by Moby
Before working on Hotel I’d recorded and mixed all my albums in my tiny bedroom studio. But I was now a successful adult musician, so I’d decided it was time to join the ranks of the real rock stars who made professional albums with professional engineers in big studios. To that end I’d spent tens of thousands of dollars in various top-of-the-line New York City studios, recording, rerecording, and mixing the album.
After it was mixed I realized that the album did have an expensive sheen of professionalism. The only problem was that it didn’t resonate with me emotionally, whereas all my previous records did. I had worked hard on crafting and recording all the songs on Hotel, but I really loved only one of them: “Slipping Away,” a sad, vulnerable song tucked away near the end of the album.
I had a year-long tour planned, starting in Europe and going to North America, Asia, South America, and then back to Europe. The first leg of European arenas was already sold out, but the US tour was going to be a struggle. I was scheduled to play much smaller venues than I had on the previous tour, and even these scaled-down shows weren’t selling very well. All evidence suggested that in the States my fame wasn’t just waning, it was plummeting. And I was terrified.
I needed my fame to stay exactly as it had been at its height in 2000. When I walked out of my front door on Mott Street I wanted to hear people talking about me. When I entered a party I wanted everyone to look at me.
Once I had loved visiting the magazine store at the corner of Prince and Sullivan to look for mentions of me on glossy full-color pages, but now when I did my daily Google search of my name I was furious. The journalists and the radio programmers and the hipsters who maligned or ignored me didn’t know what was at stake. They didn’t realize that the consequence of their disdain was that I was becoming less famous. It would take such a small effort on their part to write good articles about me, to play me on their radio stations, to invite me to their parties. All I needed in order to be happy was for them to love and support me, forever.
*
I left the bathroom in the private club’s basement and walked back upstairs to rejoin the party. David Munns, one of the EMI label bosses, came over and clapped me on the shoulder. David scared me a bit: he seemed like a handsome pirate who could become someone’s worst enemy in an instant. But for now I was making money for EMI, and he was being nice to me.
“Good first week!” he boomed.
“Yeah, not in America,” I shrugged.
“Eh, fuck ’em,” he said, and walked away.
I wanted to stay at the party, drink some more, and find someone to go home with. But I was panicking. Was the New York Times review accurate? Had I released a bad record? I needed to listen to Hotel again and figure out if the bad reviews were right. I snuck out one of the side doors and got in the limo that was waiting for me. It took me back to the Landmark hotel, where I was staying in the presidential suite.
I’d first stayed in the Landmark in 1992, with my former best friend Paul. At the time I’d never stayed in a nicer hotel. It was huge and elegant, with soft carpeting and gray-veined marble bathrooms. Paul and I had jumped in the pool and run down the hallways and watched Star Trek reruns and eaten vegan pasties we bought in Covent Garden. I sent my mom a postcard with a picture of the hotel, writing, “This place is amazing!”
And now my mom was dead and Paul and I hadn’t spoken since 1999.
A few months ago I’d had a falling-out with Damian, my other best friend. He’d accused me of being a selfish, narcissistic alcoholic; in turn, I’d accused him of being a misanthropic shut-in. We were both right, but the argument had been fierce enough and vitriolic enough that he and I were now ex-friends.
“You better be nice to me,” my old friend Lee said, after I told him about my falling-out with Damian. “I’m the only friend you have left.” I wanted to disagree with him, but he was right. I had a constant gaggle of people to get drunk with, but no real friends.
Back in my suite at the Landmark I put on my headphones and went for a walk up and down the carpeted hallways of the hotel, listening to my new album. In terms of recording, mixing, and engineering, Hotel was impeccable. But during the third song, “Beautiful,” I knew that a lot of the bad reviews were right: it was missing something. I’d traded my battered little bedroom studio for expensive rooms filled with the best equipment on the planet, and the result was a compromised album. It had a few moments of beauty, but I didn’t love it.
