Billboard : 10/07/1957
Score of 63
Moondog, an eccentric to most, a poet who versifies in sound to others, who plays by night in the Broadway area on an assemblage of drums, is presented on this recording verbally (in dialog with Bebe Barron) rhythmically (on his drums, often in company of drummer Sam Urano) and melodically (on organ and piano). Tho set is likely to attract the curious and exotically inclined, it is just a little too obscure for the average record buyer.
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Audio Magazine
Charles A. Robertson : December, 1957
The third installment of the Moondog story finds him busy with further experiments in rhythm on instruments of his own design. Some are carried out against a background of the roar of Broadway in big impressions of Birdland and the Palladium. Drummer Sam Ulano helps describe the jazz emporium in a 4/4 time dog trot. Moving a block North to detail Afro-Cuban rhythms, he is aided by Suzuko on the Lukh, a log suspended from a tripod and hit with two rubber mallets held in the right hand. Ray Malone joins him for a soft-shoe dance in 5/4 and 7/4 time.
Other of his inventions are the Oo and Tuji, and he plays his last set of square drums made before shifting to the triangular-shaped Trimba. A piano improvisation, organ solo and his howling wolf theme are also engraved for posterity. Moondog likes to record when and where the mood strikes, so the quality of the fourteen tracks is variable. Most apropos is the cover design by Reid Miles, with its artful use of calligraphy by Andy Warhol’s mother. That she also signs all his drawings makes her signature better known to Madison Avenue than Broadway, but it is a match for the “secret music” of Moondog.
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Oakland Tribune (Oakland, CA)
Russ Wilson : 08/04/1957
Sixteen further examples of the “roving imagination” of Louis Hardin, who was born in Kansas and reared among Wyoming’s Indians. His individual brand of music, mostly played on home-made instruments, became something of a cult among the New York jazzmen in the early 50s. The LP includes an eight-minute verse form monologue to rhythmic background which I thought sophomoric.
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Liner Notes (from the front cover):
Moondog is a poet who versifies in sound, a diarist overcome by love, curiosity and amusement by everything that reaches his ears, all of which he transposes into a symphony of himself. It may be the roar of the streets; it may be the casual chatter in a room or, best of all, it will be that secret music that seeps through imagination and memory. These experiences, so dull to the dull but so alive to him, he orchestrates into a record of those enchanting conversations everyone can hold with himself would he only listen for a bemused moment. They make up the script of that unique tragi-comedy, the story of anyone’s life. Picking up our ears would be so easy, yet it is seldom done. But when Moondog compels us to do it, we are entranced and delivered willingly into new worlds of meaning.