDA PETRUSICHA
nyone 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 to-
kens and street crime; for others, it’s
merely Greenwich Village without a
salad franchise on every corner. In the
nineteen-fifties and sixties, the musi-
cian and composer Moondog stood on
the corner of Sixth Avenue and Fif-
ty-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 pre-
viously unavailable pieces, will be co-re-
leased 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 Av-
enue—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. Har-
din, 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 instru-
ments, such as the trimba, an assem-
blage of triangular drums and a cym-
bal, and the Oo, a small harplike device
made with piano string. His work was
informed by the classical canon, vari-
ous eras of American jazz, and the Na-
tive 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 implor-
ing 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 in-
volving a dynamite cap. His family even-
tually relocated to Batesville, Arkansas,
where his father was the rector of an
Episcopal church. He studied compo-
sition 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-draw-
ing classes, befriended the conductor
Artur Rodzinski (Moondog would
stand outside the stage door at Carn-egie Hall, waiting for the musicians to
arrive), and began attending rehearsals
of the New York Philharmonic. In 1947,
he took the name Moondog, in hom-
age to a three-legged farm dog back
home that howled relentlessly at the
moon. By 1949, he was playing home-
made drums on Sixth Avenue and busk-
ing 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 Span-
ish 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