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[wind howling]
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[birds twittering]
[sounds growing louder]
[soft static buzzing]
[video equipment clattering]
So you might wonder why I just clapped,
uh...
because I'm sitting in my studio by myself
and am I,
am I applauding myself?
[electronica playing]
I guess a good place to start is a simple question.
Why in the world
would I want to make a documentary about myself?
And I think that's a pretty legitimate question.
[upbeat electronica playing]
Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you.
Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you!
On one hand, I've had a strange life.
I grew up very poor in a very wealthy environment.
My strange life as a musician has taken me
to a lot of very odd places, literally and figuratively.
And I guess I could make a documentary about that.
Just another biopic about a weird musician.
What's more interesting is, at least to me, is...
well, the why of it.
The why of everything.
The, why do we do what we do?
Our very short lives
quite possibly have very little significance.
As far as we can tell, we're in a universe that is vast
beyond our imagining,
ancient beyond our imagining.
But yet, all of us generally work from a place
where we think that our actions have meaning,
our lives have consequences.
And that if we do things in a certain way,
if we do things in a right way,
that our lives might somehow be better.
If I had legitimacy, if I had some money,
if I was recognized for what I did
and for who I was, and if I was esteemed...
One of the most innovative figures in the world of electronic dance music, Moby.
...happiness, and meaning would ensue.
And honestly, that's why I want to make this movie,
because I think that a lot of us
still work under those assumptions,
that if we do the right thing,
if we have the right existential portfolio,
if we have the right people, the right amount of money,
the right home or homes,
the right job, the right amount of recognition,
then everything will suddenly make sense
and we'll be happy and we'll live for a long time
and we will die contented.
There's one huge problem with that, though.
That's never actually been the case for anyone.
It's almost like we assume that it's not true for everyone else,
but that if we figure it out, like if I figure out my perfect existential portfolio,
that I will find perfect human happiness,
but I tried, and it didn't work.
[ethereal electronica playing]
This is my dream.
[ambient electronica pulsing]
[upbeat electronica playing]
- [music stops] - [cow lowing in distance]
So we're revisiting
New York City in 1966.
So yes, I was born in Harlem.
Let's make it nighttime.
Rrrrr... There's New York City.
- [horns honking] - Rrrr, rrrr!
My dad, we'll have him wearing glasses
because the truth is, I don't remember my father at all,
but in my mind he wore glasses,
and unlike me, he had hair.
My mom, because I'm not the best drawer in the world,
I have a feeling she's going to look...
Oh, she actually looks almost feminine, maybe.
Little baby me.
We also need some animals.
When I was growing up in Harlem we had a pet dog,
one or two cats, and a bunch of rats,
because my father was,
he worked in the chemistry department at Columbia
and he brought home some test rats.
They were in their twenties.
They were in New York, and they hung out in the Village
and talked about poetry and politics.
And they had me,
and then very quickly realized like,
"Oh, having a newborn in a basement apartment in Harlem."
And my dad had been a heavy drinker apparently,
but then apparently he started drinking more and more and more,
- and my mom yelling... - Get out of my house!
- ...him yelling back... - Yaaaaaa!
And then him disappearing on drunken binges.
So because I lived with two very angry parents
who were screaming at each other and smoking cigarettes and drinking,
the only calm sort of stable presence in the apartment
were the animals.
The cat, the dog, the rescued lab rats,
represented here by chihuahuas.
At an early age, when I was a tiny little baby,
I learned a lesson, which is that animals are nice and people are terrifying.
And then after a couple of years of this, they had a huge fight,
and my mother told my father, "I can't do this anymore.
I want a divorce, and I'm taking your son away from you."
So, my father got drunk
and got in his car...
and drove into a wall...
at a hundred miles an hour.
[car crashes]
So my mother was a widow at the age of 23
with her crying newborn,
a bunch of animals in a basement apartment in Harlem.
[ominous ambient music playing]
[somber electronica playing]
[marching band playing]
[music stops]
Hi.
So I'm Moby and I'm the director of this scene
and we will be reenacting some scenes from my childhood.
- I'd like to introduce our players. - [upbeat music playing]
Laura, would you step in?
This is Laura and she'll be playing my mom.
Hi, I'm Laura Dawn and I'm playing Moby's mom.
Daniel, would you like to step in?
Who will be playing my mom's scumbag boyfriend.
Hi, my name is Daniel Ahearn.
I'll be playing the scumbag boyfriend.
And this is Daron,
and he'll be playing me at about age, say three.
Hi, my name's Daron Murphy and I'll be playing young Moby.
MOBY: Yeah. Perfect. Life has already gone wrong.
You're only three years old, and basically nothing good has ever happened.
- You guys are getting ready to go out. - Let's go.
So you're a local motorcycle gang member...
but you're just, you're just scummy.
- Bye, Moby. We'll be back in a couple of hours. - Don't touch my stuff.
That was great. The only thing was you were a little too involved.
[laughing] OK.
- MOBY: And action. - LAURA: All right, Moby, we're taking off.
We're going to go out to this party and we'll be back later, okay?
Bye, Molly.
[in falsetto] ♪ Hello! Hello! Hello!
- Poor Moby. - Yeah, yeah, mm-hmm.
I wish we could save him. We'd be your friends, Moby.
- Oh yeah. - Mm-hmm. Yeah, yeah.
