Underrated Outsiders Who Rock

The Outsider Musician is a musician who’s kept locked out of the industry due to eccentricity, mental illness, class, or whatever, and still persists in getting their music to us. A lot of outsider artists are so-bad-they’re-good greats. Just take the naive tunes of The Shaggs or the rock and roll madness of Wesley Willis.

But every once in a while, someone on the fringes emerges as a genuine great. Join us as we look through the five hardest rocking outsider artists in rock music history.

The Man on the Moon

New Yorkers might recognize Moondog from his thirty-two-year stint posted up on 53rd or 54th Street in Viking garb, busking and selling his poetry. He cut a unique figure. Blind. Bearded. In long robes. Many might have written him off as an eccentric homeless guy.

Moondog was born Louis Thomas Hardin, the son of a Kansas Episcopalian minister. He was highly educated in music theory and hung around with New York City greats like Charlie Parker and Leonard Bernstein. Moondog kept an apartment uptown and recorded a ton of strange and exciting music, often using complex arrangements that feature counterpoint and bizarre topics.

You can hear this on his song “Enough About Human Rights” which features a simple hand shaker percussion that fades in and out, several layers of piano, and chanted vocals about different sorts of beings and their rights.

The Townie

The Cleaners from Venus is the project of one Martin Newell, a British man with Asperger’s and Dyspraxia living in Wivenhoe, England (population 7,637). While Newell never had the social skills to excel in the music industry or the desire to leave his beloved Wivenhoe, he has the musical brain of an ’80s indie rock great. After his band members left him in the early 80s, he holed himself up in his small apartment and recorded on a four-track player, using drum machines and household objects for percussion.

The perfect example is his masterpiece Midnight Cleaners, which features the jangle-pop song “Only a Shadow.” Newell can write a fantastic melody, and his guitar playing is up there with that of Johnny Marr. One can imagine that if the song had been recorded better, it would’ve been a hit.

The Slacker​

The American version of Martin Newell is R. Stevie Moore. Moore, the son of an incredibly prolific Nashville country bassist, planted himself in Jersey in 1978 and stayed there through the 70s, 80s, and 90s, pumping out a music career like no other. Though he lived close to New York City during the CBGB explosion, he never made the move, saying, “I’m not a nightlife person. I should have really planted myself on the streets and plugged away, but I’m not a very good salesman, so I never thought of going down and trying to convince people to sign me. It was a struggle. … Through the 80s, my uncle was hoping I’d get a band together, but I had no idea how to do it.” Just like Newell, he had the chops, but not the temperament to join the scene.

Luckily, he had his own set of skills. While working various odd jobs at a Sam Goody store and at WFMU, Moore made home recordings that he mailed out to fans, slowly amassing a small but devoted fanbase who now regard him as the Godfather of DIY.  His 1980 track “Part of the Problem” is a perfect demonstration of his skill in home recording and a rare example of a homemade music video of the era.

The King of Endicott

Gary Wilson has had one of the strangest music careers of all time. In his early twenties, living with his parents in Endicott, New York, he recorded You Think You Really Know Me at home. The album is a strange combination of funk, rock, and music that sounds something like a 70s TV show theme. He pressed and distributed the album himself and performed a live show that made liberal use of fake blood, duct tape, flowers, and milk, often getting the power cut when he was on stage. It surely didn’t help that the lyrics to songs like “Chromium Bitch” walked the line between hilarious and genuinely disturbing. Then, finding little success, Gary retired from performing in 1981.

The story of what comes next sounds like something from a movie.  The budding indie rock movement fell in love with his one-of-a-kind sound and the fact that he did it all himself at home. When breakthrough indie musician Beck shouted him out, his album gained a wider fanbase, but that didn’t change the fact that no one knew who he was or had seen him for years​

Gary eventually turned up working in a porn theatre in San Diego. He was still playing music: a weekly keyboard gig for a lounge act. After finding out he was a legend, he dusted off his skills and went back to recording music in 2002, barely missing a step in sound, now making use of contemporary tactics to modulate his voice and sound even more unique.

Since then, he’s released over 10 bizarre rock albums. For my money, his masterpiece is 2004’s Mary Had Brown Hair. On it, you have the dramatic and heartbreaking “Gary Saw Linda Last Night,” the borderline stalkerish “Gary’s in the Park” and the all-time catchy bizarro-funk banger “Debbie.”

-Christian Flynn

Photo: R. Stevie Moore (2011, Matthew Roseman vis Wikimedia Commons)