Cosmic Hoboes from Sixth Avenue to Jalan Malioboro

Cosmic Hoboes from Sixth Avenue to Jalan Malioboro
Haduhi Szukis

I came to Moondog the way you come to anything truly good & cracked & holy in this world, sideways, half-drunk, clutching at cigarette smoke, wandering alleys of forgotten music, and hearing a whisper on the wind: listen. Tom Waits – smoky old dog of a poet growling from a busted jukebox in a dive bar in East Hollywood – he was the first one who handed me a clue: there was a man, man, there was a man called Moondog who stood on Sixth Avenue dressed like Odin & beat rhythms nobody else knew. And so I came to Moondog as a cosmic hobo – the way you should – not as a scholar or critic or collector of neat little facts, but as another tramp in the grand American tradition of genius bums & saints cast out by the dull machinery of dollars & deals, a man who chose (or was chosen) to stand alone, precarious & homeless & magnificent, tapping the pulse of something older than any conservatory could ever hold.

Moondog was there on Sixth Avenue, eyes full of stars, cloak full of rain, hammering rhythms on trashcans & invented drums, selling his sheet music to passersby who never really knew what they were buying. To them, he was another downtown oddball. But to those of us who know – aesthetic winos staggering through history’s forgotten alleyways – he was the One. I think of Moondog and I see a lineage – these beautiful, broken wanderers of music’s underbelly – and I see Tom Waits too, just a few decades later, in that smoky Los Angeles bar at the tail-end of the seventies. At first he was a beat poet in a railroad diner, chasing freedom like a train whistle in the night. Then he settled into the sad comedy of it all, circling the same sad block, checking in & out of the same run-down hotel, his gravel voice more lost & more cliché with every year, but still trying to sing it true.

And yet, somewhere between Sixth Avenue & Yogyakarta – where gamelan gongs sing under the hot tropical stars – you can hear them meet. The cosmic hoboes speak the same language. The rhythmic beauty Moondog heard in the streets of Manhattan echoes the hypnotic cycles of gamelan, the deep vibrating bronze of Javanese gongs, the slow, celestial ticking of time that doesn’t care about Wall Street or record labels or rent money. Moondog dreamed in counterpoint, in bells & breath & pulse. He was closer to the gamelan masters of Java than to the businessmen of Tin Pan Alley. Standing there on the curb in his Viking helmet & robes, he already looked like he belonged on Jalan Malioboro at dusk, amidst the scent of clove cigarettes & fried tempeh, musicians sitting cross-legged & swaying, striking their gongs & metallophones in patterns as old as shadow & moonlight.

Here’s to Moondog, the cosmic hobo who stitched together the forgotten alleys of the West with the cosmic highways of the East, who taught us how to listen to the street as if it were a symphony, how to tap the pulse of the world like a gamelan player keeps time with his heart. He reminds us genius doesn’t live in the penthouses. It’s out there in the rain, in the dust, in the alley, in the rhythm of your shoes on the pavement, in the deep, low gong of the cosmos calling you home. And if you listen – really listen – you can still hear him keeping time, all the way from Sixth Avenue to Jogja. But then even the cosmic hoboes feel it, that itch, that restless sorrow of the same sidewalk, same block, same smoke curling the same ceiling night after night. By the early seventies Moondog must have felt it too. Sixth Avenue started closing in on him – same cars, same indifferent shoes passing by, same shivering winter wind – and the Viking of the sidewalks decides: I need to leave.

But here’s the thing, escape ain’t always about moving your body. You don’t necessarily need to put your feet on a plane or your thumb out on a highway. You can, if you know the trick, slide out of the dull groove of your own mind without ever leaving the street corner. You can hop trains through sound, climb out through rhythm, crawl sideways through melody and come out the other end someplace bright & foreign. That’s what he did. He started looking for new lands in music, not maps. You can hear him turning his ear toward the cracked & beautiful fringe of sound; the way Harry Partch rode the rails of microtonality & vagrant graffiti, sleeping in boxcars with his eyes full of new scales & impossible tunings. Or how Moondog himself would hammer out his hypnotic rhythms on strange, self-built contraptions there on the low side of the road, with the cats & the trash & the rain, where no symphony dared tread.

And somewhere along the line – because the road is long & the music never dies – Moondog’s song meets up with Stefan Lakatos. Another cosmic brother on the path. You can picture him out there under the same stars, carrying Moondog’s rhythms like a torch through the dark alleys of the world, working tirelessly, stubbornly, beautifully to keep the flame alive even after the man himself left this planet for some higher dimension. Lakatos didn’t just preserve it like some dusty museum relic. No, no, he kept it moving, kept it mutating & shimmering, let it keep developing the way all real music has to, like a river that never stops flowing but keeps changing its shape, carrying strange new driftwood & golden bottles downstream. And so here – here! – is where we find it. Moondog’s beat sidling up to the bamboo gamelan, two beautiful street-orchestras from opposite ends of the earth recognizing each other like long-lost kin. The hypnotic pulse of his trimbas – that wild Moondog invention of wood & skin & mystery – dancing alongside the bamboo keys & bronze gongs of Java.

The sound becomes a meeting-place, a crossroads under the moon, where Stefan Lakatos joins with Iwan Gunawan’s Kyai Fatahillah ensemble – musicians sitting cross-legged with mallets in hand, tapping out those celestial gamelan cycles while Lakatos beats the trimba with the solemn joy of a hobo keeping time on a moving freight car. And somehow it makes perfect sense. You can close your eyes and hear Sixth Avenue breathing alongside Jalan Malioboro, hear the Viking poet of Manhattan trading rhythms with the bronze spirits of Java, hear the cosmic hoboes of music history clapping their hands & stomping their feet in approval. Because this is what the journey’s all about: not just holding onto what was, but letting it meet what is, letting it drift into new streets, new alleys, new skies, until it becomes something you couldn’t have dreamed up but recognize instantly, like the face of a fellow wanderer in a strange land.

So when you listen to this music – this Moondog music reborn, shimmering now with bamboo & bronze & trimba – listen like a hobo listens to the night train. Hear the way the old songs carry forward, how they refuse to stay put, how they keep finding new ways to move through this cracked & shining world. And in that movement – in that meeting – in that endless beautiful drift, you’ll hear Moondog still there, smiling, keeping time, hammering the low side of the road, carrying us all a little closer to somewhere we’ve never been. He’s raised his journey to a higher dimension – a cosmic dérive. It’s like the Situationists said: you wander the city to get lost – on purpose – and in getting lost you find a way to be alive again. Moondog wandered through music the same way: you don’t always arrive where you thought you were going, but you arrive somewhere better, stranger, and more wonderful than you ever expected. So listen to this music like a hobo listens to the rails. Let it carry you off somewhere – anywhere – out beyond your own map. Maybe you won’t end up where you thought you would. Maybe you’ll end up on some dusty road in Java at sunset, or in the alleys of forgotten America, or just right back where you started but seeing it new. Because that’s the secret: to drift, to listen, to lose yourself and find yourself all at once: to climb onto Moondog’s strange, rattling, beautiful train & let it take you to some place you never even knew was there.