- Mm-hmm. - Yeah, yeah, yeah.
My mom is upset because she's unemployed, her boyfriend has left her,
and young me is going to try to comfort her.
Nothing ever works out.
Dan left.
Again.
And I still haven't found a job.
So I don't know what we're gonna do.
- Mom-- - Just leave me alone!
Well done.
A little more sadness.
Well, okay, no, dial it down, just not quite so much sadness.
A little, little more, just sort of like soft pathos.
[door creaking open]
That's okay. No, come on in.
We're doing really important stuff.
[in falsetto] Oh, that's very sad.
- That's a big apartment to me. - Call Child Services!
His first experience, if you think about your mother being the center of your world,
the idea that if you're the focal point of someone's world
and all they know about love and trust and stability in the world,
but you are not stable,
then that produces a cascade of effects in a developing mind
that can really mess up the rest of their lives.
He was left in places and situations
that a kid that's three, four or five, six years old,
should not be left in.
And there was a lot of drug abuse.
There was a lot of alcoholism.
I think that he suffers from anxious attachment.
When I hear so much of his music,
I hear the pain and emotion and longing that he feels towards his mother.
That to me is a core dragon he's been chasing his entire life
as some kind of understanding and resolution to that pain.
[indistinct conversations]
MOBY: When I was very, very young, I grew up playing in New York and Connecticut.
[crowd cheering]
And at that time, like my only goal was to at some point
put out a seven-inch that maybe sold a hundred copies.
I never ever, ever in a billion years
thought I would be playing with one of the most remarkable orchestras.
- [cheering and applause] - So I just wanted to say thank you all so much.
Such a beautiful orchestra. Such a friendly orchestra.
♪ Oh, Lordy, my trouble so hard ♪
♪ Don't nobody know my troubles but God ♪
♪ Oh, Lordy, my trouble so hard ♪
♪ Well, don't nobody know my troubles but God ♪
♪ Oh, don't nobody know my troubles but God ♪
♪ Oh, Lordy, my trouble so hard ♪
♪ Oh, don't nobody know my troubles but God ♪
♪ Don't nobody know my troubles but God ♪
♪ Oh, Lordy, my trouble so hard ♪
♪ Don't nobody know my troubles but God ♪
♪ Oh, Lordy, my trouble so hard ♪
♪ Don't nobody know my troubles but God ♪
♪ Don't nobody know
♪ My trouble
♪ But God
[cheering and applause]
[a/v equipment clattering]
When a human being truly dives within all the way,
negativity begins to lift away.
Hate, anger, fear, all these things start to lift.
The suffocating rubber clown suit of negativity dissolving,
and pure gold coming in from within.
[relaxed music playing]
MOBY: So for a while, we lived in Darien, Connecticut,
which is one of the wealthiest towns in the United States.
And I was certainly the poorest person that I knew there.
I hated it.
Not being able to bring people back to my house.
When I say "bring people," I mean like friends in elementary school,
but as I had learned early on, animals were safe,
and animals didn't judge me,
and I never had to feel shame around animals.
[cattle lows]
So I'd found animals, and then I found music.
And then I picked up a guitar one of my Mom's boyfriends had left at the house,
and I started playing around and very quickly I discovered punk rock.
[punk rock playing]
And I fell in love with The Clash, Bad Brains, Minor Threat, Black Flag.
And I also found a home.
I found this amazing community of misfits and confused teenagers like me,
and I felt comfortable and at home for the first time,
and I just wanted to play in a punk rock band.
And I guess that's when I dedicated my life
to these two things, animals and music.
[clock ticking]
I've been looking forward to our session.
- It's good to see you again. - Oh yeah.
Can I get you water or a cup of tea?
[discordant ambient sounds echoing]
I want to know more about your feelings.
How have you been able to process your feelings
and what you experienced as a child through your music?
We've talked about this before that sometimes you refer to yourself
in the third person,
which is intellectualizing,
and I'm wondering if you can connect to your feelings
and tell me about it from that perspective.
Well, growing up, I always felt uncomfortable if I'm being honest
and I felt really disconnected and unsafe.
I know this sounds like hyperbole,
this sounds like I'm overstating, but music saved me.
I felt connected to this bigger world that was so much better
and more interesting than the sad suburban world I was inhabiting.
Can you just tell me a little bit more about how you felt about that?
I was able to like take all of the things that I was feeling...
and make sense of them, and sort of make them
you know, take the fear and make it interesting,
and take my confusion and try to make it beautiful.
And so the act of making music was almost like a form of like self-healing,
but also in a way that maybe other people
could relate to or understand.
[banjo playing]
♪ I know that we've been
♪ In a fairly conventional narrative for a little while ♪
♪ But now we're gonna go back to being weird ♪
[discordant ambience echoing over traffic noises]
[bowl chimes]
Everyone chant!
- [chimes] - [group chanting]
[bowl chiming]
[chanting continues]
[discordant noise echoing over furtive whispers]
Someone asked me this question recently,
if I were an animal, what would,
or how would my consciousness be different?
And it's a fascinating question.
So when I look at an animal like, like, look at buffalo.
I wonder if sometimes one of the reasons
that people kill animals,
one of the reasons that people treat animals so badly
is because of loneliness,
is because they look at animals and they feel rejected by them.
