Then It Fell Apart

by Moby

  “Chill out, man, we’re havin’ fun,” Furman said, smiling at me with boozy, lupine teeth.

  I went back to walking around the little island by myself, crying in the woods while the adults smoked pot and drank cheap beer and listened to the James Gang on a portable eight-track player.

  Today, after my mom and Furman were done smoking pot, she dressed me up as a little Indian, with my own fringe vest and a headband with feathers in it.

  “I don’t think the other kids are dressing up, Mom,” I complained.

  “But it’s Indian Guides,” she said, putting an extra seagull feather in my headband.

  Furman and I left my grandparents’ house and cut silently through some of the backyards between their house and Jeff’s. We were stepping over a Revolutionary War-era stone wall when Furman stumbled and fell. “Fuck!” he yelled, falling heavily into some leaves and mud.

  I looked around, hoping nobody was nearby to hear him swear. He’d said a bad word that you weren’t supposed to say, even though I heard my mom’s friends say it a lot when they were high or talking about politics. Furman had torn a small hole in his leather pants, and he was furious. “Fuck this,” he said.

  I gaped at him, not sure what to do with this gigantic, angry grown-up.

  “What the fuck are you looking at?” he barked at me.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  It was early September, and I had been in a good mood because in a few days I was going to turn seven. I was hoping that for my birthday my grandparents and mom would take me to the restaurant at Old McDonald’s Farm, on the border of Darien and Norwalk. Old McDonald’s Farm was my favorite place in the world. They served root beer in frosted mugs, and while you waited for your food to come out you could go to the petting zoo and feed corn to the chickens. They even had a nine-hole miniature golf course; I was hoping that my grandfather and I could play before my birthday dinner. Assuming that I made it to my birthday and Furman didn’t strangle me in this copse behind Jeff’s house.

  Normally when my mom and her friends got high they were happy and smiling, if distracted. But Furman was not happy and smiling. He stormed off, muttering to himself.

  At Jeff’s house the Indian Guide dads were gathered around a long metal pancake grill, set up between the pool and the tennis court. Jeff’s dad, our Indian Guide troop leader, saw Furman in his leather fringe vest and said good-naturedly, “Hey, a real Indian’s here!”

  Furman stopped short and said, clearly and simply, “Fuck. You.” He turned and walked away, down the driveway and then down the street, leaving me alone. There was an awkward silence. All the fathers and the other Indian Guides looked at me. Nobody except me was dressed up in feathers; everyone else was wearing shorts and polo shirts.

  I recognized the look of embarrassment and pity I was getting from the dads. They felt sorry for me because I was poor and fatherless, but I could tell they wished I’d had the decency to stay home. Whenever I showed up in their clean, manicured world I brought the stain of poverty with me.

  I stood on the patio in my vest and headdress and started to cry. I was so ashamed.

  One of the fathers walked over with a paper plate full of food. He guided me to a picnic table with a checkered vinyl tablecloth and parked me on the bench. I sat there, crying. My friends Terry and John came over. They were brothers, part of the only Catholic family in the neighborhood. “What’s wrong?” Terry asked.

  I was six years old, my dad was dead, my mom was a hippie, I was poor, and I’d just been unceremoniously dumped in a suburban backyard by a stoned, furious motorcycle gang member. But I couldn’t say any of that. I kept crying onto my pancakes and sausages.

  14

  NEW YORK CITY (2000)

  Singing “Oh babe” felt awkward. But I’d been working on this song for a while and I couldn’t think of anything else to sing in the chorus. And this “Oh babe” wasn’t sweet or a sensual come-on; it was desperate. I had already recorded myself singing “Oh babe, then it fell apart,” but now I was rattling my brain, looking for a better phrase than “Oh babe.”

  I tried singing “Oh lady.” No.

  How about “Oh maybe”? No.

  “Oh now”? No.

  “Babe” was kind of trite, and overused in the rock-music lexicon, but it sounded better than any of the other words I was trying out.