I kept listening, and my panic skyrocketed. I realized I’d made a mistake in releasing Hotel. A mistake that had now been shipped around the world for millions of people to experience firsthand. I wanted to buy all of the millions of CDs that had been shipped, bury them in Nevada, and rerecord all the songs on the cheap equipment in my little studio on Mott Street.
Suddenly I needed to drink more and be around people, to be reassured that I still mattered and that things weren’t actually falling apart. I got back in my limo and returned to the private club. The party was still going strong, with nobody aware that the guest of honor had left to spend quality time with his shortcomings. The DJ was playing a Robbie Williams remix, and the record executives and minor British celebrities were having loud, cocaine-fueled conversations. I went to the bar and ordered a vodka and soda.
The executive who’d told me “Every day I want to kill myself” in the toilets was holding himself up by the vintage beer taps. His eyes were even more unfocused; he’d had more time to drink himself into near-oblivion. “You see all this?” he barked at me. “You see all this?” he repeated, gesturing at the room full of loud drunks. “This is all shit!” He tried to spit, but his saliva didn’t get far – it just dribbled onto the front of his Armani shirt.
He leaned in close to me and poked me in the chest. “But what you do is important. You make art. That is what is precious. Not this.” We looked at each other for a long moment. “Fuck this,” he said, stumbling off, leaving me holding my drink. He was right, but I didn’t want him to be. I wanted uncompromised art, but also unvarnished fame.
I finished my drink and walked into the scrum of the party, looking for a record-company executive to tell me once again how well Hotel was selling.
43
STAMFORD, CONNECTICUT (1982)
I finally owned a drum machine and a synthesizer. My mom had saved up and bought me a $75 Mattel Synsonics drum machine for Christmas. I was mildly troubled that it was a drum machine made by the same company responsible for Barbie dolls and Hot Wheels cars, but it was still a drum machine. And apart from a used Nikon F camera my uncle Joseph had given me the year before, it was the nicest present I’d ever been given.
Our Christmases had a structure. My family, including my various aunts and uncles, would spend Christmas Eve at my grandmother’s house. On Christmas morning we woke up early and opened the small presents in our stockings. Then we had breakfast at my grandmother’s dining-room table. Afterward, still in pajamas and nightgowns, we rushed back to the living room to open the big presents.
Normally Christmas morning was a noisy free-for-all, but when my mom handed me a surprisingly small and lightweight box wrapped in green and red paper, my aunts and uncles and grandmother all quieted down and watched me, smiling. I carefully peeled back the Christmas wrapping paper, trying not to tear it; my grandmother remembered the Great Depression and insisted on saving and reusing wrapping paper. When I saw the words “drum machine” on the box inside, my eyes lit up and I hugged my mom, who had a wide smile and a lit cigarette.
When I’d asked for a drum machine for Christmas my family had been confused – none of them knew what a drum machine was. But I’d noticed that a lot of my musical heroes who’d started off as punk-rockers, like New Order and Killing Joke, were now using synthesizers and drum machines, and I wanted to join them.
I wanted to start recording with my new drum machine right away, but we didn’t get home from my grandmother’s until 10.30 p.m. on Christmas night. So I woke up early on December 26, we
nt to the basement, and set everything up. In addition to the brand-new Synsonics drum machine, I had my guitar, a delay pedal, a pair of headphones, a Korg M500 Micro-Preset synthesizer I’d bought at a tag sale for $20, and a microphone I’d kind of taken from the language lab at Darien High School. I’d also borrowed a new four-track cassette recorder and some audio cables from the AV department at Darien High School. I’d considered stealing the four-track recorder, but stealing was unethical. Also, the four-track recorder was one of the nicest things in the AV department, and they might actually miss it if it was gone.
I put a cassette in the four-track recorder and started reading the instruction manual. I’d never recorded my own music before, but it looked pretty straightforward. I plugged the drum machine into input 1. I plugged the Korg synthesizer into input 2. I plugged my guitar into input 3. And into input 4 I plugged the stolen, or possibly borrowed, microphone. I turned on the synth and the drum machine and took a step back to survey my achievement: I had turned our moldy basement into a tiny electronic music studio.
