NEW YORK (CelebrityAccess) The New York Post recently was provided an advance copy of Moby’s memoir, “Then It All Fell Apart,” which comes out May 7, and offered several excerpts from the artist’s documentation of his troubled past.
Moby’s career took off about a decade after he got into the music scene with the 1999 album Play, which hit No. 1 in Europe and sold more than 2 million copies in the U.S. Ten years later, on his 43rd birthday, Moby was too drunk to walk inside his New York house and laid on the sidewalk outside, covered in vomit.
The tale begins with a swift rise that began with Natalie Portman visiting him backstage at a show in Austin.
“I walked to the door, sure that this was a misunderstanding or a joke, but there was Natalie Portman, patiently waiting,” Moby writes, according to the Post. “She gazed up at me with black eyes and said, ‘Hi.’ As if this were normal, as if we knew each other as if movie stars randomly showed up after my shows.”
Soon they were dating, with Portman taking him to the MTV Video Music Awards.
“I’d only had two drinks,” he writes, “but I felt like I’d swallowed a distillery full of joy … I found that my own burgeoning fame was like warm amber, encasing me with a sense of worth I’d never felt before.”
The book apparently has its fills of anecdotes like Russell Crowe attacking Moby in a bathroom and Andy Dick attempting to poop on Moby’s catered food but follows the story of the artist’s journey to the depths of addiction. In 2002, for instance, Moby told his girlfriend he would stay sober for a month but 12 days in went to a show by Motley Crue’s Tommy Lee and ran into Dimebag Darrell and Vinnie Paul from Pantera, plus “a bunch of their Hells Angels friends.”
Soon, Moby writes, “a 6-foot-8 Hells Angel with a red beard opened a bottle of Crown Royal and pushed it into my hands.”
As time went on, Moby’s addictive behavior became less charming. He said there was a time he tried to get into a VIP party at a bar but was told leave.
“I was swaying on my feet,” he writes. “At this point, I’d had around 16 drinks. With slurred umbrage, I said, ‘Don’t you know who I am?’
“And I stopped cold … I’d crossed a line. I felt real fear, for the moment someone has to ask ‘Don’t you know who I am?’ is the moment the tide of fame has turned against them.”
It turned out it wasn’t a party, just the owner of the club counting the evening’s profit.
Soon, he was hosting a Christmas party and threw a knife at writer Jonathan Ames.
“In the kitchen, I opened another bottle of vodka and pulled a knife out of a butcher’s block. ‘Jonathan!’ I yelled at Jonathan Ames.”
“ ‘What?’ He looked up from the table where he was sitting. I threw the knife at him. Lovingly, because I loved Jonathan.”
“He screamed and held up his hand. The point of the knife had bounced off Jonathan’s Princeton college ring. He looked at me with horror, the blood draining from his face.”
“ ‘No, Jonathan, it was nice!’ I yelled. ‘It was ’cause I love you!’ ”
By 2008, he was crawling onto stages and asking the audience for drugs.
He finally had a come-to-Jesus moment after embarrassing himself at a fundraiser for Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand.
“I’d been hung over thousands and thousands of times,” he writes. “But now when I was hungover I felt like I poisoned my DNA. Hangovers these days felt wrong, and not lower-case ‘wrong,’ like driving a few miles an hour over the speed limit, but upper-case ‘WRONG,’ like feeding gasoline to a newborn.”
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