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Louis (Moondog) Hardin, 83,
Musician, Dies
By GLENN COLLINS
The gaunt, blind musician known as Moondog, who was celebrated among
New Yorkers for two decades as a mysterious and extravagantly
garbed street performer but who went on to win acclaim in Europe
as an avant-garde composer, conducting orchestras before royalty,
died Wednesday in a hospital in Munster, Germany. He was 83. The cause was heart failure, said a friend, Ilona Sommer.
Day in and day out, the man who was originally named Louis T. Hardin was
as taciturn and unchanging a landmark of the midtown Manhattan streetscape as the George M. Cohan statue in Duffy Square. From the late
1940s until the early 1970s, Hardin stood at attention like a sentinel on
Avenue of the Americas around 54th Street.
No matter the weather, he invariably dressed in a homemade robe, sandals,
a flowing cape and a horned Viking helmet, the tangible expression
of what he referred to as his "Nordic philosophy." At his side he
clutched a long spear of his own manufacture.
Most of the passers-by who dismissed him as "the Viking of Sixth Avenue,"
offering him contributions and buying copies of his music and poetry,
were unaware that he had recorded his music on the CBS, Prestige,
Epic, Angel and Mars labels. Hardin's jazz-accented compositions,
generally scored for small wind and percussion ensembles, often
achieved a flowing, tonal symphonic style.
One of his songs, "All Is Loneliness," became a hit when recorded by Janis
Joplin. He wrote music for radio and television commercials, and one
of his compositions was used on the soundtrack for the 1972 movie "Drive,
He Said," with Jack Nicholson. Along the
way, Hardin wrote Bohemian broadsides against government regimentation,
the world monetary system and organized religion. He was celebrated
by Beat Generation poets and late-1960s flower children. His passionate
unconventionality drew praise from some critics and led to
interviews on many television shows, including both "Today" and "The Tonight
Show." Although many New Yorkers assumed
that he had died after he vanished from
his customary post in 1974, Hardin had actually been invited to perform
his music in West Germany and decided to stay.
"He led an extraordinary life for a blind man who came to New York with
no contacts and a month's rent, and who lived on the streets of New York for 30 years," said Dr. Robert Scotto, a professor of English at Baruch
College of the City University of New York. "Without question, he
was the most famous street person of his time, a hero to a generation of hippies and flower children." Scotto has just completed a biography
of Hardin, "Moondog: The Viking of Sixth Avenue," which has not been
published. After his performances in
Hamburg, Hardin again earned a living as a street performer, this time in Europe. He soon met Mrs. Sommer, whose father
insisted on taking him into their home and supported Hardin in his later
years. He composed in Braille, and she transcribed his music and acted as his publisher and business manager. According to Scotto, they had
an intimate working relationship, but neither of them ever described it as
more than that. In his later years,
Hardin produced at least five albums in Europe, including
a "sound saga" titled "The Creation," and regularly performed his
compositions with chamber and symphony orchestras before glittering audiences
in Paris, Stockholm and cities in Germany. Harding adopted the Moondog name in 1947, identifying himself, he said,
with a former pet who howled at the moon.
He was born in Maryville, Kan., on May 26, 1916, the son of an Episcopal
minister. He was blinded at the age of 16 when a dynamite blasting
cap exploded in his hands. A year later, after studying stringed instruments,
organ and harmony at the Iowa School for the Blind, he became
obsessed with becoming a composer. When he
arrived in Manhattan in 1943, he established an outpost outside the
stage entrance of Carnegie Hall and met some of the New York Philharmonic's
musicians. They arranged a meeting with their conductor, Artur Rodzinski. Rodzinski was taken with Hardin and not only extended an
open invitation to attend the orchestra's rehearsals, but also promised he
would conduct an orchestral work if Hardin ever wrote one.
But because he was blind, he needed help in writing out the score. Hardin
could not afford such assistance, so he made his living as a street musician,
training himself to be a master of percussion improvisation. He was unable to compose a symphony until after Rodzinski left the Philharmonic
in 1947. In the mid-1950s, one of his 78-rpm recordings, "Moondog Symphony," was
regularly played by Alan Freed, the pioneering rock-and-roll disk jockey.
But it wasn't until the 1960s that Hardin had regular access to an orchestra
and was able to make his first longer album for CBS, "Moondog."
In 1989, Hardin, acclaimed in Europe, was
invited back to the United States to
conduct the Brooklyn Philharmonic Chamber Orchestra. Allan Kozinn, a critic for The New York Times, described Hardin's conducting
style as unusual, explaining that he was "uncomfortable with being
an authority figure, so he sits to the side of the orchestra and provides
the beat on a bass drum or tympani." Scotto said that Hardin told him that he married in 1943 and subsequently divorced. A second marriage, to Sazuko Whiteing, a musician, in the 1950s, ended in divorce in the early 1960s, Scotto
said. Scotto and Mrs. Sommer said they thought Hardin was survived by a younger
brother, Creighton Hardin, of Kansas City; a daughter, June Hardin,
and another daughter, whose name and whereabouts they did not
know.
In the end, Hardin finally yielded to Mrs. Sommer's coaxing and gave up his
Viking outfits. He had refused to alter his dress code even when, as an
aspiring composer, it provoked his eviction from the Philharmonic rehearsals.
"But I still love horned helmets and swords and
spears," he said in a 1989 interview.
"I like to feel that I'm loyal to my past. I wouldn't want to be
on the street anymore. But you know, that led to a lot of things." |
