A Fish Tale

As his chosen moniker suggests, Moby wouldn't mind being a big fish in the musical pond. Born Richard Melville Hall, he is a distant relative of author Herman Melville, whose signature work, Moby Dick, is honored by Moby's nickname. As a teenager, he learned to play jazz and classical music on guitar but subsequently drifted in a more aggressive direction. He was a member of punk bands such as the Vatican Commandos during the Eighties, turning to dance music only toward the decade's end. His leap to the top of the rave pantheon was shockingly sudden; for many, he became the format's great white hope. The pressures he felt because of this responsibility were tangible--and on January 25, 1993, during a gig at Boulder's Fox Theatre that was opened by Prodigy, they boiled over.

The problems at the concert, which Moby refers to as "the worst show of my entire life," began many hours before he was scheduled to appear. "We were on a bus from Tulsa to Boulder, and our bus broke down," he recalls. "So we sat in a cornfield for six hours and then got on another bus and chartered a private plane that flew us to Boulder. So we got there, and the Prodigy played their set and it was fine. But then I started playing my set, and the monitors weren't working. And when we stopped and tried to fix the monitors, everything at the front of the stage stopped working. Then the microphones stopped working, too, and everything that could break down did break down. And I felt that the members of the local crew were about as unhelpful as they could possibly be. So I lost my temper backstage and ended up breaking a mirror and insulting the local crew, who then just turned everything off in the middle of one of my songs.

"The promoter and whoever else was involved responded to all of this kind of histrionically. The only thing I did was break a mirror, and they were threatening to throw me in jail--and one guy broke a beer bottle and tried to attack me with it. There was this guy and five or six huge bouncers threatening me and attacking me. And I'm five-foot-eight and 130 pounds. The balance of power was a little skewed in their favor." As he remembers it, he was allowed to leave only after one of his representatives paid an inflated price to replace sound gear that he did not harm.

Predictably, the folks at the Fox have a considerably different memory of the situation. In the February 3, 1993, Feedback, which covered the altercation, Mike Johnson, who co-promoted the date via his Poor Boy Productions firm, pinned the blame for the troubles firmly on Moby. "He was saying really rotten things to the sound guys," Johnson asserted at the time. "Instead of dealing with the situation, which was that there was no time to do a sound check, he kicked over his music stand, threw a bunch of microphones around and broke about $2,600 worth of equipment. And he was on the mike saying, 'If I were you people, I'd ask for my money back.'" He added, "At around 2:30, I saw [Fox co-owner Dickie Sidman] run past me saying, 'He just kicked in one of my monitors. That's it.' And he cut the power." Cheryl Ligouri, speaking for the Fox, confirmed that Moby's tour manager was forced to write a check to compensate the venue for damages. "They didn't have any choice, because we weren't going to let them leave."

Today, the Fox's Don Strasburg admits that Sidman, who died in 1995, waved a broken beer bottle at Moby, but he feels that the performer was never in any real danger. Moreover, he insists that Moby broke thousands of dollars' worth of sound-system accoutrements in the midst of his tantrum--a charge that Moby strongly denies.

"I'm not saying I'm innocent of everything," he says. "I got emotional because things weren't working. But these people were bullies, and what they did reeks of what bullies do, which is blaming somebody else for their problems. So it was a situation where everyone was sort of guilty. But I try very hard not to bear ill will toward people. I don't really see the point in holding grudges or being upset about things that have happened in the past. It doesn't serve any purpose. I want to look forward, not back."