You know, they look at a buffalo and buffalo are stoic
and apparently quite happy to just hang out with other buffalo,
and they have their own concerns and their own priorities.
Like the desire to not get eaten,
the desire to not be hungry,
the desire to spend time with your family, with your community.
But sometimes nature has an indifference towards humans.
And the animals, like let's say like a buffalo, they don't care.
And I think sometimes that almost justifies
people's cruelty to animals,
is they're punishing the animals
for having their own lives independent of us.
The animal is almost like
an emissary of the vast existential void
that we're all so afraid of.
[static buzzing]
♪ 'Cause in my dreams I'm dying all the time ♪
♪ Then I wake it's kaleidoscopic mind ♪
♪ I never meant to hurt you
♪ I never meant to lie
♪ So this is goodbye
♪ This is goodbye
♪ So tell the truth
♪ You never wanted me
♪ Tell the truth
♪ You never wanted me
♪ Tell me
♪ 'Cause in my dreams I'm jealous all the time ♪
♪ When I wake I'm going out of my mind ♪
♪ I'm going out of my mind
♪ Going out of my mind
[ominous music playing]
My friend gave me some acid.
And I thought this was really interesting,
'cause I'd never done acid before
and it lasted for about 15 hours.
And then a day later I had a panic attack,
and the panic attack lasted for about six months.
It was so bad that I had to drop out of school and moved home
back to my mom's house, and it was really grim.
19 years old, unemployed, broke, battling constant panic attacks,
going to my local bar, getting drunk with alcoholics
just 'cause that was the only thing that would make the panic abate.
When friends from college would drop me off...
[sighs]
...I would have them drop me off here,
and for a brief minute, I would pretend that I lived here.
Everybody I knew who grew up like the rich people here
just felt entitled and were kind of arrogant and obnoxious,
but anyone who grew up even slightly poor here,
you just felt this like stain of inadequacy
because everybody knew exactly how much money everyone else had.
No matter where you went, you just always felt,
if you're poor growing up here, you just always felt like a second-class citizen.
In my case, like an 11th-class citizen.
That was my fantasy when I was growing up,
to live in a house like this and drink tea and sit by a roaring fire,
and read Blake
while the golden retriever was asleep at my feet
and my beautiful wife was, I don't know,
writing poetry at her desk by the leaded window panes.
And then I moved to an abandoned factory.
[discordant electronica playing]
This huge, weird factory complex,
I mean millions and millions of square feet.
It had been a lock factory in Stamford, Connecticut.
But when I moved in, it was completely empty and I paid $50 a month.
What I thought of as squatter's rent.
There was a security guard, and I'd give them $50 a month,
and I didn't have running water, I didn't have heat,
but I had electricity.
And so I had my studio and it, my space was tiny.
I mean, so tiny, it was basically like a big glorified closet.
And I worked on music.
I was DJing just a couple days a week.
$25 to DJ for six hours.
And this whole huge factory building was empty,
except for me and like a few other artists who are squatting in it.
The two years I lived here, I think three people got murdered.
My friend Jamie got stabbed to death here.
I loved it, because I had free electricity and my space,
even though it was very small, was sunny and I didn't have heat,
but I had space heaters that I borrowed from my girlfriend's mom.
Now, Moby, did you grow up in your punk rock days,
did you live in factories?
As a matter of fact, I did.
Um, but old factories, the desolation
and like the entropy of them,
'cause they're such sturdy structures.
Normally things when they're abandoned collapse,
but what's great about factories is they're abandoned and they stick around,
you know, and the bricks become interesting and the floors get dusty and interesting.
And especially when the old machinery is too heavy to move, you know?
So they're just like, we're just going to leave it.
- You're talking my type. - [laughs]
[electronica playing]
And that's when I started making
my own almost exclusively electronic music.
And then I started working at a record store,
so I was able to buy more records and DJ more.
And then I started DJing Friday nights and Saturday nights.
And then there was this magic day when I learned how to mix two records together.
And all of a sudden I realized like, "Oh, that sounded okay."
Like, "I guess I'm a DJ now."
I had the worst sampler in the world and a little four-track,
and so I made my idea of what hip-hop should sound like
and my idea of what house music and techno should be.
I mean, keep in mind, house music had just been invented
and techno had just been invented,
but with my little Casio keyboard
and my cheap Roland drum machine and my little sequencer,
I tried to make electronic music
and I had no idea what was going on with me
or my life or my future, but I had some really good friends,
and I was surprisingly happy.
And I remember trying to explain that to my family,
how in hindsight it was one of the happiest times of my life.
[electronica continues]
[wind whistling]
[electronic ambient music surging]
- [music fades, resumes] - [wind howling]
- [in falsetto] Ah! - Run for your lives!
Let's go to space!
[upbeat electronica playing]
There, 205 East 14th Street,
that was my first apartment in New York City.
Uh...
And I'm pretty sure, I had a bunch of roommates,
but my rent was around $150 a month, $160 a month.
Growing up in Connecticut, I fetishized New York City.
New York was 30, 40 miles away,
and it was easy to get to on the train.
And so my friends and I growing up went to New York every chance we could.
It's where the best record stores were, it's where we saw all our first punk rock shows.
And we were amazed that we could just get on the train
and hide in the bathroom and 40 minutes later be in Grand Central.
