Moby on Writing About His Extreme Ways and Debauched Days in New Memoir
Today, Moby is a sober, vegan-restaurant-owning, transcendental-meditation-practicing resident of Los Angeles, a 50-year-old DJ-producer-musician who’s known for his animal activism, paid handsomely to appear at festivals like Coachella, and often invited to exclusive Hollywood happenings like December’s premiere for Star Wars: The Force Awakens.
In the decade before the turn of the millennium, however — prior to the release of his seminal, universally beloved 1999 album, Play — the New York-dwelling musician was a raging alcoholic who routinely indulged his insatiable libido with strippers and at least one dominatrix, even once having sex in the middle of a dance floor while a club full of drag queens dressed as Stevie Nicks cheered him on.
Thankfully, when it came time to write the story of his life, the artist born Richard Melville Hall (he’s descended from Moby Dick scribe Herman Melville) elected to focus on the latter. Yet the bald, diminutive Moby’s memoir is hardly your run-of-the-mill autobiography of an insecure/egotistical rock star dealing with addiction. A brilliantly penned page-turner, Porcelain — published May 17 by Penguin Press — calls to mind Patti Smith’s Just Kids in how it colorizes a New York that no longer exists. What Smith does for the city and its punk culture in the ‘70s, Moby does for the Manhattan club scene in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, which is to say he makes readers want to jump inside a time machine and go back. Porcelain rouses nostalgia for a time before outrageously priced bottle service, when one could go dancing at Windows on the World atop the Twin Towers, and when Moby spun records for a vogue-ing Madonna in a Meatpacking District where meatpacking actually happened. Indeed, the poor DJ had to push his skateboard full of house and techno vinyl through gutters overflowing with blood en route to gigs.
Porcelain is also laugh-out-loud funny — especially when Moby’s in denial about losing his hair — and unexpectedly heartfelt, like when he watches the single mother who raised him in below-the-poverty-line conditions in suburban Connecticut succumb to lung cancer. Meanwhile, the litany of Forest Gump-y celebrity run-ins never fail to amuse, from a third-grade best-friendship with Robert Downey Jr., to Moby’s assisting on a student film starring an unknown Viggo Mortensen, to his attending a club gig for his ex-girlfriend’s new boyfriend: the follicly blessed Jeff Buckley.
Read on, as Moby tells Yahoo Music what it was like for a teetotaler to revisit his extreme ways and most debauched days, how they led him to make the biggest record of his career, and why he no longer gives a damn what people think about him.
YAHOO MUSIC: Let’s start with the title. You could have called it Go!, since the book documents the first 10 years of your career, or Play, since, well, you played a lot, musically and hedonistically. Instead you went with Porcelain. Why?
MOBY: Three reasons. One, the song “Porcelain” really encapsulated what I thought was the end of my career. There’s this moment near the end of the book when I’m listening to it and I’m convinced that nothing has worked out, that my career is over. I’m gonna have to go live next to I-95 and sleep on a futon. But also, my character in the book has enthusiasm but intense, volatile fragility, and porcelain has that quality as well — it’s white and fragile, and so am I. And then, of course, I threw up into a lot of porcelain toilets, so it kind of made sense.
The hard-partying chapters are highly entertaining, for sure, but how does someone who’s in AA write through the eyes of someone who is an alcoholic?
Hopefully, in remembering a former self, you can come at it with a bit of sympathy. Of course, you wince a little bit — you’re remembering really gross things you did in your past. There’s some shame around it, but there’s also this sympathy because you realize, for myself, at the height of my drinking and drug-taking and craziness, I really thought that this was the best way to find happiness. I didn’t know any better. I wonder if it’s how a parent feels. I’ve never been a parent, but if you’re looking at your 9-year-old, I imagine you might say, “I wish I could protect them from what they have to go through, but in order for them to turn into a decent adult, they have to go through a lot of hard stuff.” But, yeah, it was very disconcerting, to be in Los Angeles, sober, sitting by the pool, drinking organic white tea and writing about being a bottomed-out drunk in Germany in 1996. I would look up from my laptop almost have to remind myself that my current life was the real one and the one that I’m writing about was the memory.
It must have been a huge undertaking, not just work-wise, but emotionally and psychologically.
In making records, you make a record and you go out and promote it; there’s part of it that’s relatively personal, but you’re talking about a record or the way you made the record. What’s interesting about talking about the book is getting on the phone with someone I’ve never met who knows these profoundly intimate details of my life. It’s disconcerting, but there’s almost like a therapeutic quality to it.
So there’s been some healing as well?
