Upstate Hermit, Manhattan Composer, Blind Viking Poet, He's Moondog

By STEVE KNOWLTON

From Upstate Magazine, February 22. 1970 - reprinted without permission

Holding a spoonful of sugar poised over the coffee cup on the counter, Marcella looked up and said. "Two sugars and a little milk, right?"

Moondog sat in the booth at Lela's Restaurant, exactly 60 steps down North Street in Owego from the cigar store where the New York bus stops. A smile flashed from under his immense beard and he answered, "Yes, that's right." Then, "See, she remembers. That's Marcella. Her mother, Lela, owns this little place."

The waitress brought the coffee over to the straight-backed wooden booth and put it down in front of the massive man looking like a Viking out of an old Kirk Douglas movie.

"I come here a lot," said Moondog. "Particularly in the summertime when there's not this problem with the snow. I sit and talk for hours and sometimes just listen to the old-timers come and go. Fascinating old people. Listen and talk Ñ until it's time to go back."

He felt for the cup and took a sip, stuffing large bunches of beard under his chin out of the way.

His left hand disappeared under his army blanket tunic into a leather pouch and produced a yellow plastic drinking straw with a flexible elbow. Moondog sipped the coffee and explained, "if I had a mustache cup ... but I don't and a straw is easier to carry around."

Officially, Moondog's name is Louis Hardin, born in Maryville, Kansas, in 1916, the son of an Episcopal minister. But under the layers of tattered Viking garb and the shaggy grey beard, Moondog is ageless, placeless, has no history you can connect with calendar or map.

Moondog picked his pen name from the memory of an old dog he once owned back in Missouri. It used to howl at the moon, naturally.

By his own admission, he is a "hustler" Ñ panhandler Ñ in New York on 6th Avenue, usually in the middle Fifties. He peddles his poems and songs at ten cents a mimeographed sheet and uses all he can save up to travel back and forth to his hillside two miles or so from Candor, about 25 miles below Ithaca, eight miles from the bus stop outside the cigar store in Owego.

In 1956, after 13 years in New York, Moondog had $750 at at once and bought 40 acres on a hill a thousand miles from anywhere for what would be called a retreat if he had a good job and any money.

He and a neighbor who lives down the hill half a mile or so put up a one room sod and stone shack, "but somebody, I guess some of the kids before they got to know me, kept taking the sod out from between the stones and it got cold in the winter. And then, the mice could get in."

So a few years later, about 1961, Moondog and another neighbor put up the foot by 16-foot cabin he now has. It's insulated with tarpaper between the 2x4's and heated with a wood stove that takes up about half the room.

A bed is built into one of the short walls and on the other end is a pile of tunics and leather Viking helmets and all the other junk that Moondog has collected since he came east for the last time 27 years ago.

The nearest road to Moondog's place hasn't been plowed- all winter, so there are several feet of snow on it and the best way to get to the cabin is the way Moondog does it Ñ on snowshoes.

When you make it through the drifts and get to the door, Moondog greets you warmly Ñ much warmer than the inside of the cabin Ñ and offers to take down the piece of cheesecloth over the single window so you can see your way around.

On a little wooden table near the bed is an old skillet. A fork lies in the middle of the pan, left over from Moondog's last meal, whenever it was. A few empty and a few unopened cans are stacked and piled up together behind the frying pan.

At the front edge of the table a one foot square space has been cleared away and it's here that he sits and writes his poetry, mostly coupletsÑiambic septameterÑand composes his music.

For Moondog, that one square foot is about it for work space because that's all there is in the shack, and the inside of the 8 by 16 foot shack is about it for living space. When he's in New York, he sleeps in doorways, sidewalks, anyplace that's not occupied and is out of the elements.

''But it's better now," he says, "Last year a friend who owns a leather shop gave me a key and after the people leave at night, I can go in there and sleep on the floor.

"I do some composing there too, but it's hard. After being out all day and then going inside where it's so nice and warm, I get awfully sleepy," he says, a little embarrassed.

For years he has sat there knocking out lyrics and music which is said to sound like early Donovan. Or rather, "since I was first you should say Donovan sounds like me," says Moondog with a chuckle down under his beard.

But his real love is classical music. A melody line comes in on him "like an elusive butterfly and you have to write it down then or it's almost impossible to retrieve it without its sounding strained."

The melody "is the easy part," he says. "Then comes the real nitty-gritty work of composing - "the hours and weeks of writing out the parts to the piece, for the percussions, woodwinds, brass, strings, because Moondog thinks real music( should be written for full orchestras, not two guitars, an electric bass and drums.

After the inspiration comes, Moondog jots down the melody line and works out the parts, using some thing like a thumbtack to poke little holes into cards, forming the Braille pattern that looks to the uninitiated like someone walked all over them in golf shoes.

Then comes the work of the reader and the copier - Moondog reads the notes out to a friend, the fingers of his rough lumberjack's hands moving amazingly deftly along the cards. The copier takes it all down in standard musical notationÑthe language of the sighted.