Not to overstate it, but this train saved my life and made me who I am.
I would make the tapes in my abandoned factory,
get off in Grand Central, jump the turnstile, and then just go around giving out tapes.
Years of doing this.
My first record label came from that,
other DJing jobs came from that, being introduced to all the producers of the day.
I heard about this club called Mars that was opening.
It was going to be the coolest nightclub in the world.
Somehow the man who was booking Mars
listened to it and gave me a job.
My first record label came from that,
so it all started with that one job at Mars.
♪ Go, go, go...
♪ Well, I came here to rock, turn it on and on ♪
♪ Keep it going till the break of dawn ♪
[funky electronica playing]
♪ Yeah!
[cheering]
[muffled shouting over rhythmic percussion]
In 1990, I put out a song called "Go."
And this came out and did nothing.
It sold maybe 1500 copies.
And then after it was released,
a record label guy in the UK heard it
and wanted to release it, but needed a remix.
And at this time I was obsessed with Twin Peaks,
and somehow I had this weird idea
of adding the strings from Laura Palmer's theme from Twin Peaks
to this remix I was working on for "Go."
So I came up with this remix,
and then I played the chords to Laura Palmer's theme
on top of the remix.
DAVID LYNCH: Yes. Well, Moby did that song "Go,"
and that was based on pieces of Angelo's music in Twin Peaks.
I thought it was fantastic, and a lot of other people thought that too.
♪ Go!
And it became a top-ten record throughout Europe and it sold a million copies.
♪ Go!
So my first single sold 1500 copies,
and my next single sold a million copies.
That's a big turning point,
and it was so profoundly unexpected.
So the fact that it became this weird, weird hit single,
where I was going back and forth to the UK every two weeks and DJing in raves
and playing at raves and being on all sorts of different TV shows
and being on Top of the Pops, like none of this was expected.
I had never thought that I would live in New York.
I had never thought that I would have a record deal.
I never thought that I would leave the United States.
I never thought that anyone would make an effort
to listen to the music that I was making.
And then all of a sudden I was doing interviews for magazines.
And then I was on the cover of dance magazines, and I was on TV shows,
Spin'salbum of the year, the Village Voice's album of the year.
And I had a big hit single in Europe, I had music in a Michael Mann movie,
and I went on tour with the Red Hot Chili Peppers and the Flaming Lips.
Like by the end of 1995, things were kind of magical.
All that had happened, and I had expected none of it.
And I was financially stable for the first time in my life.
And I bought an apartment, my very own apartment,
with a real studio with soundproof walls and a skylight.
♪ I see the stars...
♪ I see the stars
I still remember, I was on British Airways
flying to the UK to do Top of the Pops,
and I saw in the newspaper my song "Go" in the charts
in between Michael Jackson and Phil Collins.
♪ I see the stars
Can you talk to me about how that felt?
Not just intellectualizing that time,
but really unpack your feelings around that for me?
It felt baffling, confusing,
dislocating, but it felt wonderful.
I'd been playing music for 15 years
and every day of those 15 years thinking like,
how can I have an audience?
How can I finally, like at some point,
even like get a record deal and make records?
But I never really expected that that would happen.
♪ These open doors
♪ These open
♪ These open doors
♪ These open
♪ Open doors
♪ These...
♪ Open doors
♪ These open
♪ These open doors
[bell chiming hour over rattling ambience]
How many people right now are beating themselves up
because they think they're not successful enough, they're not famous enough,
they're not young enough, they're not beautiful enough, and like...
But then the people who are super young, super attractive,
super famous, they're miserable, you know?
So it's this, it's this horrifying, I don't know...
Like I don't have to pretend to be younger than I am.
I don't have to pretend to be more attractive than I am.
- I don't have to wear a toupee. - Yeah.
I don't have to pretend that I'm still young
and relevant in the same way that I was 20 years ago or 15 years ago.
One of the hardest things, at least for me, and I assume for you,
for lots of people, is the reason we overcompensate,
the reason we try to get people to see us in like exalted lights
is because deep down we don't like ourselves.
- Like we're ashamed of ourselves. - Yeah.
Um, we assume that if anyone looks too closely, they'll be repelled.
Especially if they look at me at this angle. Something like that.
And like looking at it yourself,
but then like being that in the presence of other people
for as potentially unattractive and uncomfortable as that might be.
[electronica playing]
[camera shutter clicks]
So in the mid-'90s, I shaved my head,
and after a long period of sobriety, I started drinking again.
♪ It's hard to let you go!
And I became a complete rock-and-roll cliché.
I was living on tour buses, hanging out in the strip clubs,
dating strippers.
♪ It's hard to let you go!
And I fully foolishly stupidly embraced
the complete rock-and-roll degenerate lifestyle.
Ah, yay, yah... drinking!
Ah, yay. Raaaah!
[mumbling] ...glug glug glug.
I don't know, it made sense to me at the time.
Oh, Hi. My name is Dr. Richard,
and I'd like to talk to you today about alcoholism.
A lot of people, many of you who are watching,
might've had a few bad experiences with drinking,
you know, a few too many drinks at the office Christmas party.
Well, one of my worst experiences, I was on a tour bus
and we were driving from London to Manchester,
and I had 15 or 20 drinks and took a whole bunch of drugs
and ended up having, I guess, a sexual encounter with a few different people.