Yeah, especially because the book is perhaps a little more revelatory and honest than a lot of memoirs, at least based on the ones I’ve read and what people have been telling me. A lot of times people write memoirs and they’re very uncomfortable sharing the really intimate or really salacious stuff. Or they don’t want to hurt the people around them, or they just want to be seen in a really good light. A few years ago, [I met with a rock-star friend] while he was writing his memoir, and I said, “Are you going to write about all the sex and drugs and rock ‘n’ roll and depravity and bottoming out and getting sober?” and he said, “No.” I was like, “But that’s what we want to read about!” I didn’t understand why he wouldn’t write about the gritty, salacious stuff. When I was writing this, all I wanted to do is be as honest as I possibly could.
Most rock memoirists relay their stories to a ghostwriter, so maybe there’s a tendency to hold back. Perhaps because you wrote this yourself and it was a solitary experience, that allowed you to be more revealing?
That’s definitely a big part of it. I also think a lot of people are understandably concerned with how they’re going to be perceived, so they almost have this winnowing criteria that they apply to the content of the book: Does the content of the book support the way in which they want to be perceived? Ten or 15 years ago, I really wanted to control how people perceived me. Every photograph, every interview had to be perfect. I wanted people to think I was a certain way, and I got very upset, as a lot of public figures do, when I was represented in ways that didn’t conform to how I wanted to be perceived. I don’t know if it’s middle-age or sobriety or what, but, at this point of my life, I don’t really care all that much. I don’t want to be perceived as an a–hole, but I’d rather be honest and not try and control how people might think of me than try and self-edit in a way that would reinforce some idea I have of myself. It’s very liberating.
It’s pretty remarkable that a man who was living such a filthy, depraved life ended up making an album that’s pristine and perfect and otherworldly in its beauty. I wonder, was Play a way of compensating for your overindulging in sex and drinking and rock ’n’ roll?
Absolutely. Almost everything we do in life, we’re sort of sustaining or altering our neurochemistry — making ourselves feel better or making ourselves feel worse. The whole reason I drank and did drugs and all that was simply to try and feel better and make up for a perceived sense of inadequacy. It was all coming from a place of fear, coming from this sense of being less-than. Music, to an extent, was a very benign way to create a mini-utopia that wasn’t really affected by any of the other more pernicious things. You could create this mini-utopia, and while you were making it, it felt utopian, and you could inhabit it in a kind of clean way that sort of stood as like a counterpoint to all of the filth and dysfunction.
Speaking of utopia, your description of the early-‘90s New York club scene suggests it was a utopia of its own. The city had its highest murder rate, hypodermic needles littered the streets, rats were everywhere, and AIDS was rampant, yet you could go to clubs like MARS and Red Zone, where you DJ’d, to dance the night away and forget all the bad stuff. Was that another part of why you wanted to write the book – to shine a spotlight on the house and techno scenes of the time?
I had been talking to some people at a party in Bushwick, telling them my old-guy stories of what New York had been like in the ‘80s and early ‘90s, and they couldn’t believe it. Because the New York of today is very, very different. So I thought, “Maybe it would be interesting to re-inhabit that world and write about it as an anthropologist – to write about myself, but also to write about that environment, that culture, the weirdness of it and the specificity of it.” Now, for better or worse, there is no such thing as underground culture, because everything is shared and disseminated globally the moment it’s created. But when you went to the Limelight, Nell’s, or MARS, you were hearing music that was only being played in those places, and you really felt you were involved in something very odd and unique. Maybe that exists today, but I don’t know if it exists in the weird, cloistered way that it existed back then.
This is what makes Porcelain so much more inclusive than a lot of rock-star bios — it’s not just your story, it feels like it’s our story too, whether you were living in New York at that time or not, whether you were ever a struggling musician or not.
Other music memoirists, they were only writing about themselves, and I was like, “What about the context? What about the culture?” Nothing happens in a vacuum. I didn’t become an electronic musician by being locked in a room and not encountering other people or other cultures. I was making music that was inspired by this culture. So to really give it three dimensions, depth and breadth, you have to write about the culture and the context almost as much as the individual.
I understand you’re releasing a companion CD, Music From Porcelain. Because nothing puts you in a moment like music.
It’s two CDs. One is the music that I made from ’89 to ’99 that’s talked about in the book; the other is a compilation of some of the records that other people have made, really focusing on early-‘90s hip-hop, house music, techno stuff. We’ve also made a bunch of Spotify playlists, because you can get 75 minutes of music on a CD but you can have 500 minutes of music on a Spotify playlist.
Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe, they really roughed it in New York. You squatted in Connecticut before moving to Manhattan apartments without toilets and showers. New Order’s Peter Hook once told me that he thinks kids have it too easy today, intimating that that’s why there’s a dearth of great music. How important do you think is struggle to a developing artist?
When I was struggling, it didn’t feel like struggle, it felt like liberation. I was really broke — making $4,000 a year — but I was only paying $50 a month to squat in an abandoned factory, and I had enough to eat and to buy cassettes to put music on. I never had to worry about getting a real job or making money as quickly as possible because my rent was so cheap and my cost of living was so low. The problem now is there aren’t very many urban environments where you can live and be broke. I don’t know how anyone could live in New York and make less than $100,000 a year, the cost of living there is so expensive. Almost a more important ingredient when you live in relative squalor, it enables you to put up with a lot. You sort of can’t be a prima donna when you’re living in an abandoned factory in a crack neighborhood and you have no running water.
It’s pretty amazing, though, that you were able to stay to focused on making music when you were living in a building alongside drug dealers where your friend was stabbed to death on the premises.
I guess a lot of it comes from growing up poor. No one in my family ever concerned themselves with getting rich or trying even being financially comfortable, so I just assumed that being poor was OK. I never thought of music even as a way to make money, so when I made money from music, it was very surprising.
Do you think that if you were starting out today, with your punk-rock aesthetic, your wide range of musical influences, and your God-fearing Christian background, you could have the career that you’ve had?
I wonder. I feel like now, some things are way easier. Like, making good-sounding records now is so much easier, because you can do it on your laptop. And getting people to pay attention to what you’re doing is easier through Facebook and Instagram, and disseminating the music throughout the world is easier with YouTube and SoundCloud. But I feel like back then there weren’t that many people doing it, so once you started doing it there was a better chance that people might hear it. Now there’s how many millions of people making their music on their laptop and putting it up on SoundCloud. It’s easy to get your friends to pay attention, but it’s hard for anyone to really notice outside of your immediate circle. But I also think, the days of a musician, like a guitar or a bass player, and being in a band and having a successful career, if they haven’t come to an end, they’re coming to an end. I think the musician of the future or the musician of today, in order to succeed they sort of have to be able to do everything. They have to be able to write songs and tour and DJ and write classical music for movies and produce and make music for video games — do all of these different things. Like Anthony [Gonzalez] from M83, for example. There are very few people who are going to be able to have careers as musicians by only doing one thing.
You were very much ahead of your time, then. Another way you were was with the licensing of every song on Play for commercial use. Today, artists beg to have their music licensed, but back then, you were vilified for it. Do you think you’re the guy who pretty much retired the term “selling out”?
Yeah. The nice thing is, I feel like that debate has largely ended, because most musicians now will do anything to get people to listen to their music and maybe even make some money from it, and that largely relies on licensing. I remember reading a quote from Jeff Tweedy about licensing music to advertisements. He had licensed a Wilco song to some commercial and his fans were outraged. I’m paraphrasing, but he basically said, “Twenty years from now, when I’m putting my kids through college and helping my parents retire and maybe helping my sick cousin, where are you guys gonna be? Do I tell my sick cousin, my daughter, my parents in 20 years, ‘I’m sorry I can’t help you because I was concerned about the opinions of people I’d never met?’” It put it in perspective. My having licensed music definitely enabled me to have more people hear what I was doing. I won’t defend it or be an apologist for it, but I do think, ideally, you have to place it in a broader context and understand that most musicians have, at best, a couple of years where they’re able to earn a little bit of money, and they sort of have to live off that for the rest of their lives. If a musician is able to license a song, make some money, buy a house for him and his wife and daughter, and be able to put his daughter in a decent school, how can anyone criticize someone for that? When huge musicians criticized licensing, I’m like, “Yeah, but you’re worth hundreds of millions of dollars.” You’ve got to put it in the perspective of the person who’s just getting by. So I do appreciate the fact that nowadays people don’t really have the selling-out conversation as much because everyone understands how hard it is to make a living as a musician.
Last question : Considering how well the book has already been received, will you be writing a second memoir, beginning with the release of Play?
Well, I’ve already written most of part two, but my editor and my publisher don’t really like it. Because part two is just like alcoholism, touring, degeneracy, bottoming out. It’s pretty repetitive, and kind of grim. I need to figure out a way to tell the story of the second book and find the emotional core. Because it’s the story about a musician who becomes successful almost overnight, fully embraces it, becomes an alcoholic, bottoms out… that story has been told a bunch of times. So I need to figure out how I can tell that story in a way that would actually resonate with people and not just be another solipsistic trip down the sort of like entitlement addiction rabbit hole.