Speaker 1: Welcome, Welcome, Welcome to the Bob Left Sets podcast, the
Speaker 1: first live podcast ever here at the USC Festival of Books.
Speaker 1: It's April twenty one, day before my birthday. You start
Speaker 1: day again, and uh my special guest today is Moby
Speaker 1: and I thank you all for being here because we
Speaker 1: had a hard time getting here. We did not connect,
Speaker 1: we went to diff It was like our own little
Speaker 1: spinal tap moment. So I would we miss if I
Speaker 1: didn't ask you, Moby that it being April twenty one,
Speaker 1: the day after a VICI passed away, do you have
Speaker 1: any thoughts about a VICI? Uh? Boy, oh boy. By
Speaker 1: the way, first of all, if tomorrow is your birthday,
Speaker 1: all I can say is like the thirties can be
Speaker 1: a challenging decade, but there's there's a lot of room
Speaker 1: for growth. Well. I don't want to reveal how old
Speaker 1: I am as but you can look it up online.
Speaker 1: Thirty was bad. I thirty was no big deal. Forty
Speaker 1: was bad, Fifty was no big deal. You're you're fifty
Speaker 1: point sixty? Really fucked me up. I'm still funning, okay.
Speaker 1: Um So a VICHI, Well, I guess it's speaking of
Speaker 1: getting older or not getting older it's just, I mean,
Speaker 1: there's so much to say about that. When someone dies
Speaker 1: so young, it's just I mean, I'm stating the obvious.
Speaker 1: But it's tragic, it's heartbreaking, it's unnecessary. It's just like
Speaker 1: the fact that death is the one unavoidable fact of
Speaker 1: our existence. Why hurry it along? You know? Like I
Speaker 1: remember when I was a depressed teenager listening to joy
Speaker 1: Division and wanting to throw myself off a bridge. I
Speaker 1: thought to myself, I was like, you know, I'm gonna
Speaker 1: die eventually. Why not just stick around and see what happens?
Speaker 1: You know? Wow, But you have been part of this
Speaker 1: world for decades to what degreed you believe the lifestyle
Speaker 1: of DJs would contribute to their demise? Uh? I mean,
Speaker 1: certainly there's very little about being a traveling professional DJ
Speaker 1: that's healthy. You know, even if you're sober and doing it,
Speaker 1: it's still pretty shitty, you know, like meaning like you're
Speaker 1: an airport, you're eating garbage food in airports. You stay
Speaker 1: in hotels, and even like the nicest hotel is still
Speaker 1: an artificial environment with recycled air. And especially like young kids,
Speaker 1: and you know that you're old when you start referring
Speaker 1: to the youth as being something you're not. You know.
Speaker 1: I remember hearing Obama say like young people, and I
Speaker 1: was like, oh does that mean, like but but he's young,
Speaker 1: so okay. So so even without drugs and alcohol and whatnot,
Speaker 1: touring is unhealthy, you know, like it's very as you
Speaker 1: know from a lifetime of being around on this, Like
Speaker 1: you look at anyone who's been touring for a while
Speaker 1: and they start to look like the crypt keeper Um
Speaker 1: or Gollum in my case. And but then you add
Speaker 1: in all the free alcohol and the drugs that are
Speaker 1: just thrown at you, like I've been sobered out for
Speaker 1: about ten years. But pre that, thanks um, but pre that.
Speaker 1: I mean, like if if you're on tour and you're
Speaker 1: playing a concert, you know, you play your concert, you
Speaker 1: get on the bus and you leave, and so you
Speaker 1: can be degenerate, but not that degenerate. Whereas the world
Speaker 1: of celebrity DJs, they have their own planes. They fly
Speaker 1: to Abisa, they fly to Las Vegas, they fly wherever.
Speaker 1: They stay in huge palatial presidential suites. They do their
Speaker 1: deejaying and then afterwards endless partying, which is great but
Speaker 1: so destructive and so corrosive. So okay in your a
Speaker 1: particular case, what caused you to get sober? Uh? So?
Speaker 1: In nine two, do you remember the been Big Audio Dynamite.
Speaker 1: So I was opening up for Big Audio Dynamites Switter
Speaker 1: group from the Clash, Yeah, Mick Jones and Don Let's
Speaker 1: I think um. So I was opening up for Big
Speaker 1: Audio Dynamite UM at Roseland and New York City, and
Speaker 1: we had dinner beforehand at a vegan restaurant called zen Palette,
Speaker 1: and I ate a purple Japanese egg plant and it
Speaker 1: disagreed with me. To this day, I've never eaten another
Speaker 1: purple Japanese egg plant because I had a little upset
Speaker 1: stomach as opposed to drinking, where I had thousands and
Speaker 1: thousands of soul destroying, debilitating hangovers. But I kept doing it,
Speaker 1: and I think I realized that indicated that I had
Speaker 1: a problem. You know, when you're hungover for the five
Speaker 1: thousandth time, you're like, oh, why do I keep doing this?
Speaker 1: When it's like it's just this I don't know, diminishing returns.
Speaker 1: So was he just one day you woke up and
Speaker 1: said this is it? It was? I tried getting sober
Speaker 1: multiple times and then this with the programmer by yourself.
Speaker 1: Eventually it was just a UM, I mean it works
Speaker 1: for me, if other people get sober without a God
Speaker 1: bless there's no right way to do it. Um. But
Speaker 1: it was October seventeenth, two thousand and eight. I had
Speaker 1: played a fundraiser for Kristen Gillibrand, Um, she was running
Speaker 1: to take Hillary Clinton's seat, and just had just a
Speaker 1: stupid night not with her. I'm not trying to throw Kristin.
Speaker 1: Jillibrand was like, we weren't you know, we weren't up
Speaker 1: at four o'clock in the morning doing cocaine and talking
Speaker 1: about how we should start a band. Yeah, that would
Speaker 1: be now. She left early on good for her. And
Speaker 1: then I found myself at like four o'clock in the
Speaker 1: morning at some dive bar and Hudson, New York, standing
Speaker 1: on stage asking if anyone there could sell me drugs,
Speaker 1: and then buying drugs and doing them by myself, and
Speaker 1: then at nine o'clock in the morning getting on amtrack
Speaker 1: and I hadn't slept, and I felt like death had
Speaker 1: like put me in a bag and thrown me down
Speaker 1: a flight of concrete stairs, like I just destroyed. And
Speaker 1: I thought you know this isn't getting better, and then
Speaker 1: you have that decision to do immediately go with a yeah.
Speaker 1: I went to an a meeting and just sat there,
Speaker 1: started crying and said, I'm Moby, I'm an alcoholic. And
Speaker 1: that was day one. And what did you learn in
Speaker 1: the I used to drink and I stopped drinking for
Speaker 1: a cornucopy of reasons, and for like the first thirty
Speaker 1: days was a lifestyle change, like the things places I
Speaker 1: would normally go, I will go. And then it was
Speaker 1: earlier when a lot of people were not sober. It
Speaker 1: was really quite a head speaking experience, irrelevant of not
Speaker 1: waking up over well. Especially I lived in Lower Manhattan
Speaker 1: and so in New York. For anyone who's spent time
Speaker 1: in New York, you know that it's paradise for degenerates
Speaker 1: like it and something you can afford to live in Manhattan.
Speaker 1: But like the ethos of New York is just abject
Speaker 1: debauchery and degeneracy. It doesn't matter who you are, like
Speaker 1: where you are on the socio economic spectrum, Like if
Speaker 1: you're not drinking and doing drugs in New York, you're
Speaker 1: missing out on why you should be in New York.
Speaker 1: Um so yes, So suddenly I was sober, living in
Speaker 1: the East Village and having my recording studio on the
Speaker 1: Lower East Side. So every day I would like walk
Speaker 1: home from work past all the bars where I used
Speaker 1: to get drunk, to go eat cereal and watch the
Speaker 1: Daily Show, and which was good. I wasn't hungover, but
Speaker 1: I was missing out on everything. And to this day,
Speaker 1: I still don't know how I stuck with it. You
Speaker 1: know why on one of those walk homes, I didn't
Speaker 1: just like go into a dive bar, get drunk and
Speaker 1: try to convince some like, oh pair to go home
Speaker 1: with me. Let's go back to the beginning. You grew
Speaker 1: up in dry In, Connecticut, not far from where I
Speaker 1: grew up in Fearfield, Connecticut. Darien is a very upscale
Speaker 1: room community. Most people work in Manhattan. However, there are
Speaker 1: other people of not of that economic caliber. So what
Speaker 1: was your experience growing up in day? So I was
Speaker 1: born on a street in Harlem, and then my dad
Speaker 1: died when I was two, and my mom happened to
Speaker 1: know what. He died of alcoholism. He drove into a wall,
Speaker 1: and so clearly it's we drove in a wall metaphorically
Speaker 1: or literally literally, I mean, I guess it worked on
Speaker 1: a metaphoric level, like no, he literally drove into a
Speaker 1: wall on a Jersey turnpike at a hundred miles an hour. Yeah,
Speaker 1: pre airbags. So it didn't work out too well. Um,
Speaker 1: And so my mom moved us back to dry Enne
Speaker 1: where she had grown up. But we were poor, white trash.
