In the 1960s, a blind man in a handmade cloak and horned Viking helmet stood on Sixth Avenue in New York selling sheet music and poetry. Passersby saw an eccentric. Charlie Parker, Benny Goodman, Leonard Bernstein, and Arturo Toscanini saw a serious composer. This episode tells the story of Louis Thomas Hardin, known as Moondog, from an Arapaho Sun Dance in Wyoming to a tomb in Münster, Germany.

The conversation covers the explosion that blinded him at 16, the sister who read him science, philosophy, and the novel that made him want to compose, and the way he built entire orchestral works in his head using linear Braille notation. It explains his 'snake time' polyrhythms, his homemade trimba, his use of city noise, his 1954 lawsuit against DJ Alan Freed, the real reason behind the Viking costume, and how Ilona Sommer transcribed hundreds of ...