  I had one week at home between a tour of Europe and a tour of Australia, and was spending as much of that time as I could recording new music. Play had pushed me into the strange pantheon of famous globe-trotting musicians, but my little studio on Mott Street was unchanged. It had originally been designed as a bedroom, but I used it as a place to work on music because, unlike the rest of the loft, it was air-conditioned and quiet. My actual “bedroom” was a storage space under a small flight of stairs. Barely big enough for my bed, it felt like a mid-century, blond-wood version of Harry Potter’s bedroom on Privet Drive.

  The rest of my loft hadn’t changed much since I moved in in 1995. My off-white couch was on its last legs – literally, since it had collapsed under the weight of some friends who had drunkenly danced on it a month ago. Two of the legs had snapped, and I was currently propping it up with piles of books and some pieces of wood I’d found in the hallway. The couch also had red stains on the upholstery because a friend and his girlfriend had had sex on it while she was menstruating. I’d turned the cushions over, but there were still some bloody handprints on the back.

  In my tiny studio I had equipment scattered everywhere and tapes heaped in random piles. My little gray mixing desk was on top of a wobbly table, which I couldn’t lean on because I’d built it out of chipped plywood from a dumpster and it gave me splinters. My keyboards were held up by milk crates; even as a vegan, I had to appreciate their sturdy utility. Plus milk crates were free (if you took them without asking). And they were perfect for storing and transporting vinyl, propping up musical equipment, and using as chairs when you ran out of places to sit. I had borrowed these particular milk crates in the late 1980s from the Stop & Shop near my grandmother’s house in Norwalk, Connecticut – although most likely I wouldn’t be bringing them back.

  Earlier that day my friend Lee had come by for lunch. “So this is where millionaire musicians work?” he asked, taking in the squalor of the studio. “You know, I think you can afford something a little nicer.”

  He was right, but I loved my little studio.

  This new song was sounding like it could have been an outtake from Exile on Main St. Or rather, I hoped it sounded like it could have been an outtake from Exile on Main St.

  I’d been working on the song for a couple of hours, and so far all I had was a slightly shouty chorus and some loud guitars. I added programmed drums, but they held the song back with their rigidity. So I dug through my drum-sample library and found a few breakbeats. They had a looseness the song needed, so I looped them and erased the programmed drums.

  Now I had some guitars, a chorus, and some breakbeats, but I needed a verse. A trick I’d learned from listening to Neil Young records was: “When in doubt, use the same chords in the verse that you’ve used in the chorus, just play them quieter.” So I tried a verse that used the same chord progression as the chorus, but more restrained. And it worked.

  I turned on the same cheap SM58 microphone I’d used for the past decade and sang, “Extreme ways are back again,” with no idea where the line had come from. In the mid-1980s I’d taken a community college course on the history of surrealism, and learned that Marcel Duchamp and the other surrealists hadn’t been weird for the sake of being weird, they had been trying to access the subconscious through automatic creative processes. I followed their lead whenever possible, writing and recording music without too much planning and thought, letting my subconscious express itself without interference. I wanted my music to be visceral, not academic. It was fun to think about music, but it was far more powerful to have a spontaneous, emotional reaction to it. So I had to be willing to be s
pontaneous and emotional when I was writing music, even if it didn’t always work out.

  “Extreme ways are back again” sounded like a celebration of the shiny lunacy that my life had become. But the underlying chords were dark and sad, making the lyrics also sound like a warning. I wrote some more lyrics for the verses, added some string orchestration, laid down a simple bassline inspired by Bill Wyman, and the song was done.

  Except it wasn’t. The song sounded fine when I played it back, but it was basic. I hated the word “hook,” and deliberately crafting an attention-grabbing element felt crass and mercenary, but I knew the song needed something distinctive. I turned on an old synth and played some analog melodies against the track. They all sounded gratuitous and tacked-on.

  Then I remembered my Yamaha sampler, which took years off my life when I had to reboot it in front of an angry audience at my first-ever live show, in 1990 at the Palladium in New York City. It had some remarkable violin samples, which I hoped might provide an interesting hook in an otherwise straightforward song.

