Moby Porcelain

Main
ISBN: 978-0-571-32150-6
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 320 Seiten

There were many reasons Moby was never going to make it as a DJ and musician in the New York club scene of the late 1980s and early 90s. This was the New York of Palladium, of Mars, Limelight, and Twilo, an era when dance music was still a largely underground phenomenon, popular chiefly among working-class African Americans and Latinos. And then there was Moby-not just a poor, skinny white kid from deepest Connecticut, but a devout Christian, a vegan, and a teetotaler, in a scene that was known for its unchecked drug-fueled hedonism. He would learn what it was to be spat on, literally and figuratively. And to live on almost nothing. But it was perhaps the last good time for an artist to live on nothing in New York City ... And so by the end of the decade, Moby contemplated the end of things, in his career and elsewhere in his life, and he put that emotion into what he assumed would be his swan song, his good-bye to all that, the album that would be in fact the beginning of an astonishing new phase in his life, the multimillion-selling Play. Porcelain is about making it, losing it, loving it, and hating it. It's about finding your people, and your place, thinking you've lost them both, and then, finally, somehow, creating a masterpiece. As a portrait of the young artist, Porcelain is a masterpiece in its own right, fit for the short shelf of musicians' memoirs that capture not just a scene but an age and something timeless about the human condition. Push play.

Moby was born in Harlem in 1965. He is a singer-songwriter, musician, DJ and photographer. He is the author of two volumes of memoir, Porcelain and Then It Fell Apart.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Moby

Leseproben

1

ONE HUNDRED SQUARE FEET

The roosters finally shut up at seven a.m.

There were four recurring sounds around the abandoned factory where I lived, a mile south of the Stamford train station.

1. Gunshots. The crack dealers would regularly shoot at each other, usually starting after the sun went down.
2. Amplified gospel. Every weekend there were big revival tents set up by the nearby storefront Dominican and Jamaican churches, trying to get the crack dealers to leave the neighborhood.
3. Public Enemy. Or EPMD. Or Rob Base and DJ E-Z Rock. Every fifteen minutes, a car would drive by playing “Fight the Power” or “It Takes Two” at toaster-oven-rattling levels.
4. Roosters. Everyone on the street opposite the abandoned factory kept roosters in their backyards. The roosters would start roostering around four thirty a.m., exactly when I was trying to go to bed. I kept an old radio next to my bed and tuned it to a non-station when I needed to sleep. The static just barely masked the dawn staccato stylings of the testosterone-fueled roosters across the street.

I had moved into this abandoned factory two years ago, and I loved it. In the nineteenth century it had been a huge lock factory, comprising twenty or thirty giant brick buildings. Now, in 1989, it was a dark and hulking mass in a neighborhood famous for having the highest murder rate in New England. A decade earlier a real estate developer had bought the whole complex, put up a fence, and hired some security guards to look after it.

A few of the guards made extra money by charging squatters and other random people $50 a month to illicitly live or work in the abandoned factory. I was making about $5,000 a year, so $50 a month for “squatter’s rent” was within my budget. My space was small and sandwiched between a gay-porn production studio and an artist’s loft, but it was all mine: one hundred square feet of abandoned factory where I could live and work as long as the security guards took their $50 and looked the other way.

My walls were built out of discarded plywood that my friend Paul and I found in a Dumpster. Paul and I had gone to Darien High School together, where we had bonded over loving science fiction and being the only poor kids in Darien, Connecticut. The walls of my one-hundred-square-foot loft looked like a brown wooden quilt, and in the summer heat the plywood would smell like the Dumpster where we had found it. My space had a solid, beautiful door that we had rescued from an abandoned house near Route 7 in Norwalk, and the entire floor was covered with thick, beautiful ivory carpeting that I had taken from the garage of a friend’s parents. I hadn’t gotten permission to take the rug, but I told myself that it was fine because I would give it back if they ever noticed it was missing. I had never cleaned the rug, but it remained improbably pristine.

I had a small, brown school desk for my Casio keyboard, my Alesis drum machine and sequencer, my TASCAM four-track mixer, and a terrible Yamaha sampler. I couldn’t afford speakers, so I listened to everything through a pair of Radio Shack headphones. I cooked my meals in a toaster oven and on a single-burner electric hot plate. And I was happy. I loved the crumbling bricks, I loved the olfactory weight of a century of different factory smells, and I loved my huge window that faced south, letting in pale light in the winter and blistering, full-throated sunlight in the summer.

There were approximately one million square feet of space in the factory complex—it was so huge, I had no idea how many other people lived there—and although I took up only one hundred of those square feet myself, I had access to the whole place. I would ride my friend Jamie’s motorcycle up and down the empty factory floors, sometimes playing “motorcycle bowling”: setting up bottles at one end of a factory floor and trying to knock them down with the motorcycle’s wheels. When I was bored, I would go exploring: I’d find old propane canisters, barrels of industrial chemicals, giant rusty wrenches, spools of steel cable, and the occasional dead pigeon.