And when I woke up in the morning,
I was sick and hung over and alone and cold.
And I had poop all over my body.
I was covered with poop,
but I didn't know whose poop it was.
And to this day, I don't know whose poop it was.
[bell jingles]
[crowd noises echoing]
Things started to go wrong.
I broke up with my girlfriend.
I started hanging out in strip clubs,
and also I decided to make a punk rock record.
[singing indistinct punk lyrics]
I'd put out the album Animal Rights and it had failed.
MAN: No one wanted to listen to it.
He was considered to be past it, a bit of a loser.
They were just making fun of him and he took it badly.
He wanted to be liked.
He wanted to be respected.
MOBY: I was convinced it was going to be my last record.
That I'd move back to Connecticut,
and I thought I'd go be a community school teacher.
[punk song resumes]
Then I learned my Mom had cancer.
And then she died.
[somber guitar music playing]
And I missed her funeral because I was in bed drunk, passed out.
[guitar continues over muffled traffic noises]
[distant thunder rumbling]
I'm really, really sorry.
[muffled announcements echoing over loudspeaker]
WOMAN: Oh, I think that's Moby.
WOMAN 2: That's Moby.
LYNCH: Well, I always talk about ideas.
And I always say we don't do anything without first an idea.
So ideas are precious things and we all want ideas.
There's trillions of ideas, you know.
They're thoughts in a way, thoughts go through our heads.
And... but I picture it out in the ether.
There's trillions and trillions of fantastic ideas.
And the deeper you can think,
the bigger the ideas are that you can catch.
So, it's very important
for any line of work to catch ideas.
And once in a while, you catch an idea that you fall in love with,
and then the idea tells you everything, pretty much everything.
So if it's like a musical idea,
you catch something that gets you going to the guitar or the piano or whatever.
And it fires you up.
Ideas come with inspiration,
a certain amount of information, and off you go.
[exotic sci-fi sound effects playing]
I had lost my American record deal.
My last album, Animal Rights, had been a complete failure.
My last tour had been a failure that no one came to,
and I was working on this album Play,
and I took the music I was working on, which was like "Porcelain"
and "Why Does My Heart Feel So Bad" and "Natural Blues,"
and I walked around this neighborhood and it just sounded terrible to me.
[Moby playing "Honey"]
♪ Get my honey come back
And I stopped on this bench,
convinced that my career was over...
♪ Get my honey come back
...convinced I was working on a record that no one was ever going to hear...
[wind whistling]
...and pretty sure that I was going to sell my apartment
and move back to Connecticut and have to get a real job.
CONTROLLER: Five... vehicle's armed...
Three, two, one, fire!
Thrust fired.
[ethereal electronica playing]
And I thought Play was going to be a complete, complete failure,
you know because it was a weird, badly mixed,
badly produced record that I made in my bedroom.
Mainly involving vocals from people who've been dead
for 40 or 50 years, but then things changed a lot.
DAVID LETTERMAN: Our next guest is a Grammy-nominated musician
whose CD right here was named one of the top albums of the year
by nearly every major publication.
If you don't have one of these boys now, you ought to,
seriously, tomorrow you ought to call in sick and go get one. It's called Play.
Here's Moby.
MOBY: It started off so small.
I mean, when it started, it was selling
like 2,000 or 3,000 copies a week, you know,
barely doing anything... oops.
And, uh...
and then it just kept selling more.
CONAN: My next guest tonight is acknowledged as one of the most innovative figures
in the world of electronic dance music,
and he's here to perform a song from his most recent album, Play.
ERIC: Slowly but surely, everybody who discovered the music
felt like there was something special there.
[relaxed electronica playing]
♪ In my dreams I'm dying all the time ♪
♪ Then I wake it's kaleidoscopic mind ♪
♪ I never meant to hurt you
♪ I never meant to lie
♪ So this is goodbye
♪ This is goodbye
And it was so surprising and every time it sold more,
I thought, "Great, now it's done."
And then it started selling 10,000 copies a week,
and then it started selling 100,000 copies a week.
And then at one point it was selling almost 200,000 copies worldwide a week.
And it went number one in the UK and it went number one in France
and Australia and Germany.
And suddenly, you know,
I went from playing to a couple hundred people a night
to a couple thousand people a night to...
Oh wow, cricket bats.
Do you need a cricket bat?
Um...
Do I need a cricket bat?
ERIC: So different tracks in different countries
sort of brought this album forward.
And at that point I just looked at Moby and said,
"Who the fuck are these people? How does this even happen?"
MOBY: It was like magic.
♪ Here we are now going to the East Side ♪
♪ I pick up my friends and we start to ride ♪
♪ Ride all night, yeah, we ride all day ♪
♪ Some may come and some may stay... ♪
[muffled music playing]
- MOBY: Hello? - DAVID BOWIE: Hi, guy. How are you doing?
- Hello? - Hiya.
Hi, David.
Yeah, I know this voice.
Um...
Go on, keep talking, will ya?
- Hello? - Hello. You sound incredibly tall.
Am I right? Are you a tall person?
I can't, unfortunately I can't hear you very well.
You're a tall person with really long hair, yeah?
I'm a tall person with really long hair.
- I weigh about 300 pounds. - Yeah, it's Moby, isn't it?
One of the sexiest men...
