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Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} Moondog The Viking of 6th Avenue The Authorized Biography by Robert Scotto Moondog The Viking of 6th Avenue: The Authorized Biography by Robert Scotto. Alternate sub-title: The Viking of Sixth Avenue. Robert M. Scotto. English Dept. Baruch College 17 Lexington Avenue New York, N.Y. 10010. office: 212 387 1803 home: 212 414 5793 78 Bank Street Apt. 20 New York, NY 10014. Preface Acknowledgements/Photographs Introduction (see "Proposal") Roots (1916-1943) Chapter One (1916-1929) : Archdeacon Prettyman´s Animated Doll 1-65. An account of Louis Hardin´s childhood prior to his blindness; the various places he lived, his earliest proclivities and adventures; the family life that explains so many later developments will be explored. The accident causing his blindness; Louis´s coping with his handicap; his discovery of his life-long vocation of music; the dissolution of his family, his schooling, his first marriage, his growing independence, his decision to go to New York. Louis´s first decade in New York; his association with the New York Philharmonic; his pen-name, Moondog, in 1947; his cross-country trip; his earliest successes, his earliest music and records, his life-style and growing reputation; his second marriage. His first albums, some on prestigious labels; the birth of his daughter; his court case with Alan Freed and WINS; the evolution of "the man with the face of Christ"; his ideas and opinions; his New Jersey and New York retreats; his separation. The emergence of Moondog as a striking New York personality of the sixties; the evolution of his dress, image, work and reputation. The year of his Columbia album, with the attendant publicity and excitement. The second Columbia album and its aftermath; his last cross-country tour; his final years in America at Candor prior to his trip to Germany. His first year in Germany on the streets; after 1975, with Ilona Goebel, the foundation of Managarm (Moondog Management) Musikverlag; his latest albums and publications (The Creation, Thor the Nordoom and The Overtone Tree, among others); his reception and reputation in Europe, his many accomplishments; his death on Sept. 8, 1999 in Munster. 2) texts of Moondog, including Thor, his Perpetual Calendar, "Around the World of Sound", sections from The Overtone Tree. It is time for the biography of Moondog. He has just died at the age of eighty-three in Germany after producing more elaborate and, possibly, more important music than at any other time in his career. His life has not only been interesting, but also instructive, in many ways as much a cautionary tale as an adventure. Most remember him as the Viking of Sixth Avenue during the sixties, a true eccentric in a city famous for every imaginable form of anti-hero and bohemian: his broadsides against government, the monetary system and established religions - coupled with his unconventional modes of dress in juxtaposition to his serious devotion to music - brought him both fame and notoriety. He appeared often in the media and was scrutinized from a variety of viewpoints: he was, in short, a sort of celebrity against the grain at a time when an anti-establishment stance had great appeal. Moondog was, however, and had been from the start, a rebel whose roots were not nearly as shallow and ephemeral as some made them out to be, a man who had a religious devotion to, of all things, the past. Although he evolved despite his wishes into a cult figure, and welcomed, despite his deeper powers of discernment, his moments in the spotlight, his unpopular beliefs about western civilization and his commitment to traditional tonal music, on the surface an unwieldly dichotomy, were the twin halves of a world-view he had built up steadily and laboriously for decades, and which he refused to abandon when they ceased to be fashionable. Although he will be recollected as the proto-hippie (or beatnik, if memories extend far enough into his past) or remembered nostalgically as the consummate blind street-poet-musician of his day, the supreme loner articulating an extreme position, Moondog was quite serious about what stood behind him and what, as a consequence, he figured forth. Fortunately, many know him as a serious musician, primarily and an interesting versifier whose work has evolved steadily through the apparent chaos of his life. Even after all of the images have been shed, and labels like "primitive" and "naif" properly understood, his music may last. He was, in short, more than a symbol for a generation on the road or in revolt: he was a man of talent and discipline committed to living the life of the artist in order to make music when he might just as easily have lapsed into bitterness or, worse, self-pity. A biography of a life so variegated, filled with so many