Speaker 1: We were on food stamps and on welfare. We lived,
Speaker 1: and it was from dairy En. Did she come from
Speaker 1: an upscale family? Her dad, my grandfather, worked on Wall Street,
Speaker 1: And so she moved us back to Darien because the
Speaker 1: schools were good, it was familiar, and she had family around.
Speaker 1: So what was your experience like constant shame because you
Speaker 1: were not one of the wealthy people. Yeah, because we were.
Speaker 1: So my mom was a pot smoking hippie who dated
Speaker 1: Hell's Angels and Darien is the land of like Lily
Speaker 1: Pulitzer pants and golf country clubs and you know, like
Speaker 1: my first serious girlfriend heard she came from the Rand family.
Speaker 1: Sorry I don't, I'm I hope I'm not going to
Speaker 1: get her in trouble, like, you know, the Rand Corporation,
Speaker 1: Like that's her posse. Her family and her dad owned
Speaker 1: a fleet of oil tankers. So that's my first serious girlfriend,
Speaker 1: my second serious girlfriend. Her grandfather was Bill Hewlett, who
Speaker 1: started Hewlett Packard. So it's like a level of wealth
Speaker 1: that you can't imagine. And my mom and I were
Speaker 1: on food stamps and welfare and I would come home
Speaker 1: and she would be, you know, like smoking pot in
Speaker 1: the kitchen with her Hell's Angel's boyfriend. And was there
Speaker 1: music in the house constantly? And what music did you hear? Everything?
Speaker 1: My mom had the most remarkable taste in books, which
Speaker 1: is Germaine. As we're at the l a Time festival books.
Speaker 1: That's what's called right yeah? Um? And so I mean
Speaker 1: because she had been a literature major at Barnard, and
Speaker 1: you graduated from Barnard, she eventually graduated from East Khan
Speaker 1: and Dan Barry. Um, so she went back. It shows
Speaker 1: a level of perseverance despite being a you know what,
Speaker 1: Hell's Angel dating hippie. Yeah, when she was really aeradite
Speaker 1: and academic. She just liked bad boys. Um. So. But
Speaker 1: her book collection, I mean, like I grew up reading
Speaker 1: Faulkner and Rambo and Dyukowski when I was twelve years old,
Speaker 1: just because she didn't turn them on to you just
Speaker 1: saw him on the shelf and you pulled them down.
Speaker 1: I was talking about this earlier with a nice man
Speaker 1: at PBS. I was like, when you're twelve years old
Speaker 1: and your board in the middle of the summer and
Speaker 1: there's nothing good on TV. You go to the bookshelf
Speaker 1: and you see as a as I lay dying and
Speaker 1: you're like, that sounds cool, or you know, like a
Speaker 1: Season in Hell by Rambo and you're like, oh, I
Speaker 1: want to read that, or you know Bukowski, you know,
Speaker 1: like every book he wrote has an amazing title. So
Speaker 1: I just started reading compulsively. And her record collection was
Speaker 1: everything from I don't know, divor Jack to Coltrane, Like
Speaker 1: she still maintains that I was conceived. Well, my mom
Speaker 1: and my dad were listening to Love Supreme now that
Speaker 1: whether it's two or not, who cares? So yeah, So
Speaker 1: I mean Crossy Seals and Nash and Young to Stravinsky
Speaker 1: to Bruce Springsteen too. She loved like a lot of
Speaker 1: late sixties folk music like It's a Wonderful Day or
Speaker 1: It's a Beautiful Day, Beautiful's a Beautiful Day and Donovan
Speaker 1: and Jefferson Airplane and Nick Drake. So it was like she,
Speaker 1: I grew up with an amazing record collection, just so eclectic.
Speaker 1: And what point did you start to play music? I
Speaker 1: started studying music when I was around nine. What was
Speaker 1: the impetus for that? That I loved music and I
Speaker 1: just wanted to do anything I could to be around it?
Speaker 1: And was this private lessons? Were in school or by yourself? Well,
Speaker 1: my mom played piano and she dated a bunch of
Speaker 1: itinerant musicians, um one of whom was a pedal steel player.
Speaker 1: And I tried to learn pedal steel at ten and
Speaker 1: I couldn't like it was just too like as your
Speaker 1: feet are doing things. So one of her boyfriends had
Speaker 1: left a guitar behind, and so I started playing guitar.
Speaker 1: And she had a friend who taught guitar lessons. And
Speaker 1: he was the most idiosyncratic music teacher because he played
Speaker 1: in a metal band. You know. He was one of
Speaker 1: those like Deely Deally dud thinks Chris Rasola like a
Speaker 1: phenomenal virtual so guitarist. But he loved music theory, bok
Speaker 1: and jazz fusion. So he instilled in me like we
Speaker 1: would study scales and deconstruct Bach cantatas and then learn
Speaker 1: how to play purple, Hayes, This is all on the guitar.
Speaker 1: On the guitar, that's not easy to do on the guitar. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and so you learned how to we music, and you
Speaker 1: still read music to this day about as well as
Speaker 1: I can read French, meaning like I can figure it
Speaker 1: out if you hold a gun to my head. But
Speaker 1: like like friends of mine who can cite read I'm
Speaker 1: sure you know those people, like like you put rockman
Speaker 1: and Off in front of them, put them to the
Speaker 1: piano and they start playing it. Like, there's absolutely no
Speaker 1: way I could even begin to do that. It would
Speaker 1: take me ten minutes to get like the first stanza. Well,
Speaker 1: in my family, we started with piano lessons, and then
Speaker 1: of course the folk are and the Beatles came along
Speaker 1: and we picked up guitar. But the issue was always practicing.
Speaker 1: Did you practice? I practice constantly because I was untroubled
Speaker 1: by much having much of a social life or a
Speaker 1: dating life. Did you have friends. I had a few friends,
Speaker 1: but not too many, so I had a lot of
Speaker 1: free time growing up, you know, especially summertimes, like you
Speaker 1: know what's like in Fairfield County, Like all the rich
Speaker 1: kids go to country clubs, they go to Switzerland, they
Speaker 1: go to islands like Fisher's Island and Martha's Vineyard and
Speaker 1: Nantuckett and I stay home and watch TV, listen to records,
Speaker 1: play guitar, drive my bike to Johnny's Records to look
Speaker 1: at records that someday I might be able to afford.
Speaker 1: So you're in school, your mother is highly educated. What
Speaker 1: kind of track are you on? Are you thinking I'm
Speaker 1: going to go to college? I can't wait to drop out?
Speaker 1: What's going through your head? Well? When I went, I
Speaker 1: went to Yukon Stores and Stanford. I didn't know that
Speaker 1: I didn't graduate. And did you go for I went
Speaker 1: to Yukon Stores for a year, went to Yukon Stamford.
Speaker 1: This is means a lot to us um and I
Speaker 1: went to study purchase for a little while. Let's let's
Speaker 1: go back. You're at Yukon Stores. Yeah, isn't that like
Speaker 1: a square peg in a round hole? Obviously that's why
Speaker 1: I didn't stay. I mean, also I was having I
Speaker 1: was having terrible panic attacks and I had to leave anyway.
Speaker 1: But like Yukon Stores is known for basketball and agriculture,
Speaker 1: and it's it's hard to say about but it's literally
Speaker 1: in the middle of nowhere, Connecticut. Yeah, it's sort of
Speaker 1: like the let's by way of comparison, like the outskirts
Speaker 1: of Fresno right now. Um So I was there and
Speaker 1: this was the early eighties, and all I wanted was
Speaker 1: to be in New York or be in London or
Speaker 1: be in Los Angeles and be a part of a
Speaker 1: music scene. So I would listen to music and I
Speaker 1: would go to classes. But being in this small farm town,
Speaker 1: it was very frustrating, and then you ended up going
Speaker 1: to purchase to purchase. I was a philosophy major the
Speaker 1: whole time, so if it weren't for music, I sort
Speaker 1: of thought that my life plan was going to be
Speaker 1: teaching philosophy at some community college somewhere. So you went
Speaker 1: to like three or four colleges. If you were to
Speaker 1: go back today, like in the Bruce Springsteen record where
Speaker 1: his mother says, never would you like to go back,
Speaker 1: how much would you have to do to graduate? I'll
Speaker 1: probably take four years of classes. Like I don't know,
Speaker 1: I mean, I wouldn't even know, like because this was
Speaker 1: this was back in the forties, so like you know,
Speaker 1: they kept records on parchment exactly. That's one of my
Speaker 1: bad dreams. You gonna wake up one day and they'll say,
Speaker 1: we have no record if you graduate from college. You
Speaker 1: did go, but um, so are you going consistently from
Speaker 1: one college to another? I was like twenty Yukon stores
Speaker 1: dropped out about a year of like drinking and learning
Speaker 1: how to DJ, went back to Yukon, Stamford dropped out,
Speaker 1: went back to Sunny Purchase, and then at that point
Speaker 1: I started to have more of a job as a DJ.