[cheering and applause]
MOBY: David Bowie was my favorite musician of all time.
- [camera shutter clicks] - Maybe 2000, 2001...
He moved across the street to me and I couldn't believe it.
Like I became friends with David Bowie.
Some of the moments that he and I had together,
I almost feel like there was maybe like
a quasi older brother quality to his friendship with me.
And we had barbecues together. We went to the deli together.
We got tea together and we worked on music together,
and we had holidays together and dinners together.
And we got to go on tour together.
David Bowie and Moby!
[band playing]
♪ Sitting here wishing on a cement floor ♪
♪ Just wishing that I had just something you wore ♪
♪ I put it on when I grow lonely ♪
♪ Won't you take off your dress and send it to me? ♪
♪ I miss your kiss and then I miss your head ♪
♪ And a letter in your writing doesn't mean you're not dead ♪
♪ Just run outside in the desert heat ♪
♪ Make your dress all wet then send it to me ♪
Here I was, this panicking, alcoholic, bald musician
who thought his career was over.
And then all of a sudden my career wasn't just over,
but it had become like actual rock stardom.
♪ And I miss your breath
♪ And a little bit of writing doesn't mean you're dead ♪
I'd walk down the street and people knew who I was,
and I would go to parties and women I'd never met would flirt with me
and then headlining my own festival, you know, with New Order and Outkast
and these big bands opening up for me.
ERIC: I mean an album like Play transcends the music industry
because it became a mainstream phenomenon.
MOBY: It ultimately completely corrupted and ruined me,
but at the time it was so much fun
to go from being kind of a washed-up has-been
to dating movie stars and going to these parties and making a lot of money
and touring and playing in front of tens of thousands of people.
Like maybe I should pretend it wasn't great, but for a minute it was really great.
And it was mind boggling.
And every day I drank more.
I started doing a lot of drugs, and...
it was amazing, but terrible at the same time.
I mean like my narcissism, my entitlement, just were really out of control.
Yeah. Um...
Do you want me to pick you up anything here?
Yeah. It's an Indian grocery.
[ethereal ambience playing]
Hi. So we're here talking to Moby,
and, uh, I want to ask him some questions about fame.
So, Moby, what are your thoughts about the world of fame?
How did you buy into fame?
And why would you think it was so important to you?
It's confusing to me.
I think that you're not a stupid person.
So why do you think you bought into the cold culture of fame?
I think I just saw it as a way of, I dunno, very simply it made me feel better.
It made me feel like I had legitimacy, and meaning, that my life had worth.
So you keep saying that, not having worth and legitimacy, and how do you feel now?
I mean, how do you think you got out of that pattern?
How do you measure yourself? Playwas your biggest hit, right?
- MOBY: Mm-hmm. - You've never topped that since.
- No. - Why?
Uh... That's a good question.
You keep saying that, that's what I'm here to do.
- Yeah. - [falsetto characters warbling]
And I'm, I don't know.
Like I desperately wanted them to be as successful as Play
and it would make me sad that each record was sort of like
successively less successful...
- [falsetto character warbles] - And...
Do you analyze it?
We've talked about this, when Playbecame successful, I loved it.
I pretended I didn't really care.
I tried really hard to pretend when I talked to journalists or people
that fame didn't matter to me, but I loved it.
Were you anxious? Depressed?
What were you going through?
I was angry. I was like an addict, you know.
Like a baby who was being weaned from his mother's breast.
Like an addict who like, the crack pipe was being taken away from me.
And I was angry, and I was scared, and I was sad,
and I just wanted anything that would bring the fame back to me.
As your therapist,
it's my professional and personal opinion
that you are a sad and broken human being.
I mean, you know what I'm talking about, right?
♪ Ooh-ooh
♪ Beneath the sorrow tree
♪ Ooh-ooh
♪ Beneath the sorrow tree
♪ Ooh-ooh
♪ Beneath the sorrow tree
♪ Ooh-ooh
[cheering and applause]
[discordant ambient music playing]
♪ Beneath the sorrow tree
[discordant electronica echoing]
[electronica growing louder]
[electronica buzzing, clattering]
[somber orchestral chords over clattering]
Oh, hey.
I didn't expect to see you down here.
Wow, I haven't seen you in a while.
Ha.
I never really understood what you were.
You're an alien, but are you an alien bug?
'Cause you have antenna.
You're sort of a self-portrait.
You're bald except for antenna.
I'm bald.
You come from another planet. I come from another planet.
- [chimes jingling] - Do you want to go for one more,
do you want to go for a ride?
Is your, your ship is here?
Okay. Let's go for one, you want to? Yeah, let's go.
The status quo wasn't going to last, I didn't want to admit that to myself.
And then I started getting really bad reviews.
Like I remember The New York Timesgave one of my records a review
where they said it was so bad, it represented the end of music.
- Really? - Yeah. It was on the homepage of The New York Times
- for a week. - The end of music.
And there were people writing in comments about
not just that they didn't like me, but they wanted to stab me to death.
They wanted to kick me to death on the street.
- They wanted to hang me. - Where is this?
Just like where people like write crazy ass stuff.
And it was, it really started to freak me out.
'Cause I was like, oh, this is the media.
- Right. - This is the thing that I love.
This is the thing that I need to feel good about myself.
