Moondog: The Art of Concealing Art

In a canon, there’s no such thing as a lead role, only supporting ones. No line stands alone. It’s like a puzzle, or a quilt – or a family, maybe: Each part is as essential to the whole as the others.

So to understand Moondog’s music, you have to understand small things. You might even have to appreciate them.

His pieces tend to be short and simple. Some of them sound like nursery rhymes. Some sound like big band jazz squashed down to pocket size. Sometimes he calls in the whole orchestra; other times it’s just him, banging away on a homemade drum.

My single favorite piece of his is about three minutes long. “Theme and Variations,” it’s called. Theme and variations, in as much time as you spend brushing your teeth in the morning.

Because Moondog’s music doesn’t linger. It makes its points and then – with a twirl of its cape – it goes. It makes sense, actually, that he wasn’t just a composer, but a street performer. Composers, with their implied pedigree and high, sacred aspirations, take their time; street performers have to win you over before the toothpaste hits the sink.

Oh, and none of them sound particularly modern. You know what I mean by modern: Dissonant, challenging, unfamiliar. In the context of late 20th century classical composition, his music is “experimental” only insofar as being experimentally familiar. If you listen to it, you will not be asking yourself if you are listening to music, or making jokes about cats having their tails pulled.

It’s old-fashioned that way. Or unfashionable. Both work. “I’m strictly tonal,” he said in a 1998 interview. “So I feel kind of lonely.”

His earlier recordings, especially Moondog and More Moondog, aren’t just polished products of his art, but documents of his life. He rambles about the music before – and while – playing it. He duets with an underemployed tapdancer he met hanging around Times Square. He accompanies his wife, who sings a Japanese lullaby to their daughter, who cries. On “Street Scene,” a cop blows his whistle, and the music disappears into the noise of traffic.

One, on More Moondog, is called “Rehearsal of Violetta’s Barefoot Dance.” Moondog says something about candy. About “no, that’s my candy.” Then a dog barks: His cocker spaniel, Ninon. So he argues with Ninon for a little while. Then he offers his guests some potato chips. Maybe they want some, maybe not. It’s unclear. A woman says something about how they really should get back to it, really should start. “From the beginning,” she says sternly, and abruptly, the music – the “art” – begins.

It wasn’t true, what Moondog said about being the only person making tonal music after the 1950s. Steve Reich was doing it. Philip Glass, too. But Glass’s music is so grand by comparison, and so modern, a ballet of automated things humming fantastically into the future.

Moondog didn’t seem to care about the future. He liked J.S. Bach and Charlie Parker. As a child, he sat on the lap of Chief Yellow Calf at an Arapaho sun dance and banged on the tom-tom. “They have this drum beat,” he said. “This heartbeat. Bom bom bom.” That’s when he realized it: the Indians: They invented swing. This thing we once thought was so new wasn’t so new after all.

Listen to his music in New York City and you will see it. The skyscrapers: they’re totem poles built to modern gods, the syncopated honks of car horns a kind of jazz. Look at the maniacs on the floor of the stock exchange: They’re warriors, whooping. If Philip Glass’s music reminded us we were always on the precipice of the future, Moondog reminded us we were never far from the past.

Or, as the old-timey chorus of Sax Pax for a Sax’s “New Amsterdam” puts it: “New Amsterdam was her name / Before she was New York.”

“Surf Session,” “Frog Bog,” “Be a Hobo,” “Good For Goodie”: These aren’t titles of serious pieces of classical composition, but of Merrie Melodies and Looney Tunes. In Moondog’s music, instruments are blown out to colorful, cartoonish proportions: Drums thump, saxophones zig-zag, flutes flutter and careen. You don’t subject music like this to surgical harmonic analysis, you subject it to whistling.

So to understand the enigmatic composer Moondog – a mostly self-taught blind guy from Kansas who played homemade instruments and wandered the streets in Viking costume – it might help to not think of him as being all that enigmatic after all.

But this idea of “understanding” – who cares? Understanding something doesn’t make it any more or less rich, or any more or less real, and just because we feel like we can understand something easily doesn’t make it more or less worth our time.

Take Moondog’s music: Its simplicity is what makes it radical, its familiarity what makes it ambitious. It is comforting music that dares you to ask for anything more. “The art of concealing art” – in his own words, that was his goal.

Something I hate admitting about Moondog is that he seemed to want to be more – or at least different – than he was. “The records I made in New York are actually extracurricular,” he said in a 1971 radio interview. “I frankly did it to get some little recognition, which I wasn’t able to get with my symphonic writing.”

It reminded me of the French author Gustave Flaubert, who became famous in his lifetime for writing Madame Bovary but died feeling like he was never recognized for his best work – the work that expressed what he imagined to be the greatest potential of his soul.

It’s possible, then, that all the music Moondog left behind was the product of a sad compromise with the world that he hoped would someday break in his favor. That someday, he would throw away these miniatures, hang up his Viking helmet and join the big boys in the concert hall.

“Playing in the doorways did get me that little bit of recognition,” he said in 1971, “which will help me establish myself as a symphonic writer.”

I wish I could’ve been there, in the booth, at the radio station. “No, Moondog, it won’t,” I would’ve told him. “It didn’t.”

Maybe that’s okay, though, that Moondog wanted his life to go some other way. In some ways, it fits. In the end, he left us no grand statement, no defining achievement, just these sketches, these tussles with his cocker spaniel; moments where he had a real-live slicked-up orchestra following his every move and moments where he was just out on the street, murmuring to whoever passed him by.

Teachers and parents tell you to think big. Don’t do it. Think small. Think haiku. Think snowglobe. Think the pearl in the oyster and make the pearl the world. Your walk to the grocery store could be as epic as the hills and all the wars fought on them. Those dogs, in the park, chasing all those sticks: They’re part of the canon, too.

In the end your life means very little. What’s nice is that you feel like it means so much. So write that symphony. Keep it short. Truth has no shape or size. They call it New York now, but who knows what they’ll call it after we go and the last of those left to remember us go too.