KCRW Sessions with Moby

Tonight I attended the second of a series of concerts called Sessions, put on by my local NPR flagship, KCRW (89.9 FM). If you read my blog post about the first Sessions concert back in April, which featured Australian vocalist Sia, then you'll know that KCRW is just about the only radio station I tune into. Since it's a public station, the DJs are not bound to any corporation's playlist. They spin hand-picked stuff and pride themselves on their diverse tastes. KCRW's favorite word is eclectic. I probably shouldn't say they're the only station I ever put on. You've also got Jack FM for those awesome hits from the eighties (my favorite decade!) as well as KUSC's classical music for your more contemplative moods.

To illustrate how all over the map KCRW can go, they've gone from Sia--with her gorgeous, soulful, heart-stabbing voice--to Moby, who himself is sort of one big bag of eclecticism. As before, tonight's event was at the Malibu Performing Arts Center (MPAC). When you live in the Valley like I do, that means hauling it over the proverbial Hill, making a bee line for the coast, and then winding north along Pacific Coast Highway, through Santa Monica and the Pacific Palisades, past the Getty Villa, until you're pretty much in downtown Malibu, a seaside town of about 10,000 or so people. MPAC is a two-story building sitting right behind Malibu City Hall. As I did three months ago, during my drive tonight I couldn't help wondering if I was passing the spot where Mel Braveheart got pulled over for drunk driving two years ago. You know what I'm talking about, when he suspected the barely legal deputy of being Jewish and therefore the scourge of Western Civilization.

Have you ever listened to Moby? You've probably heard at least one of his songs, perhaps one of the tracks from his 1999 album Play. A healthy share of those pups were appropriated by various TV shows and commercials and movies and accordingly became quite ubiquitous. At any rate, if you know of Moby at all, you most likely know him for his electronica, for being that guy in the club churning out house music from his laptop. Well, that's not what the beautiful bald vegan was up to tonight. Don't get me wrong. Raves do have their time and place, but I doubt a good share of the 500 people tonight had a rave in mind when they coughed up the healthy coin to score a ticket to this gig. Nah, so Moby showed up with a five-piece band, and it was kind of eye opening to see how versatile he was with the instruments. He could swing the axe just as well as he could take the sticks behind that Plexiglas wall. Also a standout was Laura Dawn, this big-voiced blonde who provided vocals on just about every song. I'm not sure if she has a solo career, but lord knows she should. I could even see her as a soprano on the opera stage. That gal's got pipes!

As with Sia, the format for tonight's concert was that Moby and his band came out, played a few tracks, and then Nic Harcourt came out for an interview. While the rest of the band adjourned backstage, Nic and Moby sat on a couch and bantered back and forth for about, I dunno, a half-hour maybe? After that, Moby and band went back at it for a much more extensive and diverse second set. Nic Harcourt, by the way, is the music program director for KCRW and also DJs Morning Becomes Eclectic, their weekday music show, from nine till noon.

While I had a more than swell time overall, I didn't enjoy this quite as much as I did Sia. For one thing, Sia's voice is awfully tough to beat. And secondly, if you've listened to Moby at all, you can imagine that a lot of his songs don't exactly lend themselves to being performed onstage with a band in a traditional concert format. Mind you, I've been a fan of Moby's longer than I have been of Sia's. Sia entered my life in the summer of 2001 when she contributed vocals to two songs on Zero 7's debut album Simple Things. As for Moby, it was when Play came out in '99 that he caught my--and the rest of the world's--attention. That sucker, his third full-length, sold something like eleven million copies. I snatched a copy of 18 as soon as that came out in '02. He's since come out with two more albums, 2005's Hotel and this year's Last Night. No, of course it wasn't a coincidence that he was making a much-hyped live appearance in Malibu so soon after releasing a new album. Sia had just come out with Some People Have Real Problems when she took the MPAC stage. Hey, an artist's marketing mission is never done. Anywho, 'point being that I love Moby as much as the next wannabe raver. But that's just it. Dude's music lends itself much more to being performed in a dance club or something, not in an auditorium where people sit down. Not surprisingly, there were several tracks tonight that provoked all 500 of us to get to our feet and sort of groove with the music. At one point during the interview Nic called the show a "partially seated rave." My four favorite songs from tonight were "Lift Me Up", "Bodyrock", "I Like It", and "Honey". Those tunes, and a few others, translated quite well to a live band performance. Others, not so much.