changes and contradictions, puzzles and paradoxes, must account for the growth of the mind as well as the adventures of the body. Music, therefore, is embedded in the text quite simply because Moondog´s life breathes music. His search for his roots and his identity, which consumed so much of his time, he did for the most part alone as he lived so much of his life by himself. The alienation he experienced in childhood evoked responses that frustrated his orientation to the world; blindness made him more vulnerable and wary. Only a strong man, with a strong sense of self-survival and an even stronger commitment to his ideals, could have made it through unscathed, let alone remain sanguine, productive and optimistic. The facts speak for themselves. Born in Marysville, Kansas, on May 26, 1916, Louis Hardin lived in a variety of places through his early years. His father, Louis Thomas Hardin, an episcopal minister, changed churches frequently. His marriage to Norma Alves, who was her son´s schoolteacher in the formative years, deteriorated as his relationship with his superiors became strained, especially after they published a book entitled Archdeacon Prettyman in Politics; in order to support his family, he was forced to become from time to time a merchant, a farmer, a rancher, a postman and an insurance salesman. Young Louis´s earliest memories were formed in Plymouth, Wisconsin; he grew to his teens in Wyoming; at the age of sixteen, in Hurley, Missouri, he was blinded for life when he tinkered with an object he had found, not realizing it was a dynamite cap. It exploded in his face on July 4, 1932. Through the years of his painful adjustment his parents separated, and finally divorced in 1937. His older sister, Ruth, would read to him patiently day after day for years after the accident. His first encounters with philosophy, science and myth helped to bury his beliefs in his parents´ Christianity, at least those which had lingered beyond his bitterness and spleen. One book in particular, The First Violin, inspired him to choose music for his lifework. Up to that point he had been interested in percussion instruments, playing Indian rhythms out west or drums for the high school band, but from that time forward he became positively obsessed with the desire to become a composer. His father had been not only a man of the cloth but a well-rounded, well-educated and talented eccentric in his own right, whose library contained a great number of books about warfare and a host of recordings of march music. Louis, in the midst of his private battles, recaptured with success the visions and the sounds of his youth. He learned braille in St. Louis and became proficient in several instruments at the Iowa School for the Blind. He lived with his father until 1943, after the now ex-preacher remarried and settled down at a farm in Arkansas. During 1943 he studied in Memphis, Tennessee and secretly married a socially prominent older woman. Although the relationship lasted but a few months, she secured a patron for him. In November of 1943, with a monthly allowance in hand, he took his first great leap in the dark and headed off alone and without prospects or connections for New York City. These who knew Louis as the Viking probably had little idea how long it took for him to arrive at his name, his dress and his credentials. His "conversion" to his Nordic beliefs, for instance, was not merely a pose nor simply a reaction against the faith he had surrendered at childhood´s end, but an expression of concepts won through harsh experience and patient research. At first he did some modeling and formed a relationship with a dance instructor. He was "adopted" by members of the New York Philharmonic and its conductors, Arturo Toscanini and Artur Rodzinski, both of whom treated him as a serious musician, but finally fell out of favor because of his dress, which was becoming more "bizarre" because he was fashioning it himself. He also began to create his own poetry, music and instruments. He became "Moondog" in 1947, when he officially identified himself with the memory of his childhood pet who would howl at the moon: the cry captured on one of his first 78 RPM records, "Moondog Symphony", was used by Alan Freed, the hottest disc jockey in New York, as his program logo until he lost his case in court in 1955. Soon Moondog settled into a mode of life which he sustained, despite frustrations and partial successes, until 1972, for just under three decades: musician, poet, seer, "beggar", living on the streets of Manhattan. With the exception of a country-wide tour in 1948 - when he left to go live with the Indians and promote his earliest music, with little success - and the times he spent at his two rural retreats in New Jersey and New York State, he became a permanent New Yorker.

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