Speaker 1: So I didn't let's say, so, if we're in the
Speaker 1: early eighties, Okay, what does it look like being a DJ?
Speaker 1: Then well, uh, it was not very glamorous. Remember port Chester,
Speaker 1: New York, of course, holl of the capital of the
Speaker 1: Capital Theater, which is now back up in the running.
Speaker 1: Everyone's right over the border from Connecticut, and it had
Speaker 1: a very special place I'm assuming when you were growing
Speaker 1: up as well, because the drinking age in Connecticut was
Speaker 1: twenty one and the drinking age in New York was eighteen,
Speaker 1: and port Chester was the first town over the border,
Speaker 1: so it was filled with kids from Connecticut like crashing
Speaker 1: their cars and getting STDs. Um so I got a
Speaker 1: job djaying at a bar right by the Port Chester
Speaker 1: train station on Monday nights for twenty five dollars a night,
Speaker 1: so I was working for six hours. No one was
Speaker 1: there except like a couple of like bottomed out methodone
Speaker 1: addicts and what would you play? I didn't even have
Speaker 1: that many records, so I'd play the same things over
Speaker 1: and over again. So it was the Clash and Joy
Speaker 1: Division and some early New Order records and Hank Williams
Speaker 1: and Johnny Cash basically like whatever records I had access to. Okay,
Speaker 1: so you did that, You went back to college, and
Speaker 1: you're at Sony Purchase. At one point you say, I'm
Speaker 1: done with school. I just because d jaying. I started djaying.
Speaker 1: Time passed and I got a job djaying in New York,
Speaker 1: and I realized, oh, a little bit slower. How did
Speaker 1: you get a job dj in the city. Well, because
Speaker 1: you know Saturday Night Fever, of course, And Saturday Fever
Speaker 1: is a fascinating movie if you haven't seen it recently.
Speaker 1: It's unrelenting, lee dark like. It's how that became like
Speaker 1: a pop culture phenomena. I have no idea because it's
Speaker 1: super bleak things. That was based on an article by
Speaker 1: Nick Cone in New York magazine and he was on Deadline.
Speaker 1: He completely made it up. It wasn't true whatsoever. Although
Speaker 1: a great article in a great movie, and but it's about,
Speaker 1: you know, these kids in Brooklyn and Queens who just
Speaker 1: longed to get to Manhattan. But that existed not just
Speaker 1: in Brooklyn, Queens, but in Long Island, Connecticut, New Jersey,
Speaker 1: upstate New York. Like if you lived within the sort
Speaker 1: of periphery of Manhattan, all you wanted to do was
Speaker 1: go to Manhattan to hang out, to work, to live.
Speaker 1: At least that was the case with me. So in
Speaker 1: the late eighties, I started dropping off demo tapes at
Speaker 1: different nightclubs in New York and rejected everywhere. And I
Speaker 1: started giving demo tapes to ray EO stations like Kiss
Speaker 1: and BLS same thing, I mean, like a skinny a
Speaker 1: little bit slower. They would be others. People's material to
Speaker 1: the radio was material that you had created. Both. I
Speaker 1: would drop off these cassettes that had like a hip
Speaker 1: hop mix, a house music mix, and my own music.
Speaker 1: And I also sent it to tons of labels and
Speaker 1: I got one response from Hollywood Records, the Peter Paterno
Speaker 1: and this is and I got a letter from Hollywood
Speaker 1: Records so clearly, and it said we do not accept
Speaker 1: unsolicited Yeah, we'll take a quick break and come back
Speaker 1: with more of my conversation with Moby, recorded at usc
Speaker 1: as part of the l A Times Festival of Books.
Speaker 1: This week we're talking to DJ Moby. Last week we
Speaker 1: had Chev Gordon supermnch For that, we had job Is
Speaker 1: Martin and Shirley Manson and so many other people. You
Speaker 1: gotta go back into the archives. You haven't heard these things,
Speaker 1: so download from tune in the Apple podcast or your
Speaker 1: podcast player of choice. Okay, let's get back to my
Speaker 1: conversation with Moby in front of a live studio audience. Okay,
Speaker 1: but a little bit slower. When did you start to
Speaker 1: record your own music? In early eighties? I stole a
Speaker 1: four track from the A V Department at my high school.
Speaker 1: I gave it back, so okay. I bought the real
Speaker 1: like a like a Fostex, very very like school had
Speaker 1: a FoST that's amazing, task camera Fostex. Well they were
Speaker 1: two fostests. Was first intend to task cam, but people
Speaker 1: were buying them. They certainly didn't. I did not go
Speaker 1: to a low rent school, but we didn't have that
Speaker 1: kind of equipment. Yeah, somehow. Well. I was also in
Speaker 1: the like when like if you watch family Guy, the
Speaker 1: nerdiest guy, it always has a hat that says A V.
Speaker 1: We were. I was in the A V Department, you know,
Speaker 1: like wheeling the film strip, you know, the overhead projector
Speaker 1: to classes and setting it up up and make sure
Speaker 1: it's clean. And I would eat my lunch in a
Speaker 1: closet in the A V department, not get like, I
Speaker 1: put joy Division on my walkman and eat my peanut
Speaker 1: butter and jelly sandwich in a closet And it was great.
Speaker 1: But where were we? The fas? But for those people
Speaker 1: don't know, it was a real breakthrough because there are
Speaker 1: four trucks on a cassette and the fast Tex was
Speaker 1: the first machine that allowed you to seek up and
Speaker 1: record on all four trucks, which was a huge break
Speaker 1: It was egalitary, relatively egalitarian multitrack technology. And remember the
Speaker 1: first time I turned it on and used it. Because
Speaker 1: I had a matel drum machine. Mattel made a drum
Speaker 1: machine called the Simsonics. I forgot that and so I
Speaker 1: had my Mattel Simsonics drum machine. My borrowed face text
Speaker 1: a guitar and a microphone that I also sort of
Speaker 1: borrowed from the A V. Department, and I was able
Speaker 1: to make music on my own and it was, you know,
Speaker 1: like the scales fell from my eyes and suddenly, you know,
Speaker 1: I was like I could I don't need to wait
Speaker 1: around for other musician, Like, can just do this by myself?
Speaker 1: So yes, of the late eighties. Okay, So when you're
Speaker 1: making music at first, what kind of music are you making? Uh,
Speaker 1: A little bit of everything, sort of inspired by some
Speaker 1: of the singer songwriter like Roddy Frame from ast at Camera,
Speaker 1: The Smith's The Cure, but also electronic music, you know,
Speaker 1: inspired craftwork by craftwork. Um. The demo tape that I
Speaker 1: got sent around they got rejected was actually my singer
Speaker 1: songwriter stuff, so it wasn't retrospect. How good was no?
Speaker 1: This is great, raving great back and forth in retrospect?
Speaker 1: How good was that stuff? Oh? Totally mediocre? Because that's
Speaker 1: one of the things people send you stuff Originally they
Speaker 1: think it's so great, and if they have to make it,
Speaker 1: they look back. Maybe I didn't deserve to make it
Speaker 1: at that point. Well, then I had this sort of
Speaker 1: like that, like the Robert Frost moment Two Paths Diverge
Speaker 1: and the Wood And I was playing demos to my
Speaker 1: girlfriend and a friend of hers, and I was playing
Speaker 1: my very earnest singer songwriter music and they were like, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's okay. And then I was like, oh, but I've
Speaker 1: also started making electronic music. And I played it for
Speaker 1: them and they stood up and started dancing wow. And
Speaker 1: at that moment, I was like, the audience has spoken, Like,
Speaker 1: I guess I'm not supposed to be the next Morrissey.
Speaker 1: I'm supposed to make electronic music. Okay. While you're making music,
Speaker 1: you talk about soliciting gigs in New York City, Yeah,
Speaker 1: so tell us more about that. So it's constantly sneaking
Speaker 1: into New York on Metro North, like hiding in the
Speaker 1: bathroom on Metro North with a bag full of demo tapes,
Speaker 1: jumping turnstiles, getting cheap food at Dojo remember Dojo um,
Speaker 1: and bringing demo tapes everywhere, every record label, every radio station,
Speaker 1: you know, waiting outside w n y U and the
Speaker 1: hope that maybe someone who worked at w n y
Speaker 1: U would like be willing to take a tape. And
Speaker 1: I dropped off tapes at every nightclub, every bar. And
Speaker 1: then there was this one club opening called Mars, and
Speaker 1: it was on the West Side Highway in the Meatpacking District.
Speaker 1: And this was back when the meatpacking district was the
Speaker 1: meat packing District. Like they were like dead lamb carcasses
Speaker 1: on the street and blood everywhere and prostitutes servicing all
Speaker 1: sorts of people out in the open, like it was
Speaker 1: really post apocalyptic and grim. In the middle of it
Speaker 1: was this huge nightclub, Mars, and I went there to
Speaker 1: drop off a demo tape and the HR person laughed
Speaker 1: at me because they were taking applications for like bus boy, janitor,
Speaker 1: bar back, and I dropped off a demo tape. But
Speaker 1: the guy hiring DJs had never hired DJs before, and
Speaker 1: he wondered why no one had dropped off demo tapes.
