Today, Moby is a sober, vegan-restaurant-owning, transcendental-meditation-practicing resident of Los Angeles, a 50-year-old DJ-producer-musician who’s known for his animal activism, paid handsomely to appear at festivals like Coachella, and often invited to exclusive Hollywood happenings like December’s premiere for Star Wars: The Force Awakens. In the decade before the turn of the millennium, however — prior to the release of his seminal, universally beloved 1999 album, Play — the New York-dwelling musician was a raging alcoholic who routinely indulged his insatiable libido with strippers and at least one dominatrix, even once having sex in the middle of a dance floor while a club full of drag queens dressed as Stevie Nicks cheered him on. Thankfully, when it came time to write the story of his life, the artist born Richard Melville Hall (he’s descended from Moby Dick scribe Herman Melville) elected to focus on the latter. A brilliantly penned page-turner, Porcelain — published May 17 by Penguin Press — calls to mind Patti Smith’s Just Kids in how it colorizes a New York that no longer exists.