I’d started watching Star Trek with my grandparents when I was four years old, in the TV room at their colonial house. At first I didn’t know it was science fiction, as we’d watched the moon landing on the same TV. I thought Star Trek was as real as the moon landing, or at the very least a fiction based on modern reality. NASA showed us what the outside of spaceships looked like, and I assumed Star Trek showed us what the inside looked like.
I enjoyed the aliens and the space battles on Star Trek, but my favorite thing about it was Mr. Spock and his bank of scientific equipment: light-emitting diodes, oscillators, and plastic buttons that did important space things. A few years later, when I was in elementary school, adults sometimes asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I would answer, without hesitation, “A scientist.” Because in my mind scientists were like Mr. Spock, working with important buttons in clean environments in outer space.
Our basement wasn’t in outer space, or even clean. There was mold and water in the corners, along with a lopsided pile of damp brown boxes filled with old magazines. But in front of me was technology, with glowing red lights and diodes. Even if I hadn’t been allowed to touch my drum machine and the four-track recorder, I would still have been happy: they were clean and beautiful.
I took a breath and pressed one of the gray rubber buttons on the drum machine. It made a sound that resembled a cereal box being hit by a spatula. But it was a sound, and it was electronic.
I’d been playing guitar for years, but I was growing increasingly frustrated that I could never get a guitar to not sound like a guitar. Guitars were great, but they weren’t drums. They weren’t synthesizers. They weren’t drum machines. I wanted instruments that would let me make sounds that didn’t exist in the real world.
I programmed a simple drum pattern on the Mattel drum machine and hit “Record” on the Tascam four-track. After two minutes I rewound the tape and played it back. It had worked – I’d really recorded a drum machine. My scalp tingled as I realized that I was actually making electronic music. Up until this moment I’d only been able to listen to Kraftwerk, New Order, Depeche Mode, and Heaven 17, and dream cluelessly about how they made electronic music. And now, in our dank basement, with my Mattel drum machine, I’d joined their ranks.
My analog Korg keyboard played only one note at a time, which was why it had been so cheap. I hit “Record” on the four-track and played a simple synth bassline over the simple drum-machine pattern I’d already recorded. And like magic, it worked.
I plugged my guitar into my pedal, an analog delay pedal I’d bought used with $25 my grandparents had given me for my birthday last September, and recorded New Order-style guitar parts over the Mattel drums and the Korg synth bass. I was one person, but in just a few minutes I had recorded a song by myself.
Now it was time to sing something. The microphone was plugged into the four-track, but for some reason no sound was coming through. I panicked briefly, but then I looked at the manual and figured it out: to record a microphone I had to set the input to “Mic.” I was a bit chastened, as I probably should have been able to figure that out on my own. But it was my first time recording music and now I knew.
I hit “Record” and did my best to sound like Ian Curtis or Ian McCulloch as I sang over the track I’d just recorded. I hadn’t written any lyrics down beforehand, so I just imitated my heroes and sang sad words about losing love and being alone.
I played back all four tracks of audio and saw that there were three rubber knobs that changed the sound. I knew what “Bass” and “Treble” were, but I didn’t know what “Pan” did. I turned the “Pan” knob and the sound went toward my left ear. I turned it in the other direction and it went toward my right ear. I grinned – now I knew what “Pan” was. Maybe it was short for “Panorama” or something technical and obscure that I couldn’t figure out.
I played around with the bass and treble and listened back to what I’d recorded. It was boxy and flat and thin, but remarkable – because I’d been able to record it all myself. I loved being in a band and playing with other musicians, but other musicians weren’t always there. And no matter how good they were, other musicians always sounded like other musicians, not perfect synth robots. I realized that as long as I had a little studio like this, I could work on music by myself at any time. And as long as I had synthesizers and drum machines, I could make sounds that were more than just guitars, basses, and drums.