Speaker 1: So I got my job solely because I was the
Speaker 1: only person to drop off a demo tape. Do you
Speaker 1: remember what year that was? And so you started to
Speaker 1: work there, how frequent work, first once a week, and
Speaker 1: twice a week and three times a week, and then
Speaker 1: um finally move back to New York and got this
Speaker 1: apartment on fourteen and third with four other people. Okay,
Speaker 1: what kind of music are you playing when you're working
Speaker 1: at bars um mainly house music and hip hop, but
Speaker 1: also some dance, all reggae, which is really big at
Speaker 1: the time. And occasionally my boss his name was Yuki
Speaker 1: and he was Japanese and he was really interesting and
Speaker 1: he would ask me if I could play certain genres
Speaker 1: of music, and I would always just say yes, you know,
Speaker 1: like so you remember one time in particular, he called
Speaker 1: me up and said, oh, We're having a rare groove
Speaker 1: party on the roof. Can you play rare groove? And
Speaker 1: I was like, of course I can. And then I
Speaker 1: hung up the phone and I started calling people. I
Speaker 1: was like, what is rare groove? And so the three
Speaker 1: other people you're living with, how did you find them
Speaker 1: and find the apartment. One is a friend of mine
Speaker 1: from Connecticut who was an artist named Damien loeb Uh.
Speaker 1: Then he was dating a model named Ann And then
Speaker 1: there's another DJ named Adrian came a very successful hip
Speaker 1: hop DJ named Stretch Armstrong uh. And then my friend
Speaker 1: Lee also it's just an artist from New York who
Speaker 1: now owns an art gallery in Connecticut. Okay, so you're
Speaker 1: working at Mars. Ultimately, many nights a week. Based on
Speaker 1: the story you've just told, you're so obviously hustling your
Speaker 1: demo tapes. Oh yeah. And then finally, this, finally, the
Speaker 1: moment came. I dropped off demo tapes everywhere and I
Speaker 1: was DJing at Mars and this guy named Jared Hoffman
Speaker 1: came to the DJ booth and he asked me a question.
Speaker 1: He said, well, do you make your own music? And
Speaker 1: I said, as a matter of fact, I do. So
Speaker 1: the next day I went to his apartment on fourteenth
Speaker 1: and seven and I gave him a demo tape of
Speaker 1: my own music, and he called me up and he said,
Speaker 1: we would like to sign you to an artist contract
Speaker 1: to our record label called Instinct Records. Put it in perspective,
Speaker 1: at that time, they actually didn't have a name, they
Speaker 1: didn't have an office, they'd never made records, they had
Speaker 1: no employees. It was an idea that he and a
Speaker 1: friend of his head. So so I was signed to
Speaker 1: a record label that at the time wasn't how to
Speaker 1: take you to figure that out. I kind of just
Speaker 1: ignored that fact because someone had offered me a contract
Speaker 1: like I and I never in my wild dreams thought
Speaker 1: I would sign a recording contract, even if it wasn't
Speaker 1: technically with a record label. Here for a second, when
Speaker 1: you're djaying, are you d jaying under the name Moby?
Speaker 1: You can call Moby since I was born my legal
Speaker 1: name is Richard Melville Hall. So in school, you never rich,
Speaker 1: You're never Rick, You're always Moby. Yeah, okay, So you
Speaker 1: make this, you sign this record deal. They don't know
Speaker 1: what they're doing. Do you actually make a record? Then
Speaker 1: we take six months to make my first twelve inch
Speaker 1: called Time's Up, oddly prescient for the Times Up movement
Speaker 1: um because during this although I guess I can't in
Speaker 1: any way late claim to it as assist endered heterosexual
Speaker 1: white man, but nonetheless, uh. And that record did nothing.
Speaker 1: I just disappeared. And then I made my second record
Speaker 1: under my own name, which came out and sold about
Speaker 1: a thousand copies. Which in high school I had been
Speaker 1: in a punk rock band called the Vatican Commandos, and
Speaker 1: we had a seven inch that sold two hundred copies,
Speaker 1: And that amazed me because I meant there were two
Speaker 1: hundred people who had heard the music we made. But
Speaker 1: now there were a thousand people who heard the music
Speaker 1: I had made, And I if my career had ended
Speaker 1: in I would have been pretty happy. But then the
Speaker 1: next single was a remix of the song Go, which
Speaker 1: became a top ten record around Europe and around the
Speaker 1: rest of the world. I think sold half a million copies. Okay,
Speaker 1: but this is still with these two crazy guys. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Now they had a label, they had Instinct, and they
Speaker 1: didn't really have an office. They had Jared's apartment and
Speaker 1: I was. I set up my equipment there, so I
Speaker 1: ran the office like I would clean the kitchen, send faxes,
Speaker 1: take wreck words to ups and the post off. Yeah,
Speaker 1: like answering the phone like hello, Instinct records while I
Speaker 1: was like hitting pause on my sequencer. Um, it was great.
Speaker 1: It was okay, joy full, joyful, happy time you may
Speaker 1: go in your mind. Do you think it's a hit? No?
Speaker 1: Absolutely not, because I was. I was a super weird,
Speaker 1: obscure musician that no one had ever heard of, involved
Speaker 1: in a genre techno that no one had heard of
Speaker 1: or cared about. And I used music from Twin Peaks
Speaker 1: and I was like, well, people know Twin Peaks, but no,
Speaker 1: I didn't think anything was ever gonna happen. How did
Speaker 1: it happen? It happened at the good Because this was
Speaker 1: nineteen eighty nine or ninety the rave scene in the
Speaker 1: UK was exploding and Twin Peaks was exploding, an interest
Speaker 1: in New York dance music was exploding. So some influential
Speaker 1: DJ's in the UK found this record and started playing
Speaker 1: it and it just sort of metastasized in a very
Speaker 1: good way. And what was that like being at the epicenter.
Speaker 1: It's still possible that it didn't happen, you know, like
Speaker 1: it's still possible that right, and that like that I'm
Speaker 1: it's and I'm cleaning oatmeal bowls in the kitchen at
Speaker 1: Instinct Records a K. Jared's apartment and somehow I'm having
Speaker 1: a stroke or something or dissociative like Joan of Arc
Speaker 1: style moment where like all of a sudden, like my
Speaker 1: brain is like secreting still aside and naturally on its own.
Speaker 1: And this is all a hallucination because the idea to
Speaker 1: to go from selling a thousand records two then all
Speaker 1: of a sudden, being on top of the pops multiple
Speaker 1: times and traveling all around Europe and suddenly instead of
Speaker 1: standing on stage in front of thirty people on Lowerie's
Speaker 1: side standing on stage in front of ten thousand people
Speaker 1: who knew of the songs that I had made, and
Speaker 1: I it was wonderful, but so disconcerting. Disconcerting and what
Speaker 1: was I've never expected it? Okay, But certainly when you
Speaker 1: go from a club to a festival or a gig
Speaker 1: of ten thousand people, you must add some level of
Speaker 1: stage fright, fear, you know, authenticity figuring you know they're
Speaker 1: I'm gonna go up and then people gonna say, what
Speaker 1: the hell is this? Yeah, oddly enough the stage fright thing.
Speaker 1: So my first ever real solo performance, and I think
Speaker 1: you might appreciate certain aspects of this, was at the Palladium.
Speaker 1: The Palladium was the coolest club in New York and
Speaker 1: I had seen the Clash there, had seen Simple Minds
Speaker 1: there and XTC. I've seen so many shows there. And
Speaker 1: in nine or ninety I got asked to open up
Speaker 1: for the band Snap. Remember Snap, I got the power
Speaker 1: Um rhythm is a dance, sir. So Snap were huge.
Speaker 1: The Power was the biggest song in the world. And
Speaker 1: I somehow, I think the booking agent was dating a
Speaker 1: friend of mine, and so I was going to open
Speaker 1: up for Snap in front of thousands of people at
Speaker 1: the Palladium. So I show up and I do my
Speaker 1: sound check, and this is a lovely, odd little biographical detail.
Speaker 1: The end of my sound check, I hear two people,
Speaker 1: one person clapping, and I'm like, oh, someone's at my
Speaker 1: sound check. And it was my boss, Yuki for Mars,
Speaker 1: happened to be at the Palladium. And I walked out
Speaker 1: to say hi, and there was this very small man
Speaker 1: standing next to him and he said, Moby, meet Miles Davis.
Speaker 1: So my first ever solo show was to two people,
Speaker 1: one of whom was Miles Davis. You quit that too,
Speaker 1: And he wouldn't shake my hand, but he was wearing
Speaker 1: a beautiful suit. And and then ten o'clock rolls around.
