Most tourists who come to New York City for the first time seek out sights like the Empire State Building, the Statue of Liberty and Central Park. But between the early 60s and 1972, visitors with a more adventurous nature had a different agenda. “Certain people flying into the city at that time would jump into a cab and tell the driver – ‘take me to Moondog!’” said Robert Scotto, author of a book about the eccentric musician and composer who went by that luminous name. “The driver would take them straight to 6th Avenue and 53rd Street because everyone knew that’s where he was.”
Certainly, no one who passed by that busy stretch of the city during that era could have missed him. Outfitted like a fantasy Viking, complete with a double-horned headdress, a doomy black tunic, an eight-foot spear and a long white beard, Moondog had an imposing presence to say the least. It only magnified the intensity of his appearance that he was blind, a fact he refused to hide behind dark glasses. From his reliable perch, Moondog would pull from his pockets reams of poetry, sheet music, 78rpm recordings and broadsides he had written to sell to curious passersby. Some people thought he was a freak or a vagrant. (He was, in fact, homeless during several short stretches of time.) Others saw him as the ultimate counter-cultural figure, while some major musicians viewed him as a visionary, including the jazz greats Benny Goodman and Charlie Parker and classical artists from Arturo Toscanini to Leonard Bernstein. Janis Joplin covered his existential composition All Is Loneliness, on her first album with Big Brother and the Holding Company, and pop acts from T-Rex to Prefab Sprout referenced him in their lyrics. Moondog was written up in many local and national papers and, in 1969 and 1971, he had two albums on Columbia Records which, at the time, was headquartered on the same block he haunted.
