MOONDOG
RAREMATERIAL
If you walked by the corner of 54th Street and Sixth Avenue in New York City in the summer of 1967, the chances are you would have caught sight of the most famous of all of the city’s eccentrics. He dressed in a Viking costume: headdress with horns, elaborate cape, spear. He was articulate and
friendly. He’d discuss the Vietnam war, the local art scene, the grand designs of history. He would try to sell passers-by some couplets from a mammoth work-inprogress called Thor the Nordoom. He was blind, but refused to talk about his condition as a handicap. Perhaps most surprising of all
was that this eerie and unusual figure was a classical composer in the tonal western tradition who followed all the rules of counterpoint and harmony. This man was Moondog. A serious artist, but one who approached his abilities lightly and satirically, he saw his reputation grow in strange ways
until his death in Germany in 1999. Born 83 years before in Marysville, Kansas, Louis Hardin was the son of Louis Thomas Hardin, an episcopal minister who changed parishes often. At the age of 16, in Hurley, Missouri, he was blinded for life when he was messing around with a dynamite cap,
unaware of what it was, and it exploded in his face. Louis’s older sister, Ruth, read to him every day for years following the accident, and his encounters with philosophy, science and myth helped to bury whatever was left in him of his parents’ Christianity. For more than two decades, he was a musician, poet, seer,
“beggar”, living on the streets of Manhattan. With the exception of the first of two cross-country tours in 1948 - when he left the city to live with Native Americans out west and promote his earliest music - and the brief times he spent at his two rural retreats in New Jersey and upstate New York, he
was a committed New Yorker. His self-reliance became legendary. He was, as he put it, looking for an identity, both in his lifestyle and in his music: he studied jazz, attuned himself to the city’s street sounds and became a master of percussion improvisation. He sold his wares (sheet music, 78rpm records,
booklets, broadsides) on the streets and began to acquire friends and a reputation. In 1969 his life changed dramatically, thanks to the release of Moondog by Columbia Records in its Masterworks series, backed up by an extensive promotional campaign. That year was Moondog’s annus
mirabilis. From being a cult figure and local treasure, he became a celebrity of a different order: an internationally famous composer of classical music who was also a unique and easily recognisable personality. For two years, from 1972 to 1974, Moondog moved to Candor, New York, for an
interlude of peaceful work before making another great leap. That leap came when he fulfilled a long-delayed dream by travelling to Europe and, in so doing, returning to the site of the ancient culture that he had kept alive for so long in his clothes and his music. Except for one brief, triumphal
return tour in 1989, he never returned to the US. He lived in Germany, and though it was a long way from New York City, he felt at home. But, like everything else in his life, it wasn’t easy: for the first year or so he lived on the streets in several German cities, not having the airfare to return to America.
Moondog’s residence in Europe was, in every sense of the word, a triumph: he performed frequently in Austria, France, Britain and Germany. Domestication, he said, only improved his work. Nearly everything had changed - except the creative spark, which was as bright as it had ever been.
Moondog - Rare Material 01. 02. 03. 04. 05. 06. 07. 08. 09. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20.
Guggisberglied (2:00) Friska (6:28) Magic Ring (2:20) LogrĂźndr XV in B Major (1:25) Gygg (8:03) LogrĂźndr XVIi in E Major (3:53) Log in G Major (1:54) All Is Loneliness (1:19) Dog Trot (2:28) Frog Bog (2:13) Surf Session (7:02) Trees Against the Sky (0:52) Single Foot (2:49) Be a Hobo (0:53) Rabbit Hop (2:25) Why Spent the Dark Night with You (1:04) Moondog Symphony 1 (Timberwolf) (1:55) Lullaby (1:23) Avenue of the Americas (1:32) Moondog Monologue (8:26)
Mastered By [Additional Mastering] - Arnd Esser Performer - London Brass, London Saxophonic, Moondog-Big Band Photography - Alexander Wegmann, Norbert Nowitsch Producer - John Harle All Pieces Written-By - Louis Hardin Collection - 2006 Roof Music