House DJ Moby Gets Grammy Nomination
MORET: Elton John certainly will feel the love on Grammy night. He will receive the Grammy Legend award and will perform during an all-star tribute. Other performers during the rest of the ceremony include the Backstreet Boys, TLC, Santana, and Ricky Martin, who all are nominated for multiple awards. The Grammys will be handed out February 23 right here in Los Angeles. Moby is another name you might be hearing on Grammy night. The DJ was more than surprised when he earned two nominations. After all, the house music impresario had an unusual recipe for making his Grammy-nominated CD. He took recordings a folklorist made some 65 years ago in the deep South, and built new songs around them in his home studio. Mark Scheerer visited him in his New York apartment.</s>MARK SCHEERER, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): The video for the song "Natural Blues" finds DJ/producer/performer Moby in senior citizen makeup. What he's done in this song and others is take a blues number from the 1930s, "Trouble So Hard," by Vera Hall, and reinvent it. On his album "Play," he's done that with lots of samples of the Southern Folk and Blues field recordings by legendary musicologist Alan Lomax.</s>MOBY, DJ/PRODUCER/PERFORMER: I wish I had stories about like, you know, either me like getting them myself, like, you know, hanging out in prisons and farms in Georgia, Atlanta, or Alabama, or whatever, but no, I just went around the corner to my old record store and bought the reissues.</s>SCHEERER: So just who is this Moby, caught here on the second stage at Lollapalooza '95?</s>MOBY: I am convinced that at like one point in a past life I was a lemur or a squirrel or something, because it's almost like my apartment is like a human habitrail.</s>SCHEERER: Thirty-four-year-old Connecticut-born Richard Melville Hall says his parents gave him the nickname Moby.</s>MOBY: The basis for Richard Melville Hall and for Moby is that supposedly Herman Melville was my great-great-great-granduncle.</s>SCHEERER: "Bodyrock" is one of the tracks from the album that's an exception. A rap song was sampled, not one of the old field recordings from the South, on which most of the songs are built. (on camera): Were you concerned that somebody might take you to task for exploiting this old music by these old musicians?</s>MOBY: The real litmus test for me was at the MTV Music Awards. I met Chris Rock, and if anyone was going to skewer me for sampling African-American vocals from the early 20th century, it would be him, and he told me how much he loved the record,</s>SCHEERER (voice-over): The lavish critical praise for "Play" has led to two Grammy nominations.</s>MOBY: I keep waiting for the phone to ring and for, you know, Mr. John Q. Grammy or whoever is in charge of the Grammys to call up my manager, and say, "oh, we made a big mistake. These were two more nominations that were supposed to go to Santana."</s>SCHEERER: Songs from "Play" are on the soundtracks of the new Leo DiCaprio movie and Madonna's new film. And he's also in a Calvin Klein ad campaign. Perhaps the best perk of all involves an old friend, Christina Ricci.</s>MOBY: In a part in the video where I am lying in Christina Ricci's arms, I did have the thought, you know, there are an awful lot of men in the world that would gladly trade places with me right now.</s>SCHEERER: Mark Scheerer, CNN Entertainment News, New York.</s>COLLIN RAYE, MUSICIAN: I thought this record would be, if we did it right, would be a good opportunity to get parents and children together to spend quality time together, listening to the music.</s>PETER FURLER, MUSICIAN: This record, there -- there is really sort of three singers in the band and so we tried to focus more on that, you know, with harmonies and things that -- and we hadn't done it before.</s>STEPHAN JENKINS, MUSICIAN: We got together and did some really intensive song-writing sessions. Those happened in -- in different ways and the different ways turned into different songs. So, that's why there's not one sort of pattern Third Eye Blind song.</s>ANNOUNCER: Tomorrow, why some critics say "The Hurricane" is historically inaccurate, and teenage country sensation Alecia Elliott.