“Moondog” Has New Outfit

May 14, 1965 - Moondog, the blind, bearded musician who makes a career out of being the most unusual sight on 6th Avenue, has changed his clothes.

His new outfit is a velvet cloak and hood of scarlet, lined with pale green satin, and two new pieces of thonged cowhide that partly cover his feet. He abandoned his old costume, made up of surplus Army blankets, to “get away from the G.I. connotations.”

But he still wears his familiar horned Viking helmet and carries an iron spear and a hollow moose’s hoof for alms.

And he still stands stolidly for about eight hours a day on a midtown corner, awing passersby who have never known the mild and sensitive man beneath the costume he made himself.

Although Moondog is a serious musician with several recordings to his credit and nightclub and network TV appearances in his past, he makes most of his living begging.

“It’s not degrading,” he said today, sitting on an unmade bed in the shabby midtown hotel where he has lived for 15 years. “Homer begged, and so did Jesus Christ. It was only the Calvinists who ordained that no man shall eat who does not work.”

Moondog, whose real name is Louis Thomas Hardin, traces his theology from his Viking heritage, which also explains his clothes. Although he is the son of an Episcopal minister, he said his gods are “the gods of the Viking pantheon, like Thor and Odin.”

Now 48 years old, Moondog came to New York in 1943 and adopted his nickname out of devotion to a former pet who bayed at the moon. He quickly established himself as a landmark in Times Square, where he stood on the traffic island and played the “oo” and the “uni,” percussion instruments of his own design.

In the last decade, he moved to the area of 6th Ave. and 54th St., where he stands selling copies of his verse, written in rhymed heptameter couplets, like the following: “Christianity’s ‘uncompromising war on error or evil’ would appear to me to be an evil error.”

He stopped the street performances because of the crowds they drew. When there are no policemen around, he talks easily.

“People usually ask why I am dressed this way,” Moondog says, “and I tell them it’s my way of saying ‘no.’

“I am an observer or life, a nonparticipant who takes no sides. I am in the regimented society but not of it.”

“My music is me, and me no one can change,” he added. One person who apparently tried is Moondog’s estranged wife, who “lives somewhere” with their 12-year-old daughter. “The trouble with women,” he explains, “is that they try to chip away at you, to make you a conventional stereotype, and I have no desire to be conventional.”

Support this project at patreon.com/realtime1960s