Moby Recalls His Drinking and Drug Use After 'Play' Success

Posted on Jun 16th 2009 5:00PM by Steve Baltin
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Moby confesses he has had a hard time believing anybody listens to his music. "I've been making records for 20 years; it's still incredibly disconcerting to me when someone tells me that they like me or they like my music," the techno giant told Spinner when he recently visited us for a lengthy chat. So how, then, did he deal with huge popularity of 'Play,' the 1999 album that sold millions of copies and made him one of music's most unlikely superstars? "I drank a lot," he says. "And by staying drunk for a few years, it made the attention a lot more tolerable."

During that time, Moby was a very visible public figure, often being seen at A-list parties. It wasn't all it's cracked up to be, he recalls: "You go to these celebrity parties, and it's a bunch of people who think that just showing up has made it a special event, so it's kind of tedious, and the conversations with celebrities, you just keep repeating the same thing over, 'What are you working on? So, where are you staying? So, where are you going for vacation?'"

What finally broke the cycle for him? "It took about a few hundred of those experiences for me to finally realize, 'Maybe I'd be happier if I hung out with my friends who I've known for 20 years and are smart as a whip, and funny and decent people,'" he says. "Going over to my friend Ashley's house, eating hummus and playing Scrabble is not going to be written about in Us Weekly, but that's probably a good thing."

After coming to those realizations himself, does he have any advice for young artists? "I almost think there should be a little handbook for public figures -- what not to do," he says. "One: Whenever possible, stay away from private planes; two: stay away from private planes and storms; three: I've done a lot of drugs in my life and have somehow emerged relatively unscathed, but drugs destroy people. The number of my friends who have been junkies and coke addicts and addicted to crystal meth, and then all of a sudden people get to that point where they realize they cannot function without drugs -- they're enslaved by it. It's really heartbreaking."

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