New York Times: Moondog and Roky Erickson
Our dear publishing pals at Process just released two new books that tell the strange stories of two very different music acts of the late 1960s who had profound impact on much experimental, punk, garage, weird America, and psychedelic music that's come since. Robert Scott's biography of Moondog recounts the life of the eccentric Viking-garbed Louis Thomas Hardin whose avant-jazz, modern classical, and psych-folk has been performed and lauded by the likes of Janis Joplin, Julie Andrews, Elvis Costello, and his onetime roommate, Philip Glass. The other new Process book, Paul Drummond's Eye Mind, tells the sordid 60s story of Roky Erickson And The 13th Floor Eleevators whose pioneering psychedelic garage rock was heavily dosed with their own cosmic agenda. Both books were separately featured in yesterday's New York Times.
From the New York Times feature on Moondog:
From the New York Times blurb on Eye Mind:
From the New York Times feature on Moondog:
A tall blind man with long hair and beard, wearing a handmade Viking helmet and primitive cloak, he regularly stationed himself at Sixth Avenue and 54th Street, which cops and cabbies knew as Moondog’s Corner. Dispensing his poetry, politics, sheet music and recordings (some on boutique labels, some on majors), he was sought out over the years by beats, hippies and foreign tourists, but also by the media and celebrities, from Walter Winchell and “Today” to Marlon Brando, Muhammad Ali and Martin Scorsese.
“Everybody who was anybody met Moondog,” Robert Scotto, author of “Moondog,” a biography published this month by Process Books, said recently. “And everybody had his own Moondog.”
Even after he moved to Germany in 1974, where he remained until his death in 1999 at 83, he was remembered in New York as an emblematic street character, though not as a serious classical composer. As the British music critic Kenneth Ansell observed in the mid-’90s, while jazz greats like Count Basie and Charlie Parker admired Moondog’s idiosyncratic forays into their world, “the classical orthodoxy has not rushed to embrace him.”
Link to Moondog profile, Link to buy Moondog: The Viking of 6th Avenue
From the New York Times blurb on Eye Mind:
Mr. Drummond has talked to sisters and brothers and cousins, and cops who busted the band. He shows you how psychedelic drugs advanced on Austin — first a rumor off in the distance, then flooding the city in 1965. He shows you the band’s controlling philosopher king, Tommy Hall (the guy with the electric jug), and exactly what books he read. At a certain point the story becomes too depressing for words, flattening out into madness with daily LSD ministrations, trial transcripts, religious visitations. But it’s valuable cultural history...
Link to article with 13th Floor Elevators blurb, Link to buy Eye Mind: The Saga of Roky Erickson and the 13th Floor Elevators, The Pioneers of Psychedelic Sound
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There's also a Moondog music festival this weekend in NYC:
http://www.moondogrising.com
Moondog's music is beautiful, and while it's not standard anything and therefore is weird by most standards, I think a lot of people would be moved by it if they got a chance to hear it. In New York you can find a few of his albums at the New York Public Library, including Moondog, his 1971 orchestral jazz album, and the joyous 1997 album Sax Pax for a Sax. People who like the places where kinds of music bleed together should check them out.
Isn't Jeff Bridges thinking about playing Moondog in the bio-pic?
Moondog is amazing and has created some of the most arrestingly beautiful music to tape!
http://www.seeqpod.com/music/?plid=b96e797901
Moondog made crazy and awesome music. I think one of his songs was used in a Lincoln Navigator commercial.
Living in Austin, Roky Erickson is a legend, but I didn't realize how well known he was everywhere at first. While at a record shop in São Paulo, Brazil, the owner (and a friend of Os Mutantes), when we told him where we were from, said, "Oh, do you know about Roky Erickson?" Maybe it was just because he was a psychedelic music fan of the same generation, but it was cool to hear someone in another country associated with legends in their own right ask about a local legend.
Man. Moondog. My mom worked in Rockefeller Center, in the old Exxon Building, from about 1971 onwards, and when I would go to meet her for lunch sometimes I would see Moondog sitting on his short wall. He never seemed to do anything at the time; just sit there. And then one day he was gone. That happens all the time in NYC (I have no idea what happened to Mosaic Man, who adorned streetlamp bases all over the East Village in the late '80s). I was only in my early teens at the time, so I had no idea about Moondog's rich musical life--he was just part of the city landscape.
Fewer and fewer such characters these days, and NYC is much the poorer for it.