The Viking of Sixth Avenue

Louis Thomas Hardin lost his sight at sixteen when a dynamite cap exploded in his hands. He moved to New York, stationed himself outside Carnegie Hall with a drum, and within months was advising the conductor of the Cleveland Orchestra on how Brahms should sound.

Then he dressed as a Viking and refused to leave the corner of 54th and Sixth.

He stood there for nearly thirty years. He called himself Moondog, after a childhood dog that howled at the moon. He composed in braille, filling notebooks with orchestral scores that required four simultaneous conductors. When a radio DJ stole his name, he sued and won; Stravinsky called the judge on his behalf. Philip Glass lived with him for a year. Janis Joplin covered his songs. He invented instruments with names like the trimba and the oo and the dragon's teeth. When audiences mocked his compositions, he stopped performing entirely and just stood there, silent, eight hours a day. He made more money silent than playing.

He became, as far as anyone could tell, a geographic feature. Burlington Industries, a Fortune 500 company, used him as a landmark in advertisements: "across the street from Moondog." You could hail a cab anywhere in Manhattan, say "Take me to Moondog," and the driver would know exactly where to go.

In 1974 he moved to Germany. He was fifty-eight. He called it a composer's paradise.