Speaker 1: The palladium is filled with bowl and the booking agent
Speaker 1: comes to me and says, oh, bad news Snap didn't
Speaker 1: make their flight, but you can go play. So I
Speaker 1: walk on stage and the m C says, ladies and gentlemen,
Speaker 1: bad news Snap aren't here, but from New York. Moby.
Speaker 1: I hadn't made a record this point. People are booing
Speaker 1: and throwing things, and I walk over to my equipment
Speaker 1: and someone had unplugged it, and so I spent three
Speaker 1: or four minutes in front of five thousand people plugging
Speaker 1: in my equipment and rebooting discs, and they were booing.
Speaker 1: And then when it was finally done and the first
Speaker 1: song started, I was like, oh, I don't care. Like
Speaker 1: I was like, this is the worst experience, this is
Speaker 1: like such a nightmare experience. But I went through it,
Speaker 1: you know, I was like, you were still again. By
Speaker 1: the end of it, they were actually kind of with me.
Speaker 1: And I realized that one thing that can serve for
Speaker 1: armers really well is having a degree of contempt for
Speaker 1: your audience where you can love them fascinating. I love
Speaker 1: that where you can love them but you don't really
Speaker 1: care if they love you in return. And that's when
Speaker 1: you can just perform as opposed to like being some
Speaker 1: like lap dog sick of fans, like saying like, oh
Speaker 1: please love me, just being like, if you love me,
Speaker 1: that's fine. If not, that's fine too, Okay. From the
Speaker 1: Giggots Palladium, how do you end up on top of
Speaker 1: the Pops? And in Europe? Just put that song go
Speaker 1: with the Twin Peaks music on it, and it just
Speaker 1: kept going and then all of a sudden, the rave
Speaker 1: scene blew up in the United States. And at that point,
Speaker 1: as you know, a lot of the rave producers were
Speaker 1: very faceless. You know, they would give themselves alter egos
Speaker 1: and they wouldn't perform. And I was one of the
Speaker 1: only people with a face. And I guess technically they
Speaker 1: all had faces, they just chose not to show them.
Speaker 1: And so I started being on the cover of magazines.
Speaker 1: And there weren't that many public figure tech no producers
Speaker 1: in the United States. They were really a handful. And
Speaker 1: I kept touring and touring and touring and touring with
Speaker 1: the Prodigy and with the Shaman, you remember the band
Speaker 1: and the Shaman, and and I just toured and toured
Speaker 1: and toured like old school Chitland circuit style, like just
Speaker 1: me and a keyboard, okay, a couple of things. Were
Speaker 1: you making any money? I remember I got I played
Speaker 1: one show in the UK and I got paid six
Speaker 1: hundred dollars and I was like, I just got paid
Speaker 1: six hundred dollars. Like I was at that time, I
Speaker 1: was being paid a hundred dollars to DJ, and I
Speaker 1: was like, wow, I just got paid six nights of
Speaker 1: djaying in one night. So up until about two that
Speaker 1: was the most I've ever made. And in retrospect, were
Speaker 1: you being ripped off or that was absolute? Now, when
Speaker 1: I think of like, like Martin Garrick's, I like Martin Garrick's.
Speaker 1: I really like that Animal song quite a lot. A
Speaker 1: young techno producer puts out one song. Six months later,
Speaker 1: he has a private plane and he's getting paid a
Speaker 1: hundred and fifty And I was like, oh, I had
Speaker 1: a top ten single and I was getting paid six
Speaker 1: hundred dollars and I clearly someone else was making a
Speaker 1: lot of money. You're a pro janitor, and at this
Speaker 1: point the act was solely you on stage with little
Speaker 1: octoped and little Yamaha keyboard and a microphone that I
Speaker 1: would yell into being an old punk rocker. Now is
Speaker 1: it okay? And you're traveling? How does the record label
Speaker 1: situation work? Eventually I left instinct because they were they
Speaker 1: as often happens like structurally, they were quite small and
Speaker 1: things were going well for me. So then I signed
Speaker 1: with Mute Records and Electra. So it was with Bob
Speaker 1: Krasnow in Electra here in the States and Daniel Miller
Speaker 1: and Mute everywhere else. And did that work for you? Yeah?
Speaker 1: I mean Daniel Miller and Mute Records, you know, you know,
Speaker 1: Mute Records like Depeche Mode, Nick cave Um, goldfrapp Et, cetera,
Speaker 1: on and on and on, like an amazing, amazing label.
Speaker 1: Daniel has never dropped an artist. So what I signed
Speaker 1: with Mute, I was like, I I'm set, like I
Speaker 1: can do anything, and I know he's never going to
Speaker 1: drop me because he's never dropped an artist. Electra, on
Speaker 1: the other hand, I think they signed me thinking, oh,
Speaker 1: he's going to be our techno wonder kins, like, you know,
Speaker 1: there's this whole genre of music and he's going to
Speaker 1: be the progenitor of it and we're gonna sell millions
Speaker 1: of records. And that never happened. And so I became
Speaker 1: sort of the bastard step child at Electra, understandably because
Speaker 1: I wasn't selling records. But like as a record company person, Okay,
Speaker 1: I don't mean that in a bad way. As a
Speaker 1: I never really worked at a record companies, you don't
Speaker 1: have to worry about offending as someone who has a
Speaker 1: lot of experience around record companies. In I put out
Speaker 1: an album called Everything Is Wrong, and Spin magazine that
Speaker 1: autumn three or four months after it came out, said
Speaker 1: this is going to be our album of the year.
Speaker 1: We went to Electra and said, guess what. Spin at
Speaker 1: the time was a real magazine with paper and everything,
Speaker 1: and we went to them and said, Wow, it's going
Speaker 1: to be the album of the year. And the response
Speaker 1: from Electra was like, oh, sorry, it's already a catalog item.
Speaker 1: There's nothing we can do. And did it fail accordingly? Yeah, okay.
Speaker 1: So at this point in time, for most of the nineties,
Speaker 1: you're putting up music with Mutant Electra and you're touring.
Speaker 1: What kind of audience are especially where this music is
Speaker 1: prominent in the UK and the continent. What kind of
Speaker 1: gigs are you doing? Um? Clubs and raids every now
Speaker 1: and then I would do a solo show, but that
Speaker 1: up until the mid nineties, the solo shows didn't make
Speaker 1: sense because like that genre of electronic dance music, people
Speaker 1: wanted big events, you know, and so you'd played ten
Speaker 1: thousand people and if I did a solo show on
Speaker 1: people hundred and fifty people. Um, and yeah. I remember
Speaker 1: because when I this album everything is wrong. I did
Speaker 1: a solo tour and in some places we sold like
Speaker 1: three d tickets and I was like, I can't believe
Speaker 1: that's like three hundred people coming out to just see me, Like,
Speaker 1: I'm not part of a rave I'm not on tour
Speaker 1: with thirty other people. So that was really exciting. And
Speaker 1: are you getting frustrated because you're queer is at this
Speaker 1: level or you still believe there's something beyond or is
Speaker 1: just beyond your wildest dreams? So I mentioned earlier my
Speaker 1: high school punk rock band, The Vatican Commandos sold two
Speaker 1: hundred copies of a seven inch Everything beyond that has
Speaker 1: been unimaginable success. Okay, but at one point you get
Speaker 1: frustrated and to change your sound. Well then, then in
Speaker 1: the late nineties, I decided to make a punk rock
Speaker 1: record because I think, like the artists you and I
Speaker 1: grew up revering. I thought that part of being a
Speaker 1: musician was to experiment and take chances, and to be
Speaker 1: lou Reid making metal machine music, to be the Beatles
Speaker 1: and making Revolution number nine, to be David Bowie and
Speaker 1: go from like the Laughing Gnome to a Philadelphia disco artist.
Speaker 1: Like I thought that's what musicians did. So I made
Speaker 1: this very dark punk rock record because I thought it
Speaker 1: was part of the job description of being a musician
Speaker 1: to experiment, and it got crucified, like I got. Everyone
Speaker 1: hated it except for a few people. Bono told me
Speaker 1: he liked it as much as the First Class album.
Speaker 1: Um Axel Rose, who now hates me, told me that
Speaker 1: he would listen to it on repeat while driving around
Speaker 1: l A. But the best is I got one piece
Speaker 1: of fan mail from Terence Trent Darby on Tarrent Trent
Speaker 1: Darby Purple Stationary telling me how much he liked the record.
