Moondog: Vikings, Dynamite, and the Distortion of Space and Time

The blind Viking from Kansas influenced Tom Waits, Frank Zappa, Laurie Anderson and Steve Reich, and his studio experiments also blazed a trail for hip hop and punk.

Did you ever sit in your bedroom as a child and become so engrossed in your playthings that in a state of sugar rush you gathered every wind-up toy you owned, lined them up, wound them tight, and then unleashed them unto your narrow world?Remember the cacophonous free-for-all? The clanging of monkey cymbals, the cartoonish boing of the Jack-in-the-Box, the industrial whirring of your favourite race car; listening to Moondog is a similar experience. It really is a sentimental joy.

Born in Kansas as Louis Thomas Hardin in 1916, Moondog was a musician, composer, poet, street performer, occasional actor, and inventor of some particularly bizarre musical instruments. As if growing up in Kansas wasn’t bland enough, Moondog became blind at the age of 16, the result of an errant dynamite explosion on some kid’s farm.

Moondog was born a genius. By the age of 5, he had already built his first drum kit, mostly out of cardboard boxes, teaching himself various sound manipulation techniques. Muffling, deadening, and lining each drum inner with aluminium foil provided a sharper, more intense cracking effect, a signature sound that would permeate his music for years to come.

Moondog continued to play drums throughout his childhood and well into high school, often performing at popular socials, before driving the majority of the audience away with his unconventional, avant-garde, and abrasive style of delivery. After he left school, he traveled across America, enrolling in several music schools for the blind, where he trained his ear for composition by learning many instruments. Minus a sense of sight, Moondog was able to hone his hearing, picking up subtle nuances beneath the music to the amazement of his fellow musicians.

By the early 1940s, Moondog had migrated to the burgeoning musical hub of New York City, where he befriended some true dynamos of the scene; Benny Goodman, Leonard Bernstein, Charlie Parker and Arturo Toscanini, to name a few. But, unlike his famous contemporaries who had forged illustrious careers, Moondog, despite his prodigious talents, followed a different path. Resplendent in his trademark viking costume, Moondog took root on New York City’s 52nd Street nightclub strip, where he set upon a three-decade-long career as an improvisational street performer.

After a while, disgruntled with the passing crowd’s mockery of his music and appearance, Moondog stopped performing his compositions, preferring to leave his instruments at home and stand in concrete silence. Ironically, he made more money from curious stickybeaks by standing stone silent than playing his compositions.

Ultimately, Moondog made a small patch of Manhattan his own, the corner of 53rd and 6th; anyone looking for him from the 1950s to the early 1970s knew exactly where to find him. Playing less music publicly, he began to improvise poetry, an art form that New York office workers appreciated. Hundreds would spend their lunch breaks standing in the street, circling and listening to the mysterious Viking, soaking in the genius, with many creatives adapting new styles for themselves from his off-kilter hollering.

But Moondog missed playing regular music gigs. So, in 1956, championed by New York Philharmonic Orchestra conductor Artur Rodzinski, he was ushered into the recording studio to record his debut album. Insisting on production and recording autonomy, and usage of his collection of homemade instruments, he set about recording what is now regarded as one of the most important albums of the twentieth century. Rarely has a street performer held so much respect, power, and influence within the music industry, as Moondog did in the late 1950s.

Released on the Prestige label, Moondog is outside the outside of the box. Drawing influence from general street sounds, the album’s opener Caribea kicks off with what would later become a template for late-career Tom Waits — a drunken, minimalist style with muffled toms, played in a snaking, smoky tempo.

Enter the wind-up-toy procession; the cranking of a music box, the winding of a cast-metal model car. Moondog’s moody, claustrophobic piano displays a jazz knowhow within the album’s first five descending notes, but with such an off-the-wall temperament, it evokes images of spreading cobwebs, sepia photographs, and a dishevelled Charlie Chaplin marauding forlornly in the gutter.

Track two, the all too literal Lullaby, begins with a baby crying, reminiscent of David Lynch’s Eraserhead. The strangled bawling leads into the mainframe of the song, in a similar vain to a rollicking bass introducing a hardcore punk blueprint. What follows is a hopelessly minimalist cardboard drum beat accompanied by a plucky string pick, Moondog’s version of the early blues instrument, the Diddley Bow. Enter one of the most angelic, yet increasingly disturbing, harmonised voices ever committed to acetate. Imagine a fat nanny, void of love and sex, lulling a toddler into a deep sleep before strangling it with her own bare hands. Nightmarish, stunning.

In its entirety, Moondog runs for exactly thirty minutes over its fourteen songs. That’s all Moondog needed to stamp his place in American music history. Across the breadth of the album are soundscapes of farm animals, wind-up toys, street noise, playing children, crying babies, and more, all played either above or beneath a wonderful selection of avant-jazz that has influenced a slew of music innovators. Frank Zappa, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Coco Rosie, Philip Glass, Janis Joplin, Steve Reich, Laurie Anderson, Pentangle, and Mr. Scruff all drew inspiration from the bling Viking, owing a portion of their success to the meticulously crafted recordings.

“I’m not gonna die in 4/4 time”
– Moondog

Perhaps the most conventional track is the sweeping, churning Frog Bog. Beginning with a menagerie of frog and cricket swooning, a minimal drum pattern, and a selection of string instruments, Frog Bog lulls the listener into a beauty sleep, twisted by dreams mystic terror.

As you’ve probably figured out, Moondog doesn’t care for convention. Defying any segment of normality, Moondog brings to the studio a sixth musical sense — an innate understanding of frequency and time, intertwined with a love of abstraction. Avoiding the chart-busting 4/4 and 2/4 time signatures, he feels more comfortable swinging in the awkward breeze of the 7/4 of Caribea and the stratospheric 5/4 of Trees Against the Sky. And it’s there, in Trees Against the Sky, where the essence of Moondog is captured. In this 50-second slap of experimentation, he not only preempts Brion Gysin’s cut-up methods of the late 1950s, he takes layering and crossover to a whole new level. Schmaltzy crooning and lush harmonics are cut, reapplied, and looped to satanic proportions, and played over a high-tempo minimalist percussion. Trees Against the Sky is Moondog’s pinnacle; slapstick, anti-social, and dare I say it, D.I.Y. punk.

The remainder of Moondog’s life saw him remain on New York’s streets until the early 1970’s, with a ten year hiatus from recording between 1957 and 1967. In 1973, he departed the United States to take residence in his dreamland, Germany, “The holy land with the holy river.” It was there, in Munster, he stayed until his death in 1999, recording hundreds of compositions, and having each of them transferred to braille at the hands of a young student by the name of Ilona Sommer. Moondog, Viking, wherever you may roam, on behalf of my porous soul, thank you for the sheer joy.