70 THE NEWYORKER, DECEMBER 16, 2019
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.
I
n the early fifties, Moondog met
Tony Schwartz, an archivist and a
sound designer who had a radio pro-
gram, titled “Adventures in Sound,” on
WNYC. Schwartz made amateur field
recordings of street life around Hell’s
Kitchen—he was agoraphobic, and pre-
ferred not to wander very far from his
apartment—using a lightweight cus-
tom 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 ac-
quired by the Library of Con-
gress. (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 com-
mercial for Lyndon Johnson that
invoked the prospect of nuclear
war and included a grave cau-
tion from the candidate: “We must ei-
ther 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 expres-
sions 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 unpub-
lished 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 no-
tation 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 col-
lection 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 se-
ries of song sketches and exper-
iments, with titles such as “Un-
titled Percussion Solo in Traffic #2.”
Those snippets—which were re-
corded 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 pre-
ferred 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 hold-
ing his Oo. Each uses the sound of the
city to orient and steady himself, find-
ing peace in its tumult.
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