Speaker 1: So the three of them liked it. Okay, so the
Speaker 1: motivation was just about expanding your horizons. I just, I
Speaker 1: just I been making electronic music and I really missed
Speaker 1: playing guitar and screaming. And then after the reaction, generally
Speaker 1: speaking is negative. What headspace does that leave you? Well,
Speaker 1: it was a very dark time because I've been sober
Speaker 1: for eight years and then I started drinking again, started
Speaker 1: dating a lot of professional sex workers, as you do,
Speaker 1: um my mom, when are we talking about literally professional
Speaker 1: sex workers. We're talking about people in the nightlife sphere
Speaker 1: who live that lifestyle, people who would get paid to
Speaker 1: have sex. Okay, what do we call that dating? Well,
Speaker 1: I guess I Luckily I was not a customer. I
Speaker 1: was a boyfriend, you know. And then also like Dominatrix
Speaker 1: is strippers, phone sex workers, you know. Now this is
Speaker 1: a whole another aspect. I mean, for those of us
Speaker 1: who haven't walked on the dark side of the street,
Speaker 1: how do you find these people? You live in Lower
Speaker 1: Manhattan in the nineties, Like, you know, it's like like
Speaker 1: bagels and professional sex workers? Okay? Were these hookers were
Speaker 1: the heart of gold? Were they just low class people? Uh? No,
Speaker 1: they were what I found and m hmmm, sort of
Speaker 1: like growing up really poor. I don't know. For some reason,
Speaker 1: I've always been attracted to friends or dating people who
Speaker 1: sort of wear their brokenness on their sleeve. You know,
Speaker 1: did you try to fix them? There's a little holding
Speaker 1: cau Field is um going on there? Yeah? Like, you know,
Speaker 1: you stepped in these relationships with these broken people. They end,
Speaker 1: how usually with me having panic attacks and running away? Really,
Speaker 1: so do you still have panic attacks today? Only when
Speaker 1: I try to get close to anyone. But apart from that,
Speaker 1: I'm fine? Yeah? Is that really pano deck just a
Speaker 1: fear of intimacy? Oh no, it's full on. So what
Speaker 1: did the professionals say about that. The professionals say that
Speaker 1: because I've seen quite a lot of them that I
Speaker 1: have panic attack. I mean, I was part of a
Speaker 1: study on panic attack suffers at Columbia. I've seen a
Speaker 1: lot lots of therapists been medicated. It doesn't. But what
Speaker 1: we know about panic, because I used to suffer from bags,
Speaker 1: is if you wait long enough, the panic will evaporate. Yes,
Speaker 1: which largely is true. Unfortunately, I was diagnosed to Columbia's
Speaker 1: having a very unique type of panic disorder. It's called
Speaker 1: plateaued panic disorder. I once had a panic attack that
Speaker 1: lasted for six months. And I'm not kidding. It started
Speaker 1: and it just when I went to sleep. I wasn't panicking,
Speaker 1: but I'd wake up and it would come right back.
Speaker 1: Every waking minute I'd go to sleep, wake up, it
Speaker 1: would come right back. And it only started waning about
Speaker 1: six months into it. And but you could sleep with yeah,
Speaker 1: like I would pass out just through exhaustion. Okay, Then uh,
Speaker 1: let's wind it back. You go through the dark period
Speaker 1: subsequent to your punk rock record, and then what are
Speaker 1: you the thoughts in your brain as far as moving forward?
Speaker 1: So I make the punk rock cracker called animal rights
Speaker 1: um starting again. My mom dies of lung cancer. I
Speaker 1: lose that. Did your mother acknowledge and respect your success? Oh?
Speaker 1: She loved it, She loved it. There's the most adorable
Speaker 1: story is when I put out the album Everything is
Speaker 1: Wrong on a major label, Electric Records. She took a
Speaker 1: review to the editor of the Dairy En News Review
Speaker 1: and she walked in the Dairy and News Review circulation
Speaker 1: five ten, and she walked in. She said, my son
Speaker 1: is a famous musician. You should write about him. Did
Speaker 1: they eventually, like I think ten years later. Yeah, it
Speaker 1: was a big deal. Like to an interview for day mother,
Speaker 1: your father's dead, your mother's passage, you were now an orphan.
Speaker 1: Do you have any other family that you had connection with?
Speaker 1: Two aunts and uncles, some cousins who I love very much,
Speaker 1: but against a little Russian literature. On my mom's deathbed,
Speaker 1: she told me that I have a half brother somewhere, somewhere, somewhere.
Speaker 1: She got pregnant in high school, had a child put
Speaker 1: up for adoption, and I found out about this right
Speaker 1: before she died. And if you found that person, no,
Speaker 1: But fast forward to the year two thousand seven. Um
Speaker 1: Uh Alexandra Pelosi, Nancy Pelosi's daughter, and I are in
Speaker 1: d C. Hanging out with Nancy. At this point Nancy
Speaker 1: Speaker of the House. Um, so she was surrounded. I mean,
Speaker 1: she's third in line to the presidency, so it's a
Speaker 1: she's a big deal, and he's always been a big deal.
Speaker 1: But I got very drunk and I was talking to
Speaker 1: a journalist from Politico and somehow this came up that
Speaker 1: I have a half brother, and I joking, he said,
Speaker 1: maybe it's Karl Rove and he then he wrote a
Speaker 1: funny little piece our Mobi and Karl Rove brothers. Keep
Speaker 1: minding if you don't. I told this story once and
Speaker 1: the person was like, who's Karl Rove. I was like, oh,
Speaker 1: that's right, you're young. Um so, so Karl Rove was.
Speaker 1: He's the one essentially was the architect of the Bush
Speaker 1: white House. And so two weeks after this article comes out,
Speaker 1: I get a letter on White House stationary, handwritten and said,
Speaker 1: I haven't memorized, dear Moby, or is that Mr Moby?
Speaker 1: It's not me. For one thing, I am seventeen years
Speaker 1: older than you, and I have no musical ability. Have
Speaker 1: you considered James Carville as he's bald and plays the guitar.
Speaker 1: I haven't framed in my bathroom your pal Karl Rove,
Speaker 1: so of the three and a half billion men on
Speaker 1: the planet, I know that Karl Rove is not my brother,
Speaker 1: so you'll still be hunting. You're listening to my conversation
Speaker 1: with Grammy nominated DJ Moby. We'll be back in a moment.
Speaker 1: I hope you're enjoying listening to this episode of the
Speaker 1: Bob Left Sets podcast. If you want to see videos
Speaker 1: and photos of our guests, go to at tune in
Speaker 1: on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Now more of Moby and
Speaker 1: me in front of a live studio audience at the
Speaker 1: l A Times Festival. Book on the Bob Left Sets podcast.
Speaker 1: So in this dark period, how do you decide to
Speaker 1: make music again? And what music do you then make? Well?
Speaker 1: I was playing Glastonbury, do you know. Glastonbury's sort of
Speaker 1: like one of the original biggest festivals in the world
Speaker 1: and in the UK. And um, I was playing Glastonbury.
Speaker 1: It was raining, it was muddy, and it was disgusting,
Speaker 1: and they wanted me to play a dance music set
Speaker 1: and I had and I this is after the Animal
Speaker 1: Rights the rock record, and I wanted to make a
Speaker 1: darker punk rock record. I was like, Animal Rights wasn't
Speaker 1: dark enough. It was pretty dark, and I wanted to
Speaker 1: make like a super like Sepultura inspired dark punk rock record.
Speaker 1: And one of my managers said the simplest little thing.
Speaker 1: He said, well you could do that, he said, but
Speaker 1: you know, your electronic music makes people happy, and that
Speaker 1: was what reached me. He didn't say you could sell more,
Speaker 1: he didn't say it would be better for your career.
Speaker 1: He said it makes people happy. And all of a sudden,
Speaker 1: I thought like, oh, if I have the ability to
Speaker 1: put music out into the world, why not try to
Speaker 1: make people happy? And so then, um, I lost my
Speaker 1: deal with Electra and I made the album Play thinking
Speaker 1: it was going to be my last album. Okay, you
Speaker 1: thought it was going to be your last album for
Speaker 1: Elektra or his last album period period, because no one
Speaker 1: was into I mean, I was such a has been
Speaker 1: at this point, Like I was like, as has been
Speaker 1: as it has been, could be. That record ultimately came
Speaker 1: out in V two Richard Brimpson's and people. Yeah in
Speaker 1: the US, um was the record done when they picked
Speaker 1: it up? Yeah, one of the n r. People at
Speaker 1: V two had heard somehow heard one of the songs
Speaker 1: on NPR some college radio station upstate New York, and
Speaker 1: they signed it for North America. Okay, a licensing deal,
Speaker 1: which is great because now I own it again. Okay,
Speaker 1: so the record you're making it, It had a number
Speaker 1: of guests, spots, etcetera. For those looking at your career,
Speaker 1: this would be a larger step of broater thing than
Speaker 1: you would have done previously. Oh it was. I mean
Speaker 1: everything about it is baffling. And made it on old,
Speaker 1: broken equipment in my tiny little studio on Mott Street. UM.
Speaker 1: Some of the songs are mixed onto cassette. There are
Speaker 1: three songs on Play that are demos that were recorded
Speaker 1: to cassette. UM. Made for a budget of exactly zero
Speaker 1: dollars and released with no expectations Like I remember someone
Speaker 1: at V two saying, you know what, we think Play
Speaker 1: could sell fifty copies, and I was like, it was
Speaker 1: m Richard Sanders, do you know Richard? Sir Richard said,
Speaker 1: you know what, we actually have high hopes for Play.
