![]() "It feels so awkward."įour days before New Year's, I arrive in Playa del Carmen, Mexico, to find him pacing around a tented greenroom at Mamita's Beach Club, smoking like a chimney and knocking back Red Bulls. "It's just like when it's right in the moment and you have that stupid bright light on you," he says, searching for the words to say it. There's always that moment, right before he goes onstage, when he wonders what the fuck he is even doing up there, if he deserves any of this, and if this is the time it all comes crashing down. "I love everything that comes with it it's fun and it's kind of glamorous." And yet. Because he is only 23, subsisting on a diet of Red Bull, nicotine, and airport food, and spending most of his time bathed in the pixelated glow of a computer screen has not diminished, just kind of softened, the perpetually rumpled good looks that prompted Ralph Lauren to cast him in an ad campaign. He rifles a hand through his scraggly blond hair, sincerity in his icy blue eyes. "I am reasonably happy, I am," he'd said in his Swedish accent a few days earlier. To have the girls hyperventilating, "I want to fuck him so bad," whenever he appears, which one blonde is telling her friend right now at high-decibel volume, although Tim can't hear her, he's too immersed in cuing up the next track that is going to keep people going completely apeshit. ![]() To have the leggy blond girlfriend, the limitless champagne and the piles of money, and famous musicians begging for the production magic he brought to "Levels," his inescapable 2011 electronic dance music hit in which Etta James has a good feeling, over and over, for three and a half minutes. To have, 250-plus nights a year, audiences of thousands chanting your name. Most people would be overjoyed to have Tim Bergling's life. ![]() ![]() When Tim twists around from the jiggy little dance he's doing behind the decks to accept a glass, he is smiling like the happiest guy in the world. "Happy New Year!" shouts Felix Alfonso, his bodyman, popping open the first of many bottles of Dom Pérignon. "Dog!" An assistant sweeps in to take the Pomeranian from the girlfriend's arms. "Security!" the promoter shouts, and hulking figures fall into step beside us. His girlfriend, his booking agent, his tour manager, a club promoter, a guy with a video camera, and a reporter surge after him. "People paid money for this!" The doors slide open, and Tim steps forward, purposeful as a heart surgeon headed to perform a triple bypass. better get to XS soon!!" some douchebag is saying on Twitter. Now he is twenty-one minutes late, and twenty-one minutes matters when it's the biggest party night of the year, New Year's Eve, in the biggest party city in the world, Vegas, and you're the star of the show, scheduled to go on at midnight, which was-Tim reaches into the pocket of his jeans, barely held up by a Gucci belt, and pulls out his phone to check the time-twenty-two minutes ago. Even with the police escort and the private plane. ![]() It was a crazy thing to do, in retrospect, two shows in two different cities, Anaheim and Las Vegas, with only an hour and a half between them. He is staring straight ahead, so quiet that everyone with him has gone silent, too, out of respect or maybe a little fear. ![]()
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