Louis Hardin; New York Musical ‘Moondog’

Dressed in his standard garb of homemade robe, sandals, spear, scraggly beard and a Viking helmet with horns, Louis “Moondog” Hardin was a familiar sight to New Yorkers in the 1960s.

Hardin, a tall man who was blind and a bit gaunt, would take his place at the corner of 54th Street and Avenue of the Americas and play his homemade zither, sing in his distinctly atonal manner or beat a drum. At other times, he might recite some poetry. His street theater generally drew a crowd, and the crowd was his living in those days. The corner became “Moondog Corner.”

But beneath his unquestionably eccentric exterior, Hardin was a talented composer. In his hours off the street he wrote larger works--often based upon a form of the canon (or round)--and was welcomed as a guest to rehearsals of the New York Philharmonic.

Hardin’s curious life came to an end in a hospital in Munster, Germany, on Sept. 8. The cause of death was heart failure. He was 83.

“He was the greatest street person that New York has ever produced,” said Robert Scotto, a professor of English at Baruch College of the City University of New York, who is working on a book on Hardin’s life.

Born in Kansas, the son of an Episcopal minister, Hardin grew up in Wyoming. He lost his eyesight when he was 16 after a dynamite cap that he found on the railroad tracks blew up in his face. He studied music at the Iowa School for the Blind for a year before moving to New York City in 1943 to continue his musical education, which at the time was rudimentary.

Hardin started as a percussionist on drums, many of which he built himself. Through the 1950s, he tried Latin music and jazz, recorded some albums on 78 rpm and worked in a number of bands, including a Latin jazz ensemble improbably called “Moondog and the Honking Geese.”

He became something of a celebrity after Walter Winchell mentioned him in a newspaper column. Diane Arbus photographed him and would occasionally buy him lunch at a cafeteria near Carnegie Hall.

When Alan Freed, the pioneering rock ‘n’ roll disc jockey, moved his radio program to New York from Cleveland, he used one of Hardin’s 78-rpm recordings, “Moondog Symphony,” as his theme music and called his program “The Moondog Show.”

According to Scotto, Hardin sued over the use of the name and Freed lost. So the disc jockey changed the name of his program to “Alan Freed’s Rock ‘n’ Roll Show.” Freed is generally thought of as the originator of the term “rock ‘n’ roll.”

In the early ‘60s, Hardin’s Viking persona took over. He performed with the legendary jazz bassist Charles Mingus at the Whitney Museum and later did a concert with Tiny Tim and Lenny Bruce. In 1967, he showed up in the avant-garde film “Chappaqua” with William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg and Ravi Shankar, who also wrote the score.

One day, a band called Big Brother and the Holding Company, which featured a singer named Janis Joplin, showed up at Moondog Corner, and Hardin taught them the song “All Is Loneliness.” They stood on the corner singing the song before a rapt audience, and then recorded it on their debut album in 1968.

She “really murdered it,” Hardin later said of Joplin.

Two albums of Hardin’s atonal jazz and madrigals were released in 1969 and 1971 by Columbia Records and drew good reviews.

In 1989, Hardin played his drum with top avant-garde composers Philip Glass and Steve Reich at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

In an interview two years ago with Times jazz writer Don Heckman to mark the release of Hardin’s first American album in more than 25 years, the musician recalled the New York Philharmonic experience fondly.

“It was fantastic,” he told Heckman. “Attending those rehearsals was part of my basic music education. I learned a lot about orchestration sitting there, listening to the way they took the music apart and put it back together.”

Hardin, a genial, soft-spoken and articulate individual, told Heckman the story of how he came up with the name “Moondog.”

“It’s a pen name, of course,” said Hardin. “In 1947, I was sitting in my garret in New York, remembering the pet dog I use to have. We used to howl at the moon a lot together, so I put those names together.

“I thought I was being original, but later I found out that it’s an Eskimo term too. There’s also a Moondog in Norse sagas that refers to the tail of a comet as well as to a giant. So it’s a very old name. There’s even a whiskey in Kentucky called Moondog.”

Hardin, of German and English descent, moved to Recklinghausen in what was then West Germany, in 1974 after traveling there for a radio concert. He lived on the streets for a year and was finally adopted by a German family who loved his work. A daughter in the family, Ilona Goebel, became his working partner. She became his copier and editor. He composed, recorded and occasionally performed in concerts throughout Europe.

At least 10 albums of his compositions have been released in Europe since 1977, and his collected works now include 300 canons in the form of madrigals, 100 keyboard works and a self-published four-volume “Art of the Canon.”

Hardin’s goal from the beginning was to compose music in the contrapuntal style he loved. To that end, he was successful and influenced other inventive composers and musicians. One of them was pop star Elvis Costello.

“When I first heard Moondog on the radio in the ‘60s,” he told Heckman, “I thought his music was a product of those days. Little did I know that it was just one of the occasions in which the world has discovered Moondog. Recently, I was talking with my son Matt . . . who said, ‘Do you know this album?’ and out of his bag produced a Moondog album from the ‘50s. I have no doubt that in 40 years or more, a father and a son somewhere will be having the same conversation about a Moondog record.”