Speaker 1: We think it could sell fifty thousand copies. Fast forward
Speaker 1: a year, it was selling two copies a week. With
Speaker 1: that or alternately, that is not true and I am
Speaker 1: just hallucinating somewhere and this is all okay, So you
Speaker 1: make that record. There are a lot of legends about
Speaker 1: that record. One that every track was licensed for commercials?
Speaker 1: A is that literally true? Every track was licensed, but
Speaker 1: a lot of the licenses were actually for like student
Speaker 1: films because I'm tight, etcetera. So like there were a
Speaker 1: lot of commercial licenses for which I was crucified over
Speaker 1: and over and over and over and over once again
Speaker 1: at the bleeding edge looking back at your career. Was
Speaker 1: that your effort, the label's effort, the manager's effort. How
Speaker 1: did those licenses come to first? Okay, so the album
Speaker 1: Everything is wrong, I had it. There's a song on
Speaker 1: They're called God Moving over the Face of the Water.
Speaker 1: So it was used in Michael Man's Heat Thanks um.
Speaker 1: Range Rover came to me and said, we want to
Speaker 1: give you a hundred and fifty thou dollars to use
Speaker 1: God Moving over the Face of the Waters in a
Speaker 1: Range Rover commercial. My knee jerk reaction was to say,
Speaker 1: fuck you, Range Rover. You know I'm an old punk rocker.
Speaker 1: I don't even have a driver's license, like go funk yourself.
Speaker 1: But then but then I thought, I was like, well,
Speaker 1: if I go to if I go to Green Peace
Speaker 1: and say I got offered a hundred and fifty thousand
Speaker 1: dollars to license music to Range Rover, and I told
Speaker 1: him to go funk themselves. Some my green piece would
Speaker 1: say good for you. Or if I said, oh, here's
Speaker 1: a check for a hundred and fifty thousand dollars, they'd
Speaker 1: be a lot happier. So I sort of decided to
Speaker 1: enter this faustian robin hood slash bargain where I was like,
Speaker 1: I will license my music as long as ultimately I
Speaker 1: do good things with the money. All of the money
Speaker 1: over time, yes, we look, yeah, absolutely over time. That
Speaker 1: is the goal is to like any money that has
Speaker 1: come in from licensing, I have to get rid of Wow.
Speaker 1: So in any event, you're like, I also would like
Speaker 1: to say in the early two thousands, I did forget
Speaker 1: about that for a while, you know, so now trying
Speaker 1: to like maya culpa makeup for it. Okay, but the
Speaker 1: record is not an instant here. It's successful, but it's
Speaker 1: not mega. I mean, it's old. Four thousand copies the
Speaker 1: week it was released, and then two thousand copies the
Speaker 1: next week and then a thousand copies the week after that,
Speaker 1: And the licensing to your question was mainly done because
Speaker 1: music supervisors were the only people interested, like k CRW
Speaker 1: here and people who wanted to use the music and
Speaker 1: TV shows where that was the only attention the record
Speaker 1: was getting. So we just said yes. And what was
Speaker 1: the turning point to breakthrough on the record that blew
Speaker 1: it up? In your mind? The turning point was Danny
Speaker 1: Boyle using porcelain in the movie The Beach, because The
Speaker 1: Beach with Leo DiCaprio's first movie after Titanic, so everyone
Speaker 1: went to see it and they used porcelain when they
Speaker 1: get to the beach, when they get to the island,
Speaker 1: and you could just sense like that was the moment
Speaker 1: where like it went from being a weird, little underground
Speaker 1: record to all of a sudden like being so much
Speaker 1: bigger than that. And then you're tied up with Gwen Stefani,
Speaker 1: You're all over MTV. What's it like being the either
Speaker 1: hurricane on that? It was great because it was also
Speaker 1: bad anthropologically baffling, because I thought this was going to
Speaker 1: be my last record and I was going to move
Speaker 1: back to Connecticut teach philosophy at community college, and you know,
Speaker 1: being a loveless marriage, um and and and part of
Speaker 1: the player and die. And then all of a sudden,
Speaker 1: like there are movie stars coming to my concerts and
Speaker 1: they want to date me, and I'm getting invited to
Speaker 1: amazing parties and instead of playing too like the touring,
Speaker 1: for example, in the UK, the first show that I
Speaker 1: did was at a place called the Scala on the
Speaker 1: Play tour and we sold four hundred tickets, which I
Speaker 1: thought was great. The last show was selling out Wembley
Speaker 1: and adding a show at Brixton Academy Stadium the Arenas,
Speaker 1: which is like fifteen thousand. Um actually did end up
Speaker 1: playing Wembley Stadium, but it's a much later and it
Speaker 1: has not. It was I was playing a corporate event
Speaker 1: and there were two hundred people there. And if you've
Speaker 1: ever played two hundred people in a stadium that holds
Speaker 1: sixty thousand, things are not working. These are these are
Speaker 1: going up. You started off the playing the four hundred,
Speaker 1: now you're playing the fifteen thousand, and what are you thinking.
Speaker 1: I'm thinking that this is the answer to every problem
Speaker 1: I've ever had, and you ultimately learned that it's not,
Speaker 1: of course. Yeah, And then I was like, I was like,
Speaker 1: I mean, I just finished writing memoir too, And there's
Speaker 1: this one scene. I mean, I feel very narcissistic quoting myself,
Speaker 1: but there's a scene where like I'm playing a concert
Speaker 1: and I look over at the side of the stage
Speaker 1: and there's like Madonna and Gwyneth Paltrow Natalie Portman dancing
Speaker 1: and and I imagine a conversation with myself, like me
Speaker 1: with like the old eighteen year old punk rocker, and
Speaker 1: the eighteen year old punk rocker is like, fuck you,
Speaker 1: don't you know celebrity culture is facile and like you're
Speaker 1: such a running dog, licks bittle accommodator to these paradigms
Speaker 1: that you know are cheap and shitty. And I was like, yeah,
Speaker 1: but they're being nice to me. It's like Howard Sterring today. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so did you test the waters all of them? Yeah?
Speaker 1: Of course? And what did you learn witch waters? I mean,
Speaker 1: like the water. You know, you're saying the door opens up.
Speaker 1: You're a recognizable character. You talk about not feeling good
Speaker 1: about yourself and therefore dating sex workers. Suddenly iconic people
Speaker 1: are interested in you. Was that something that you then
Speaker 1: proceeded to date those people, of course, and what was
Speaker 1: that like? Uh interesting? Because you Okay, So we live
Speaker 1: in a culture where and I'm stating the obvious, but
Speaker 1: we live in a culture where we're all instilled with
Speaker 1: the belief that if you have the right combination of
Speaker 1: like fame, money, sex, etcetera, everything's going to work out.
Speaker 1: And I was given all of that times a thousand,
Speaker 1: and I was never less happy. You know. So, like
Speaker 1: the more I drank, the more people I dated, the
Speaker 1: more drugs I did, the more money I made. And
Speaker 1: I'm not looking for sympathy, and I'm not complaining, but
Speaker 1: it's just an old school object lesson of Like, you know,
Speaker 1: I found myself in a penthouse apartment on the Upper
Speaker 1: West Side with Bono and Alec Baldwin as my neighbor,
Speaker 1: and I've never been less happy. I love Bonno and
Speaker 1: Alec Baldwin. I'm not I'm not involving them in my despair.
Speaker 1: But people also find out that really this roving jet
Speaker 1: set are just not your people. Yeah, well that's the thing.
Speaker 1: Like I grew up with the idea that like, if
Speaker 1: you're going to a party, if you get invited to
Speaker 1: a party with Bill Clinton and George Plimpton and Natalie Portman.
Speaker 1: There's lots of similar sounding last names, um, and there's
Speaker 1: all these like luminaries and celebrities, you know, like the
Speaker 1: most remarkable famous, even at times areadite people in the world.
Speaker 1: Like you think, Wow, if I could just be friends
Speaker 1: with them, things are going to be great. And then
Speaker 1: you're at that party and you're like, oh, they're not
Speaker 1: so great, you know, like you realize, like, oh, the
Speaker 1: friends I grew up with are nicer and funnier, and
Speaker 1: the people I went to high school with actually are
Speaker 1: a little more insightful and humble. I'm sure you've had
Speaker 1: that experience mattersolutely. But then I asked, what did we am?
Speaker 1: I a writer and therefore inherently a loner. We all
Speaker 1: like the experience when you're sitting there and you get
Speaker 1: a letter from Bano or even Carl, etcetera. But then
Speaker 1: you have enough experiences where you're in these environments, the
Speaker 1: door opens and to go, do I really belong here?
Speaker 1: Is this fulfilling for me? Especially at first because it
Speaker 1: was so exciting and you're like, there's Gwenny's and she's
Speaker 1: being nice to me. And there's in such a movie
Speaker 1: star who even wants to go on a date with me,
Speaker 1: And you're like, this is great, And then you take
Speaker 1: a step back and you're like, but I haven't had
Speaker 1: a meaningful conversation with anyone. And it's basically every public
Speaker 1: figure I've ever met is this messy combination of entitlement
Speaker 1: and terror. You talk about the terror. We certainly know
Speaker 1: the entitle the terrors that it's going to go away.