And not only are they paying less attention to me,
but the attention they're paying to me is so hurtful.
- Right. - You know?
And so, and it... it really was disconcerting.
- WOMAN: You suck! - [crowd booing]
Nobody listens to techno!
You suck!
MAN: [drunkenly] You suuuuck!
[distorted booing]
You suuuuck!
[booing continues]
[slowing down, echoing] Nobody listens to techno!
I was in Barcelona for the MTV Music Awards,
and I'd been told beforehand that I was going to be winning an MTV Music Award.
And it was going to be my third or fourth
or fifth MTV Music Award that I was winning.
And I got to my hotel in Barcelona the night before the MTV Music Awards.
And I was at the top of one of the most elegant hotels I've ever been to.
It's called the Arts Hotel.
And there were four huge apartments at the top of this hotel,
and my neighbors were P. Diddy, Bon Jovi, and Madonna.
So the four of us were sharing this floor.
It's overlooking Barcelona and the Mediterranean.
And that night I ended up getting very drunk...
and everything was perfect.
You know, everything I'd ever wanted had been given to me, even more so.
You know, like I just wanted to make a few obscure records
and all of a sudden, like I'm at the top of this crazy hotel
and I've sold 10 or 20 million records.
And everything had been given to me that I'd ever wanted times a million.
And I was so despondent.
How strange it was that I've been given everything
and I'd never been more depressed.
And one of the only things that kept me from killing myself was the fact
that the windows in the hotel didn't open wide enough.
And I was even annoyed at that.
I was like, wow, I can't even kill myself.
Even that somehow is denied me.
It was such an odd moment
to be at what was ostensibly the pinnacle of my career
and the pinnacle of my life
and to have never been more depressed.
[choral music echoing in background]
I went back to New York, and I just started drinking more,
and I started doing cocaine.
I'd always avoided cocaine because of all the drugs,
that was the one that scared me the most.
So I was having 15 drinks a night,
a couple hundred dollars' worth of cocaine every night,
and then every morning at like 7:00,
I would try to go to sleep and I would take Xanax
and Vicodin and I would wake up so disappointed
that I was still alive.
And it got to the point where when I went to sleep,
all I wanted was to never wake up.
But somehow, and maybe I'm like part cockroach or part rat,
I just kept waking up, you know, at 4 or 5 in the afternoon
so disappointed I was still alive.
And I was physically, I was starting to turn gray,
and I was all puffy, and I had this like alcoholic bloatedness.
There were complete strangers in my apartment.
People were smoking crystal meth in my bathroom.
There are people I'd never met having sex in my bed.
Finally in 2008, I think I just bottomed out,
you know, in every way, like physically, emotionally, spiritually.
Yeah. And then 2008, October, 2008, I finally stopped drinking.
[muffled music pounding, liquid burbling]
♪ I would stand in line for this ♪
♪ There's always room in life for this ♪
♪ Oh babe, oh babe
♪ Then it fell apart
♪ It fell apart
♪ Oh babe
♪ Then it fell apart
♪ It fell apart
♪ I had to close down everything ♪
♪ I had to close down my mind ♪
♪ Too many things could cut me ♪
♪ Too much can make me blind ♪
♪ I've seen so much in so many places ♪
♪ So many heartaches, so many faces ♪
♪ So many dirty things
♪ You couldn't even believe
♪ I would stand in line for this ♪
♪ There's always room in life for this ♪
♪ What you say my name was?
♪ Say it
♪ What you say my name was?
♪ Ah, say it when
♪ I know I can
♪ But I know I can
♪ Well, I know I can't find no... ♪
♪ Oh babe
♪ Then it fell apart
♪ It fell apart
♪ Oh babe
♪ Then it fell apart
♪ It fell apart
♪ Oh babe
♪ Then it fell apart
♪ It fell apart
♪ Oh babe
♪ Like it always does
♪ Always does
[cheering and applause]
In the crack neighborhood in Stamford, I was happier.
Making $3,000 a year, I was happier.
Paying $50 a month so I could squat,
I was happier than when I was living overlooking Central Park.
Felt like such a confused...
'cause I had thought that living in this perfect home was going to fix everything.
Like, how couldn't it? When I found the perfect home, I would be perfectly happy.
When you set your sights, you know you spend your entire life working towards something
and you achieve it and you're less happy
than before you even started working to achieve it,
you don't know what else to do.
- [horn beeps] - [animals squawking]
Give up the familiar, even if it's killing you,
and you have to figure out then what works.
[cow moos]
90% of rainforest deforestation,
probably 75% of erectile dysfunction...
[audience laughing]
40% of California's water use,
50% of cancer, diabetes, heart disease,
close to 100% of famine,
'cause all the food that they're feeding the cows, et cetera,
could be fed to people.
50% of ocean acidification.
So in one fell swoop, you address all these environmental issues
just by stopping subsidizing animal agriculture.
That's my quick spiel.
[crowd murmuring]
I think people should speak up about what they believe in.
So, Moby, more power to him, you know.
What he's speaking about all the time is, are positive things.
And... but he's known for, you know, great music.
And I think Moby really does, you know, love, you know, what he does
and more power to him.
Just keep on making that great music, Mo.
Just as an aside, not to take up too much time,
but like, have you looked around recently?
This is real.
- Like, you know? - [applause]
I mean, you look at the space,
and you look at the people, this is real.
