Louis Hardin was born in Kansas in 1916, banged a drum on an Arapaho chief’s lap in Wyoming, and lost his sight in a farming accident in Missouri as a teenager. But the world knew him as Moondog. And the world did, for a time, know him. While mostly forgotten today outside the rarified halls of experimental music festivals, Moondog's genius-in-circus-freak’s-clothing story makes him one of the essential characters of American subculture.

Moondog, who died in Germany in 1999 at the age 83, was the most celebrated of New York street denizens from the late 1940s through 1974. He dressed like a Viking, spouted short-burst poetry in a stentorian voice and cranked out unlikely consonant music on homemade instruments. The Don Drapers of the world saw him on the way to work, perched as he was near 6th Avenue at 53rd Street, near CBS’s building (a fortuitous location, as we'll soon see).

The Beats took him in, later the counter-culture hippies, then the art crowd ferried him overseas. And if you turned on a television for more than 10 minutes during the year 2003, you heard his music remixed for a Lincoln Navigator ad that played nonstop. He collaborated with the young Philip Glass, was promoted by a top rock producer, has been covered by artists as diverse as Janis Joplin and Antony and the Johnsons, and had a booster in Elvis Costello. He's the 20th century’s avant-garde in one strangely cloaked package.

British documentarian (and one-time stand-in for Po on Teletubbies!) Holly Elson is currently filming The Viking of 6th Avenue, a feature-length look at this bizarre and under-appreciated individual. She's got a Kickstarter campaign up until June 26 to help cushion production cost, as well as to gather more testimony from people who interacted with this strange urban wizard during his New York years.

“I was on the BBC website in 2009 and I saw a link of a bearded man in a robe. When I heard the music I thought it sounded strange and great but somehow familiar even though I didn't know where I heard it. Then you read how much music he's produced and all the people he has influenced. I got hooked.”

Given his appearance you might expect a radical, free-form music, but Moondog is no Sun Ra. (Moondog just dressed as a Viking; Sun Ra may have actually thought he visited Saturn.) His work has a basic, almost perfect instrumentation, and is precise and timeless. You've heard it in The Big Lebowski, Pineapple Express, and in a remix by Mr. Scruff. But for decades, people heard it on the streets of New York City.

“Reputedly he had $60 in his pocket when he got off the bus,” Elson explains. “He survived by his wits, selling yearbooks with poetry and music and photographs. He was a fixture. People specifically seek him out and talk to him at lunch. Grey Line buses use his image in an ad saying, ‘You should see the things that aren't in a normal tour.’ It's a phenomenon.”

But even with the radical garb, he wasn't just a gimmicky freak.

“He was blinded at 16, then learned Braille music notation,” Elson says. “He wouldn't compose at a piano, but while standing on the street. He would have a Braille slate with a puncher and punch the notation into the card under his robes. He'd get that transcribed, and they'd read the music back to him, which was made into the scores—a very expensive process. To stand on 6th Avenue and to compose these rich scores is extraordinary—keeping all the voices in your mind.”

In the 1950s he recorded a few albums for the jazz label Prestige, though the instrumental tracks aren't what you may consider classic jazz. They are frequently short rhythmic bursts with percussive color added by Moondog's self-made instruments, like the trimba, a triangular block drum with a cymbal, and the oo, a triangular harp. Sometimes these tunes would be accompanied by clever poems in his accent-resistant, deep voice. He made friends with the Beats, and ended up in one of the high-water-mark events from the end of that era, Conrad Rooks's cult film Chappaqua. Hooks was the heir to the Avon Cosmetics fortune and an early hippie. He traveled the world, went to India, took a lot of drugs and sank a bunch of money into an inscrutable film with the world's hippest cast: William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Ornette Coleman (from where we get the “Chappaqua Suite,” unused in the film) Ravi Shankar, Ed Sanders of the Fugs, and Herve Villechaize plus Robert Frank, as one of the cinematographers. Appearing periodically is Moondog as “The Prophet.” Today, the hamlet of Chappaqua is best known as the permanent address for Bill and Hillary Clinton, just down the block from Martha Stewart—not an LSD/poetry/cinema freakout.

With the late 1960s comes psychedelia and a more militant counter-culture. One of Moondog's songs is covered by Janis Joplin's group, Big Brother and the Holding Company. One of the top music producers of the day is James William Guercio, making huge records for Columbia withBlood Sweat & Tears and Chicago—huge chart sellers that appeased radio as well as political radicals. Guercio, who would also direct the ne plus ultra New Hollywood picture Electra Glide in Blue in 1973, was in and out of the CBS building regularly (CBS was Columbia's parent company), and with carte blanche and ends up bringing Moondog into the studio and record his self-titled 1969 album—Moondog's masterpiece.

It's at this point where a young Philip Glass reads that Moondog needs a new place to stay, so he invites him to move in. For a year in the late 1960s Moondog lives in a building on 9th Avenue and 23rd street. Glass, Moondog and composer Steve Reich play and rehearse together on a weekly basis before he eventually floats to Europe.

In the pre-Internet days, many just figured he died, but he had something of a homecoming at a Brooklyn Academy of Music concert in 1989.

“There were a lot of extraordinary people there, Ginsberg and Reich were there, Bob Weir of the Grateful Dead, and Moondog conducted by banging a drum,” Elson explains, teasing scenes that will be in her forthcoming film.

In addition to his influence on music and poetry, there's his stamp on design. “Right from the 1950s, there's stuff in Jet Magazine,” Elson says. “Bonnie Cashin does some stuff. There's a guy called Mads Dinesen in Berlin who did a collection entirely based on Moondog just last year.”

There's a reason DJs still sample him and he is also increasingly part of the new classical canon. Despite the cultural changes, his extremely catchy, one-of-a-kind sound was a constant. Songs like “New Amsterdam” tap into an underground, hidden history. But Moondog's story is also an urban legend the predates the pervasiveness of of YouTube.

“He has this otherness. He was on the street. He had a relation to people. It was a first association for a lot of people coming to New York from the suburbs. It becomes an amazing mythology, and a lot of that is coming from people telling their stories on Kickstarter,” Elson says. “It nicely ties it back into a direct experience.”

If you want to throw a few bucks in the pot, or just check out the videos and stories, visit The Viking of 6th Avenue’s Kickstarter page.