Speaker 1: Speaking of going away, you have this gargantuan success with play.
Speaker 1: To what degree do you feel internal pressure to follow
Speaker 1: it up? Do something different? Can I reach this level?
Speaker 1: And if you look at someone like at the Pinnacle
Speaker 1: Michael Jackson, he has his pinnacle with thrill and when
Speaker 1: she tries to imitate ultimately badly. Okay, But you have
Speaker 1: this iconic success, and except for maybe some of the
Speaker 1: people in your electronic world, it might be jealous. It
Speaker 1: was a universally adored record and everybody loved the record.
Speaker 1: So moving forward, what were your thoughts moving forward? My
Speaker 1: thought was, I want more fame. I want more of
Speaker 1: everything I have. If I'm going out five nights a week,
Speaker 1: I want to go out seven nights a week. If
Speaker 1: I'm sleeping with ten people, I want to sleep with
Speaker 1: twenty people. If I want if I sold ten million records,
Speaker 1: I want to sell twenty million records. Like I lost
Speaker 1: my fucking mind. Like I wanted everything, but more of everything,
Speaker 1: and slowly things didn't work out, like you know, like
Speaker 1: play was the peak, and then the subsequent records the
Speaker 1: reviews got bad, started selling fewer tickets, etcetera. And I
Speaker 1: panicked because I thought that fame and records say as
Speaker 1: an all this. All I wanted was for everything to
Speaker 1: stay at the peak of play every day for the
Speaker 1: rest of my life, and not to anthropomorphize the universe.
Speaker 1: But the universe had other plans in mind form So
Speaker 1: but in your mind you tried to replicate the successful play.
Speaker 1: Oh absolutely, I mean I tried to make music that
Speaker 1: I liked, but I tried to also tick as many
Speaker 1: boxes as possible. I was like, well, I want to
Speaker 1: I don't want to a complete lick spittle sell out,
Speaker 1: So I want to make music I like that. Also,
Speaker 1: radio programmers will like that, journalists will like that, the
Speaker 1: people at the record company will like that, the sync
Speaker 1: agents will like that, the licensees will like And I
Speaker 1: realized there are people who are good at that, like
Speaker 1: they're as you know, Like there are tons of great
Speaker 1: pop producers who know how to make great records that
Speaker 1: also do well at radio, etcetera. I'm not that person,
Speaker 1: you know. And the more I tried, the worst the results.
Speaker 1: In retrospect, if you had to do it all over again,
Speaker 1: would you be able to make records that resonated more
Speaker 1: or more successful or those those records just you know,
Speaker 1: it wasn't your time anymore. Um, everything is perfect. I
Speaker 1: mean at the time, I would have said, yes, like
Speaker 1: show me how to make a more successful record, show
Speaker 1: me how to produce a pop song that will give
Speaker 1: me back the career, the pinnacle that I had with play.
Speaker 1: But now you and I are sitting here, We're ober
Speaker 1: and healthy. I've got a nice bunch of people here, Um,
Speaker 1: and I have a perspective that's informed by success and failure.
Speaker 1: And if you like your perspective, you can't be too
Speaker 1: upset at the circumstances that have led you to have
Speaker 1: that perspective. Okay, let's go back to some of the
Speaker 1: highlights or low lights of that era. Eminem famously dissed
Speaker 1: you in a song, Were you happy about that MORTI five. Um.
Speaker 1: At first I thought it was a joke, and then
Speaker 1: I ran into him at the two thousand and two
Speaker 1: MTV Music Awards and he tried to attack me. He
Speaker 1: also attacked Triumph to insult comic dogs. So I was like,
Speaker 1: clearly he was having a bad day to go after
Speaker 1: like a skinny, bald vegan and a puppet. Um. But
Speaker 1: but up until that moment, I thought like, oh, this
Speaker 1: is like because I actually I don't know Eminem but
Speaker 1: I like some of his music. Um, I think he's
Speaker 1: a fascinating public figure. Uh. So I didn't know that
Speaker 1: it was serious like that he really hated me. So
Speaker 1: at this point in you've continued to make music, but
Speaker 1: the peak of your success is nearly two decades back.
Speaker 1: So what ignites you, what keeps you going? What do
Speaker 1: you want to do now? Uh? The goal, I'm at
Speaker 1: the risk of sounding too much like a vegan who
Speaker 1: lives in Los Angeles who meditates. The goal is just like,
Speaker 1: it's the pursuit of beauty. It's the idea that every
Speaker 1: day when I go into my studio there's an opportunity
Speaker 1: to make something beautiful. Not that I do, but it's
Speaker 1: I've always admired the work ethic of like Flannery, O'Connor, Picasso, soldiers,
Speaker 1: and like the people who just day in, day out worked,
Speaker 1: you know, and you show up with the hope that
Speaker 1: you'll be inspired and inspired in the old etymological sense
Speaker 1: of inspired, to have like the breath of inspiration breathed
Speaker 1: into And if I spend my entire life trying to
Speaker 1: do that and it doesn't work out, at least I
Speaker 1: loved the process of doing it. And do you make music?
Speaker 1: How frequently? Every day without every day? But you don't
Speaker 1: release all that music either about six or seven thousand
Speaker 1: unreleased songs. And but we live in an era where
Speaker 1: theoretically you could release that, except a lot of it's
Speaker 1: not good. So what do you feel? How do you
Speaker 1: feel about all the changes in the music business? You
Speaker 1: know there are issues of music monetization, but it used
Speaker 1: to be especially you know, you were like the tail
Speaker 1: end of this with play. We lived on a monoculture
Speaker 1: and if you were successful, everybody knew you. Whereas a
Speaker 1: Vici dies, I'm getting emails saying I never heard one
Speaker 1: of his songs, even though weak Me Up five years
Speaker 1: ago was one of the biggest records of all time.
Speaker 1: So what's it like being a musician in this era?
Speaker 1: I mean to stomach, and I feel like I can't
Speaker 1: speak to that experience, you know, because I'm fifty two
Speaker 1: years old. I sold a lot of records a long
Speaker 1: time ago. Um. So, like whenever I if I do
Speaker 1: interviews and I talked about my opinions about the current
Speaker 1: state of the music business, understandably, so will tend to
Speaker 1: dismiss my opinion. They're like, I understand, I believe, we understand.
Speaker 1: And what gets you off now other than making music?
Speaker 1: What what turns you on? Uh? Well, so, But to
Speaker 1: your question about the music business selfishly, personally, I love
Speaker 1: the current state as the music business. I love how
Speaker 1: egalitarian it is. Um. I love that anyone anywhere in
Speaker 1: the world can make music and actually potentially have an
Speaker 1: audience for it. UM, I don't love We'll think of
Speaker 1: it like a qualitative gray goo. Do you remember the
Speaker 1: concept of a gray goo? Don't know that at some
Speaker 1: point automated technology would get to the point where like
Speaker 1: just we're just spewing out stuff and the world would
Speaker 1: be covered in gray goo. And I think musically we
Speaker 1: sometimes are at risk of that we're like, it's very
Speaker 1: easy to make okay music, you know, with Ableton without
Speaker 1: and I love these software platforms. But it's easy to
Speaker 1: make music that's pretty good. But what about imagine? You know,
Speaker 1: what about Cat Stevens, what about the Rolling Stones? What
Speaker 1: about like when music is transcendent? I I don't hear
Speaker 1: that much of it. I know it's being made, but
Speaker 1: I feel like I do miss when you had, like
Speaker 1: professional musicians who would like when Leonard Collin would write
Speaker 1: to Suzanne and it took him three years to write
Speaker 1: that song. I missed that, you know that the transcendence.
Speaker 1: But I also like how democratic and egalitarian, you know.
Speaker 1: I like that you know, all the barriers are done,
Speaker 1: everybody can play, but just as a fan, it's hard
Speaker 1: to wait get through them. Morass, there's so much stuff.
Speaker 1: I mean, you go on Spotify, listen to the Spotify
Speaker 1: Top fifty, and then you know there's all the genres.
Speaker 1: It's overwhelming. In any event, we've come to the end
Speaker 1: of the feeling we've known, and I thank you all
Speaker 1: for attending. Moby has been incredible. Very are unite intellectual
Speaker 1: responses yourself. I could go on for another hour, but
Speaker 1: they tell us our time is up once again. Mob.
Speaker 1: That wraps up this week's episode of the Bob Left
Speaker 1: Sets podcast, recorded live on the University of Southern California
Speaker 1: campus at the l A Times Festival of Books. I
Speaker 1: hope you enjoyed this fascinating conversation with Moby. As always,
Speaker 1: I welcome your feedback. Email me at Bob at left
Speaker 1: sets dot com. Until next time, It's Bob left Sez
Speaker 1: think me reas don't know exactly