The musician Moby was recently regaling a group of cocktail-party guests with tales of 1980s New York when he had a realization. “I felt like a hipster Grandpa Simpson,” he says. “I was this old middle-aged guy recounting stories of when rent was cheap.” So he decided to write those stories down. His new memoir, “Porcelain,” is the story of his life as a pioneer of electronic dance music and his ups and downs along the way.  Moby, born Richard Melville Hall and now 50 years old, has sold more than 20 million albums world-wide; his dozen official releases include “Play” (1999), “18” (2002) and “Innocents” (2013). It wasn’t an easy path. He grew up poor in an affluent Connecticut suburb and battled alcoholism for almost two decades.  His goal in writing the book was, in part, to recall the opportunities that musicians once had to live and work in big cities—which have now become too pricey for them. A few decades ago, “if we wanted to be 20 years old and broke living in a creative environment, we could’ve lived in Berlin, London, San Francisco and New York,” he says. “But now, because of affluence, so many former creative folks have been closed out.”  His upbringing in Darien, Conn.—living with a single mother, a sometime secretary who was often on welfare, surrounded by wealthy neighbors—has given him a pointed perspective on inequality. “So many issues came along with the stigma of poverty,” he says. “It’s odd because, professionally, I’ve had enough success that I can be fairly comfortable now, so it’s weird to try to nostalgically remember, while sitting at the pool house in Los Angeles drinking organic white tea…living in a crack den in 1989.” (At the time, he was squatting in an abandoned factory in a neighborhood of Stamford, Conn., known for crack use.)  Moby was always interested in music. In high school, he and his friends started a hard-core punk band that performed at New York clubs. He attended the University of Connecticut but dropped out after eight months and started hanging out in New York, where he became interested in dance music. He worked as a disc jockey and then started recording his own dance mixes, releasing his first album, “Everything Is Wrong,” in 1995.  Moby was drinking heavily by the late 1980s, before becoming sober for a few years and then starting to drink again in 1995. “From 1995 until 2008, I drank as much as I possibly could and did as many drugs as I possibly could,” he says.  Finally, in 2008, he decided that he had to stop. “The fun decreases every year, and the consequences increase,” he says. Moving to Los Angeles in 2010 from New York has helped him stay sober, he says. “New York is the greatest place in the world to be a drunk,” he says. “There’s a bar on every corner.”  But even during his dark days, he kept playing music. For one thing, he says, “I had no other job I knew how to do.”  Moby says that his success came as a surprise. When his tour for his breakout album “Play” started, the first show was in a record store basement for 40 people. His last was at a festival in southern California with an audience of 25,000. By the end of that tour, he was being heralded as the first major techno star.  Over the next few years, his music became so ubiquitous—he licensed many of his songs to movies and TV shows—that critics complained that he had sold out. “If you do something in public and have success with it, people will hate you for it,” says Moby. But, he concedes, “there was a three-year period where [my music] was everywhere, so I kind of understand why people thought you couldn’t escape.”  In 2002, he branched out into the restaurant business and opened Teany, a small vegan cafe in New York, spurred by his support of veganism and animal rights. He hasn’t eaten meat or dairy since he was 22, aside from an episode in 1992 when he ate yogurt. His healthy diet didn’t get in the way of his hedonism, however. “I liked the idea of being healthy, but I liked the idea of being drunk more,” he says. Teany closed last fall, around the same time that Moby opened Little Pine, a vegan restaurant in Los Angeles.  In his free time, Moby listens to classical music and classic rock. He also listens to a lot of college radio while driving around in L.A. He’s gearing up to release his next album in September. “I fully appreciate the absurdity of a 50-year-old musician putting out an album in 2016,” he says. “One, people don’t buy albums anymore, two, people don’t really listen to albums anymore, and three, people especially don’t listen to the 15th album made by a 50-year-old musician who hates to tour.”  For now, Moby is happy staying at home in L.A. He says that one of his takeaways from writing his memoir was realizing how much people struggle unnecessarily—from dealing with bad landlords to being anxious about running late for meetings. Looking back, “I’ve just created so much extra worry and struggle for myself and have approached so many neutral and benign things as if they were either catastrophic or had the potential to turn to ruin,” he says. “The well-being of the universe doesn’t hang in the balance.”  In L.A., he now has a sunnier outlook. Borrowing from Mark Twain, he says, “I’ve lived through some terrible things in my life, some of which actually happened.”  Write to Alexandra Wolfe at alexandra.wolfe@wsj.com
The techno music pioneer has reached middle age, with a new memoir out about his struggles with alcohol, poverty and success.