Like I've been a vegan for 30 years.
30 years ago, this didn't exist.
[applause]
So let's just take a moment.
I mean, we have a long way to go,
but boy, we've come so far.
[applause]
Moby and I are super excited to present this evening's incredible news.
In just a few weeks, we will be launching
the world's first ever vegan music festival right here in Los Angeles.
[cheering]
[indistinct introduction, crowd cheering]
First off just once again, thank you to everyone.
- And... - [applause]
...one last thing before we play this song.
Maybe this is smug of me to say this,
but we're on the right side of history.
- Whoo! - [cheering and applause]
It was just a given that at some point
people will look at animal agriculture in the past
the way we now look at slavery,
or the way that we look at like women not being allowed to vote,
or the way we look at African-Americans and Caucasians
not being allowed to use the same drinking fountain.
Like as Martin Luther King Jr. said, and we often paraphrase,
the moral arc of the universe is long and it bends towards justice.
It also bends towards the pragmatic reason.
And there's so many reasons to consider veganism.
Like using animals for food is the dumbest, cruelest thing
that we have ever done collectively as a species.
- [cheering and applause] - And to that end,
I know it's going to stop,
especially because everybody here and people around the world
are working so hard on it.
So I would like to dedicate this song to all the ravers
and all the animal rights activists, and everyone.
Thanks.
[electronica playing]
♪ I'm feeling so real
♪ Love that you feel it now
♪ I'm feeling so real
♪ Love that you feel it
♪ I'm feeling so real
♪ I'm... [voice electronically distorted]
♪ I'm feeling so real
♪ Love that you feel now
♪ I'm feeling so real
♪ Love that we're feeling now! ♪
♪ I'm feeling so real
♪ Love that you feel now
♪ I'm feeling so real
♪ Love that you feel now
[crowd whistling and applauding]
Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you...
[thunder crashing]
[wind whistling]
As I've gotten older, the world of people just doesn't interest me as much.
[eagle screeching]
Nothing that humans make ever compares
to what I can find in nature.
There are no signs.
There's no advertisements.
There's this wonderful, still indifference to us.
As humans, we love feeling a sense of significance
and we spend our whole lives pursuing significance
and trying to maintain the fiction that we have great significance,
but there's something really refreshing and nice
about giving up any sense of significance
and just remembering our place in the order of things.
And even though I'm still crazy,
I think I've hopefully figured out
how to avoid looking for like big, giant things
to fix more like small internal problems, but...
Where am, where am I?
[geese honking]
[techno chords playing, liquid burbling]
[static buzzing]
[somber orchestral chords playing]
[piano playing somber arpeggios]
[techno chords playing]
[fireworks whistling, popping]
[electronica buzzing]
[percussion pounding]
[wind whistling]
[birds squawking, singing]
[bees droning]
[crows cawing]
[background rumbling, growing louder]
[ominous echoes droning]
[exotic birds trilling]
[rumbling growing louder]
- [ambient music stops] - MOBY: Hey, Hey.
Hey. Hey.
Death. Hey!
[footsteps crunching ground]
Hey.
Whoa.
[clears throat]
Hey, Death.
Ugh!
Hey, Death.
Hey.
What are you doing out here?
[static feedback squealing]
No.
I mean, it's a beautiful day. You want to go for a walk?
[static feedback squealing]
Nah, come on. It's... It's a nice day.
So it might sound weird,
but I could almost, in an odd way,
say that I'm sort of a fan of your work...
- [static feedback squealing] - ...because...
Yeah, I know, I think a lot of people have
some weird opinions about you,
but I'm also an animal rights activist,
and for most animals, especially the ones on factory farms, like,
who experience nothing in their entire lives but sickness and suffering,
like without you, there's no end to their suffering.
I mean think of all the sick and suffering people.
You know, without you,
there is quite literally no end to their suffering.
I mean, you are merciful.
And I think it's also a little strange that people are afraid of you
and have such negative opinions about you because
you're the only, literally, the only guarantee in people's lives.
Yeah, I'm really, I mean, look, I mean,
I meet a lot of public figures
and I really don't want to be some fan weirdo,
but yeah, I...
I, I...
But I am wondering,
and I hear... you probably hear this all the time,
but like what happens after we die?
[static feedback squealing]
[electronica playing]
[muffled echoes, liquid burbling]
♪ Oh...
♪ We close our eyes
♪ The perfect life
♪ Life
♪ Is all we need
Everybody! Come on.
- ♪ Ah, ah... - Make some noise!
♪ Oh
♪ We close our eyes
♪ The perfect life
♪ Life
♪ Is all we need
- One more, come on. - A cappella.
♪ Oh!
♪ We close our eyes
♪ The perfect life
♪ Life
♪ Is all we need
Whoo!
♪ Oh
♪ We close our eyes
♪ The perfect life
♪ Life
♪ Is all we need
[falsetto] ♪ Oh
♪ We close our eyes
♪ The perfect life
♪ Life
♪ Is all we need
♪ Oh
♪ We close our eyes
♪ The perfect life
♪ Life
♪ Is all we need
♪ Oh
♪ We close our eyes
♪ The perfect life
♪ Life
♪ Is all we need
♪ Oh
♪ We close our eyes
♪ The perfect life
♪ Life
♪ Is all we need