For Moby, writing a book was antidote for fame withdrawal
DJ/producer best known for 1999’s Play has since come to terms with dignified defeat
LOS ANGELES— As a famously brainy electronic musician — and a descendant of literary royalty — Moby had plenty of lodestars he might have looked to while writing his first book.
There was, for instance, Brian Eno, the pop experimentalist who reflected on his work with U2 and David Bowie in his 1996 volume A Year With Swollen Appendices. And the distant ancestor from whom Moby got his nickname: Moby-Dick author Herman Melville.
In reality, the DJ and producer best known for 1999’s multi-platinum Play album took inspiration from a more unlikely source: Duff McKa- gan, the tattooed bassist in Guns N’ Roses.
“Honestly, I’d never given much thought to the guy before I read his memoir,” Moby said at home in Los Angeles, referring to It’s So Easy (and Other Lies), in which McKagan writes frankly about the excess and the illusions of show business. “But he wrote a book that’s good enough that it transcends the fact that I wasn’t interested in him.”
Engaging readers with the quality of his prose rather than the vestiges of his celebrity — that, along with not tarnishing his family’s legacy — was Moby’s goal with Porcelain, a lovingly composed memoir that tracks his journey from living in an abandoned factory in Connecticut to playing the hottest clubs in New York and Europe.
The book isn’t without its share of insider-y music talk, including funny memories from a mid-’90s Lollapalooza tour and a revealing look at how musicians clear samples. More than a beat-maker’s how-to or a rundown of his famous friends, though, Porcelain reads like an intimate meditation on the various contradictions Moby has resolved over the course of his 50 years: his Christian faith versus his hedonistic streak; his hunger for stardom versus his retiring nature.
The book is also a tender ode to a vanished New York City, Moby’s longtime home before he resettled in Los Angeles in 2010. His vivid de- scriptions of the downtown club scene — “glamorous teenage trannies, drug-addled old queens, peedrinking contests, people dressed as giant chickens” — give a clear sense of time and place that many musicians’ memoirs don’t provide.
Though he’s continued to make music since his commercial peak, Moby has seemed to spend more time in recent years on other pursuits. In 2011, he released a volume of photographs, Destroyed, and last year he opened Little Pine, a vegan bistro in Silver Lake. He also bought and restored Wolf’s Lair, a historic estate in the Hollywood Hills, before selling it in 2014 for $12.4 million (U.S.).
He gets the idea, held by some, that each of these is a kind of vanity project, a means of extending the renown that had started to wane by the mid-2000s. But Moby takes the opposite view: to him, throwing himself wholeheartedly into the photography and the restaurant and especially the book has served as a method of managed withdrawal.
“When I got that first taste of big fame, I didn’t want it to ever go away,” he said. “I desperately wanted to be a beautiful rock star — some hybrid of Thom Yorke, Robert Plant and Johnny Depp — forever.”
Gradually losing it hurt at the time, he said: “I was like a crack-addicted grizzly bear being separated from its cubs.” But now he’s thankful it didn’t last. “The more attached I became to attention, the less happy I was. I became a bad friend, a bad family member, a bad person to date.”
With a laugh, he said the work he’s done lately sharpening other skills — and making smaller-scale records like his latest, this year’s instructively titled Long Ambients1: Calm. Sleep. — reflects “the dignity of defeat.”