  I turned on the sampler, inserted the startup disk, and then spent five minutes loading the string samples. No wonder I hated this piece of equipment: it was the slowest, most awkward piece of gear I’d ever owned. I still couldn’t believe that I had gone through this laborious process in front of two thousand booing audience members at my first show.

  While the last samples were slowly loading, I walked down the hall to the bathroom. My hallway was filling up with framed gold and platinum records. Before Play I’d never received a single one. And now Play had gone gold or platinum in twenty-five different countries, so more framed awards were arriving every week. I didn’t know what to do with them, so they were stacked on top of each other and leaning against the wall in my long hallway.

  When I returned to the studio the samples had finally loaded. I experimented with them over the opening of the song, but they didn’t work. I switched to another bank of string samples and tried bending the pitch, starting at the root note of the song and going up to thirds and sevenths and octaves. And suddenly everything clicked. With the right pitch, the strings sounded shrill and menacing, like angry wraiths.

  I added this shrill hook to the song and listened to the playback. The new orchestration and the pitch-bending strings turned a basic rock song into something sadder and more powerful. It felt finished.

  Then I had a thought: Why not add one more bit of conventional songcraft? There was room for a pre-chorus: the space between the verse and the chorus where I could add a misleading pause, creating a sense of reticence. “I would stand in line for this, there’s always room in life for this,” I sang over descending guitar chords.

  I leaned back in my rickety chair and listened to the song from start to finish. My baffling fame made me happier than I’d ever been, as did the alcohol and the drugs and the debauched promiscuity. But no party or platinum record gave me as much pleasure as the moment when a song came together.

  Making a new piece of music was wonderful, but often I’d lose myself in the work for hours and not be consciously aware of what I was doing. It was this moment – stopping and listening when a song was done – that was the greatest part. Not just of my job, but of my life.

  15

  NEW YORK CITY (2000)

  “Moby, do you know Mick?”

  I was washing down my second hit of ecstasy with a glass of champagne when Richard Branson introduced me to Mick Jagger.

  “No,” I said, swallowing. “We’ve never met.” I held out my hand. Mick took it, eyeing me warily. He was wearing a pink silk shirt and a dark-blue blazer, and he was Mick Jagger. The most iconic rock star the world had ever produced was standing inches away from me, in the flesh, giving me a dead-fish handshake.

  “Moby’s made an amazing album, Play,” Branson told Mick. “Do you know it?”

  “Oh, I’ve heard it,” Mick said flatly, dropping my hand and looking away from me. I stood there awkwardly, not sure if I was allowed to talk to Mick Jagger as an equal or if I had been summoned to Richard Branson’s couch as a bald novelty musician with a hit record.

  “Well, I’m going to get back to the party,” I finally said. “Nice to meet you, Mick.” But he had already moved on and was busy flirting with Sophie Dahl, who was next to him on the couch. Sophie was a tall, gorgeous Amazon with platinum hair, most famous for being the granddaughter of Roald Dahl, who’d written one of my favorite books from when I was in kindergarten, James and the Giant Peach. She was about a foot taller and forty years younger than Mick, but he was undaunted and she seemed smitten.

  My label, V2, had rented an old bank and were throwing a party for the Black Crowes. I’d brought a few friends up to the VIP balcony, where we drank bottles of free champagne and took ecstasy. I’d been a heavy drinker for a few years, but lately I’d been downing ten or fifteen drinks every night and taking ecstasy whenever I could get my hands on it. I’d even invented what I called my “rock star cocktail”: two or three hits of ecstasy, a bottle of champagne, and a bottle of vodka. If the MDMA and champagne and vodka were mixed correctly, everything balanced in my brain, and for a few hours the human condition seemed gentle and sublime. I stumbled to the bar and asked the bartender for another bottle of Veuve Clicquot.

  “The whole bottle?” he asked.

  “It’s okay,” I assured him, obnoxiously. “My album’s paying for this party.”

