- In 1991 I was DJing at KDVS (the UC Davis radio station), and writing to record labels (snail mail) requesting record promos. Instinct Records sent me a 12″ that included a remix of “Go”. I played the hell out of it, especially the Barracuda Mix.
- 1992: Moby played at The Rage in Sacramento. I can’t believe the set is actually online (listen to it while you read this post). I went with my good fried Amy West and another friend from the Davis Student Co-Op, where we all lived. Moby still had hair. That may have been the first time I heard the version of Go with the Twin Peaks sample. Why did Moby dedicate a track to the Sacramento police force? I have no idea…
- Summer of ’93, still in college. At this point I’d released my first record as DJ JD. The piano riffs in “1-900” are heavily influenced by Moby. A friend of mine, Mark Pace, also a music producer, moves to San Diego to start an electronic music collective. I visit for a few days, considering joining myself. I have a serious talk with Carol (my girlfriend at this time) about this possibility. About five guys living in a huge house. Nobody is doing any dishes. I try to do some dishes but there’s not even any dish soap. The living room is filled with about ten keyboards, huge speakers, and an elevated chair like the commander of a starship. They’re all flat broke. They have a house meeting and argue about money. I make a few beats but it’s not the software I usually use. We go to a rave. We drive around San Diego freeways listening to techno at max volume. Random people visit and hang out. One of the randos rifles through my backpack and steals my Moby CD. I return to Davis and tell Carol that I’m not joining the collective, but we break up anyway.
- 1994. I join a better electronic music collective, Trip ‘n Spin, in San Francisco. I meet DJ Special K and we form Jondi & Spesh and put out our first vinyl records. I mail some of our records to Moby, who is living in New York, and he emails me back. Island Universe – Make Me Say Yes is his favorite.
- 2006. Kia and I have been married nearly ten years, but we’re living in different cities. She’s having a go at being a film director in Los Angeles, and I’m co-running Loöq Records and promoting dance music events in San Francisco. She enters a crowd-sourced video production contest for MoveOn.org and her video is voted into the Top 5. We go to New York City together for the awards ceremony. Moby and Julia Stiles both speak at the event. Kia’s video gets disqualified for legal reasons and the most boring video wins (but Barack Obama is elected two years later, nonetheless). My music is less influenced by Moby, but I own most of his albums on CD and listen to them frequently, including Everything Is Wrong. When things are difficult in my life I say “everything is wrong.”
- 2016. I listen to a fascinating podcast about Moby and Gregor, the friend who lent him Sounds of the South, which included the gospel tracks that Moby sampled for his breakout album Play (when there was perhaps less awareness and stigma around cultural appropriation). I haven’t thought about Moby much in the last decade, but the podcast reminds me how much of an influence he was on my own music. Moby never returned the CD set.
- 2026 (last night). I saw Moby at Bill Graham in San Francisco. Great show! There were at least ten people on stage: a drummer, vocalists, dancers, string players, etc. A far cry from the 1992 show at The Rage where it was just Moby and his keyboard. Moby played Go and a few other of the oldies. But I reached my limit of being in a crowd and left before Moby’s guitar solo.
RIP Juan Atkins