Here's some biographical tidbits about our man Moby. He was born Richard Melville Hall in Harlem on September 11, 1966. The man was barely out of the womb when his folks decided to nickname him Moby. No, it's not a coincidence that they'd give him the name of Herman Melville's whale, nor that his middle name is Melville. Herman was his great-great-great grand uncle. Anyway, Moby's dad died when he was two. He and Mom moved to Darien, Connecticut, where Moby did most of his growing up. They lived in poverty for pretty much his entire childhood, subsisting on food stamps and welfare. The adventures didn't end there, though. After double majoring in photography and philosophy at SUNY Purchase, ol' Mobe moved to Stamford, Connecticut, where he lived in an abandoned factory in a crack ghetto. His main method of survival was to horde tons of bottles and cans and then go wait in line with homeless people to exchange the containers for coinage so he could eat.

During his couch interview with Nic, Moby downplayed his poor upbringing. The only time he came within a football field of mentioning it was when he talked about his earliest music memory, which also doubles as his earliest memory period. He talked about sitting in his ma's beat-up white Plymouth ("the tailpipe hanging on with twine," he said). They had just gotten home, and on the radio came "Proud Mary" by Creedence Clearwater Revival, from their 1969 album Bayou Country. He was just three years old at the time, and he refused to get out of the car until the song was over. Aw, isn't that cute? Can't you just picture that tiny little bald kid really getting into the groove?

So that was it. Besides mentioning their raggedy ol' Plymouth, Moby never said a word about being poor. You gotta admire the guy for not feeling sorry for himself as well as not wanting anyone to feel bad for him. I mean, I'd say he's doing okay now, wouldn't you?

His mother's musical tastes influenced him greatly. Her tastes spanned the spectrum, which helps explain why his songs can sort of dart all over the map. He told Nic that she could listen to The Birds or Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young one minute, and then switch to Miles Davis and Stravinsky the next. He said he regularly raided his mom's vast vinyl collection, to the point that it became a routine for her to go into his room once in a while to take back whatever he'd "borrowed." He was also big on recording songs off the radio. His favorite station growing up was WNYU, a college station in New York. He was particularly fond of a program that came on after school called the New Afternoon Show, which played a lot of punk and new wave. Moby would literally sit next to the radio with his finger on the record button, just in case a tune came on that caught his fancy.

The first record he ever bought was the 7" single "Convoy" by C.W. McCall. It was thanks to a fiver one of his pals found on the street. Because Moby was there when he found it, his pal gave him a dollar. Moby didn't waste a minute. He immediately made his way to a local discount store in Darien called Bradley's and bought that single. Then he went home and listened to it forty. Consecutive. Times. Forty. This was in the mid seventies. Moby wasn't even ten. The next day at school that little squirt walked around the halls talking like a trucker, pretending he was talking to his pals on a CB radio or whatever.

When he was nine or ten or so, he landed a job mowing lawns for his neighbors and used that money to buy the soundtrack to Live and Let Die, which scared the bejesus out of him at the time. At 13 he scooped up a copy of Aerosmith's self-titled debut...and played it while making out with his girlfriend. "Dream On" was playing. Moby swung for home. But only hit a double. What made it kind of awkward, Moby said with a cringe, was that he had bigger boobies than she did. Not that it mattered. She didn't like how he kissed and dumped him for his best friend, thus making the song's title quite prescient. About ten years ago Moby ran into Steve Tyler at a party and related this little narrative. According to Moby, "Steve couldn't have cared less."