  He handed me the bottle as I spotted the most beautiful woman I had ever seen. She was standing by herself underneath an exposed Edison bulb, and had long, straight, blonde hair. She was wearing a beige fringe jacket and looked as though she’d stepped out of Laurel Canyon in 1968. Even though it was midnight, her hair was touched by the sun and I knew that she would sound like birds.

  I walked over to her, emboldened by fame, champagne, and drugs. “Hi,” I said. “You’re the most beautiful woman on the planet.”

  She smiled. “And you’re Moby, and you’re high.”

  “Those are true things.”

  “Do you have any more E?” she asked.

  “No,” I said, suddenly sad. Then I brightened. “But my friend Michael does.” I took her hand and led her past Mick Jagger and Richard Branson and Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell and Kate Hudson and a coterie of models and record-company employees until I found the drug dealer, Michael.

  “Michael, this is—” I paused. “I don’t know your name.”

  “Lauren,” she said.

  “Lauren, and she’s the most beautiful woman on the planet. Do you have any more E?”

  He laughed and handed me four hits of E. “Here you go, drunky.”

  I handed an E to Lauren and took another myself. We swallowed them with champagne. “How many Es have you had tonight?” Lauren asked.

  “More than two?” I said, trying to keep my head and eyes from vibrating. She smiled and kissed me. I kissed her back. “Do you want to go to Sway?” I asked her.

  “I want to go with you,” she said, both forthright and demure. She took my hand and led me out of the party.

  When we stepped out on Lafayette Street the paparazzi started taking my picture and yelling my name. “Moby!” somebody shouted over the staccato rhythm of flashbulbs. “Is that your girlfriend?”

  “I hope so!” I yelled as we got into a taxi. Once the door shut the world got very quiet.

  “Spring and Greenwich,” Lauren told the cabbie.

  A Creedence Clearwater song came on the radio. “Ah!” I yelled. “Turn it up! Please!” The cab driver laughed and played “Proud Mary” loudly as he swerved onto Prince Street.

  “Proud Mary” was the first song I ever loved; one of my earliest memories was refusing to leave the car because “Proud Mary” was on the radio. I called it “Rolling on the River” until I was eleven years old, when some older, cooler kid ridiculed me for not knowing it was called “Proud Mary.”

  I rolled down the window. “Feel the air!” I yelled, happily. Lauren laughed and held my hand. I
rolled up the window and got serious. “Lauren, you are so beautiful,” I said, and kissed her. “But why doesn’t God let us feel like this all the time?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean that an omnipotent God could give us any resting neurochemical state, so why doesn’t he let us feel like this from the time we’re born until the moment we die?”

  “Are you always like this on E?” she asked.

  “Like?”

  “Philosophical in taxis.”

  “I love taxis,” I declared earnestly, and we kissed some more.

  We pulled up at Sway, my favorite degenerate drug-fueled bar in New York City. Which was high praise, as there were a lot of degenerate drug-fueled bars in New York City. There was a line in front, but a doorman spotted me and whisked us inside. “Bono’s here,” he said, leading us through the crush of people. “Let me take you to him.”

  “Bono?” Lauren said. “I’ve never met Bono.”

  “He’s amazing, I love him,” I said, slurring and grinding my teeth. The back room was a bit quieter than the rest of the bar, and ringed with low benches covered in stained and cigarette-burned Moroccan fabrics.

  Bono was sitting with some friends, and was dressed all in black and was wearing his lavender sunglasses. “Moby!” he yelled, jumping up. We hugged. “Get this man some champagne!” he told the doorman. “And his lovely lady as well!”

  Bono introduced me to Michael Stipe. “I know Michael!” I said, and hugged him. I’d loved Michael since first hearing “So. Central Rain” on college radio in the 1980s; in recent months we’d become late-night celebrity friends. Then Bono introduced me to Salman Rushdie, who smiled at me from behind his professorial glasses. For some reason I never imagined Salman Rushdie smiling. Or hanging out in bars. I became solemn. “It’s an honor to meet you, sir,” I said. “I think you’re lovely!”