The two-minute track ended. I rewound the tape. On the other side of the wooden stairs the 1940s boiler was humming. Our cat Tucker was sitting and watching me quizzically. I heard water run through the pipes, meaning my mom was upstairs in the bathroom, or maybe filling up her percolator to make coffee.
Almost everything in the basement – the moldy cardboard boxes, the wooden shelves, the old cans of paint – was old and smelled like mildew. But the clean equipment had the aroma of new plastic and warm electronics and science fiction. I looked at Tucker and hit “Play.”
44
ST. PETERSBURG, RUSSIA (2005)
At midnight in St. Petersburg I pulled the thick curtains of my hotel room closed, blotting out the late-night sun, and was about to get a restorative night’s sleep when my phone rang.
“Moby! It’s Johnny Knoxville!”
A voice in the background: “And Steve-O!”
“We’re in the lobby!”
Steve-O was from Darien (along with Gus Van Sant, Robert Downey Jr., Chloë Sevigny, Anne Coulter, Topher Grace, and Kate Bosworth) and also a vegan. I knew him a bit from animal-rights events, where we’d reminisce about teachers we’d both had at Darien High School.
I had wanted a quiet night in, but I put on my clothes and went down to the hotel lobby, where Johnny and Steve-O and the entire Jackass crew were waiting for me. Jackass had become a hugely successful American franchise, based around kids from the underground skateboarding world doing their best to hurt and degrade themselves on camera. I had no idea why they were in Russia, or why they’d called me, but I loved being around the chaos that followed them wherever they went.
We started drinking in the ornate lobby, next to framed photos of George W. Bush and other heads of state who’d stayed in the hotel, then went to a few techno clubs. I blacked out around 5 a.m., after fifteen or twenty vodka shots, but not before seeing Steve-O force himself into a dance contest where he was the only person onstage not wearing pants.
After thirty or forty minutes of post-Jackass sleep in my hotel room I went to the airport and flew to Moscow to play a show for fifteen thousand people in a hockey arena. The show was good, even though I needed three shots of espresso to make it onto the stage.
Backstage after the show I met a group of five people: very tall, very stylish, possibly involved in organized crime, and very Russian. They wanted to take me to the best club in Moscow; as I’d had only an hour or so of sleep in the last thirty-six hours, I was in favor of that idea. I’d battled insom
nia for decades, and I found sometimes the best way to handle sleeplessness was to drink vodka and coffee until alcohol, caffeine, and exhaustion created a Hunter S. Thompson level of psychosis.
We glided through the city in a brand-new black bulletproof Mercedes limo. When we arrived the club promoter met me at the car, gave me a glass of vodka, and walked me inside, guiding me by the elbow to have an audience with a woman he told me was Vladimir Putin’s daughter.
The club wasn’t huge, but every surface was as new and shiny as an arms dealer’s Miami penthouse. The promoter led me to a black leather couch, where I sat down and shook hands with a lovely and shy young woman who looked like a blonde grad student at Princeton. I knew that her father, Vladimir Putin, the president of Russia, was ex-KGB, and since I didn’t want to end up dead or in prison, I resolved to be on my best behavior.
“Moby,” she said loudly, in almost unaccented English, “it’s a pleasure to meet you.” She told me that she liked my music, asked how I liked Russia, and then listened politely as I drunkenly told her that I loved nineteenth-century Russian literature and considered Leo Tolstoy to be one of the patron saints of veganism. She kept smiling and nodding, but I didn’t know if she could hear me over the blaring Top 40 techno.
In my loudest voice I tried to tell her my half-baked theories about Russia: that it was neither Western nor Eastern but simply Russian, and that even after reading Dostoyevsky and Pushkin no Westerner could ever fully understand Mother Russia. As we were talking – or, rather, as I was yelling – a tall blonde woman came and stood in front of me.
“You are Moby?” she yelled.
“Yes,” I said.
“I want you sign my pussy,” she shouted, and undid her gold jumpsuit, suddenly standing naked in front of me, with her jumpsuit bunched around her ankles.