While his tastes slowly but steadily expanded across the genres, his first gravitation was to techno and hardcore punk. In high school he was part of two bands. The first was a hardcore punk band called the Vatican Commandos. Their main thing was to rail against religious fundamentalism. They also did lots of Sex Pistols and Clash covers, as well as a cover of Minor Threat's "12XU". According to Moby, any and all punk bands worth their salt were obligated to cover "12XU". Before breaking up, the Vatican Commandos actually managed to put together an EP entitled...(wait for it)...Hit Squad for God. Also during high school, Moby was part of this Joy Divisionesque post-punk group called AWOL. They actually stayed together long enough to put out a full-length (self-titled). Most of the other peeps in these bands were Moby's fellow nerdy pals from the high school's AV club. Moby was the kid whose task was to wheel the film projectors into the classrooms and set up the reels. Ever the musical loner, he said his lunch usually consisted of sitting in his AV room cubby and eating sandwiches while listening to Joy Division on his walkman.

When Nic asked him how he got into disco, Moby recalled fondly how open the music scene was in New York during the eighties. One club he was especially fond of was Danceteria, which played all kinds of stuff (e.g. Clash, Donna Summer, Johnny Cash, you name it.) It was at Danceteria that he discovered disco. And his tastes continued to grow.

He never dreamed he'd have a music career (he had two majors at SUNY Purchase, music wasn't one of them). That didn't stop him from giving it a whirl. By the time he finished college in '87, he was hardcore into The Smiths, so he put together a demo of songs that, a la The Smiths, were sort of angsty. He submitted it to a bunch of places and got back all of one response. It was a form letter rejection from Disney saying they don't accept unsolicited material. Then in '89 he made a demo of techno music and actually got signed to a tiny label called Instinct Records. He said Instinct was so small that they had neither a name, an office, nor any employees. "A mime equivalent of a record label," Moby said. His first single, "Mobility", sold 1,500 copies.

It was his second single that gave his career a nice boost. In the early nineties David Lynch had a show called Twin Peaks. Moby's song "Go" became known as Laura Palmer's Theme. Moby was 25 at the time. Tonight, just before he played that song, he said he wouldn't have a career without Mr. Lynch.

His debut full length was 1995's Everything Is Wrong. That didn't do much. Then in '96 he did a punk rock album called Animal Rights, which to this day is his biggest flop. Moby, in true Moby fashion, says that, also to this day, Animal Rights remains the only album he really likes and doesn't mind listening to now and again. It was during this slow phase that he met vocalist Laura Dawn. She spotted him in a bar, went up to him, and couldn't stop gushing about Animal Rights. They've been working together ever since.

As I said above, what launched him into the stratosphere was 1999's Play, by which time the critics had already called him a has-been. And talk about ironic as all hell, the critical notices for Play were horrible. The songs, though, kept getting appropriated for tons of TV shows, movies, and commercials. The album ended up going quintuple platinum or something.

In the wake of Play, he started going to celebrity parties and whatnot and eventually decided that celebs are mostly "insecure people with not much to say." The good thing about his success is that he's gotten to jam with a lot of his idols. He toured with New Order and convinced them that they should do a Joy Division cover together. Hilariously, Moby had to teach them how to play this one Joy Division song even though New Order, of course, had been the ones who originally wrote it. The song they picked hadn't been sung since Ian Curtis. Moby also played with David Bowie at Carnegie Hall. To rehearse, Dave came over to Moby's Little Italy apartment one morning and sat on his couch so they could go over tunes like "Heroes" and what have you. Like I said, Moby's doing okay now.

So here's what the beautiful bald man played. During the applause after each song, ol' Mobe never failed to say thank you three times really fast. "Thankyouthankyouthankyou."

First set:

Lift Me Up

Go

Bodyrock

Disco Lies

The Stars

Interview with Nic

That raucous second set:

Great Escape

Porcelain

Extreme Ways

I Like It

We Are All Made of Stars

Run On

When It's Cold

Natural Blues

New Dawn Fades

Encore:

Next is the E

Honey