When friends and family visited me, they were dismayed. My five-year-old cousin Ben, visiting me with my aunt Anne, stood in the doorway to my small space and announced, “This is terrible.” I smelled like a homeless person—because although I had a quasi-residence, I was functionally homeless. I didn’t have running water or a bathroom or heat, but I had free electricity, which is the one utility I needed to make music.

When I needed to pee, I would use an empty water bottle. With no bathroom, I was bathing only once a week—if I visited my mom’s house, or my girlfriend’s dorm, I could use the shower there. I usually stank, but I’d stopped offending myself. I loved everything about my life in the abandoned factory.

Well, not everything. I didn’t love that I’d been working on music for years and was still in a small city forty miles away from New York. I didn’t love that no record label had expressed any interest in my electronic music, or that I had never actually played it for anyone except my girlfriend. But aside from my longing to live and make music in lower Manhattan, the abandoned factory was perfect.

*

Most days I would wake up in my loft bed around noon, make oatmeal on my hot plate, read the Bible, and work on music. When I wanted a break I would ride my skateboard up and down the long, empty hallways of the factory or walk to the local Dominican bodega, where I could buy oats and raisins.

Today, however, I was headed to New York City, my dirty mecca. There were a few ways to get to New York. Sometimes I would ride my old moped to Darien, where my mom lived, and borrow her aging Chevy Chevette. I would drive into the city, following the route that I learned from my grandfather when I was eight years old: he taught me how to get into the city without paying tolls, though it meant driving through the most crime- and drug-ridden parts of New York.

Sometimes I could find someone who was already driving into the city and get a ride with them. But usually I took Metro-North, a commuter train that connected New York to its suburbs. I spent my childhood fleeing Connecticut for Manhattan via Metro-North. My punk-rock friends and I would all put on our best punk-rock T-shirts and go into the city, hoping that real punk rockers would notice us and approve of our Black Flag and Bad Brains shirts. Heading into Grand Central Terminal in the morning, we’d sit next to sleepy white businessmen; coming home at night we’d sit next to the same white businessmen, who were now drunk and exhausted.

If the police were around when I left the factory I would climb out via one of the huge glass-and-steel windows to avoid the scrutiny of the cops. Today there was only a truck rumbling down the road, so I left by the back door, stepping outside and clenching my body against the cold. It wasn’t a dry cold, but a wet cold that made my socks heavy and stabbed my bones. It had snowed three days earlier, covering the ground with a pristine and angelic blanket—quickly ruined by freezing rain. I walked under the gray sky, across the pitted and broken tarmac of the parking lot, picking my way through a maze of puddles. When I got to the chain-link fence, I let myself out through a hole in the corner and headed for the Stamford train station.

Walking to the train station I passed some storefront churches with hand-painted signs, a grocery store with bulletproof Plexiglas and a special on Schlitz malt liquor, the Cavalier Pool Hall, and some shuttered and abandoned buildings. Within a few minutes my hands and feet were already cold. The scattering of locals on the street looked homeless or scared, and they were nonplussed by the badly dressed white kid walking through their neighborhood.

The next train to Grand Central didn’t leave for half an hour, so I stopped at the pool hall to play a game by myself. The room was dark, with a few dim lights over the five pool tables. Even low-wattage lighting couldn’t conceal that the felt on the tables was scarred and burned from decades of cigarettes and spilled drinks. Aside from me there was one other person playing a midday game of pool, and the guy in the back who rented you your cue and rack of balls for $1.50. I often stopped by the pool hall on my way to the train station, even though I was a mediocre pool player. I consoled myself with the knowledge that if I were any good at pool I’d run the table quickly and not be able to play as long. As with so many things, there was utility in avoiding excellence.

The pool hall was always filled with cigarette smoke. That wasn’t surprising—I worked in bars where everyone smoked and went to restaurants where everyone smoked. Even though I was a nonsmoker, and there were only two other human beings inside the pool hall, it seemed normal for the room to be filled with smoke. I never spoke with the other pool players, or the guy handing out cues and racks. I hoped that someday, they would say “How are ya?” or even give me a subtle nod, but they just tolerated me. Apart from me, the only white people around here were suburban kids buying crack and heroin. The irony was that even though I was sober, I was seen as part of the problem: another drug-addicted white kid ruining the neighborhood. Eventually the locals realized that I lived there, and while that didn’t get me any friendly nods, at least it stopped the hostile stares.

I finished my game, hoping that if either of the other guys in the pool hall looked at me, they would think that I was a better player than I actually was. On the...