9

WE’RE ALL A LITTLE SICK

I broke the edge after college.

For whatever reason, the straight-edge lifestyle began to lose its appeal. Can’t say why, can’t say how. I was still deep into the hardcore scene, totally immersed. All my friends, that’s what they were into, but the idea that I had allowed myself to become defined by the fact that I didn’t do drugs or drink alcohol didn’t make sense to me anymore.

It was who I was at one point. It wasn’t anymore.

It was a gradual regression, and I share it here because it leads to the downward spiral that found me after my dad’s death. It started when I was living in another co-op off campus called Biko, named for Stephen Biko, the anti-apartheid activist from South Africa. There were a bunch of co-ops in and around Santa Barbara filled with vegetarians and activists, and Biko was my next stop along the way. I needed to stay in town after graduation to complete my last few credits, so I enrolled in a couple classes at Santa Barbara City College and threw in with this whole new group of personalities.

You have to realize, other than that one senseless acid trip I’d taken when I was a kid, I’d never touched drugs. I’d never taken a sip of alcohol. And now that I’d started to lose the feel for being clean and sober and totally in the moment now that the pure straight-edge piece of my lifestyle didn’t seem so important, I had no idea what I was doing. And yet it’s not like I was on completely unfamiliar ground. I’d been around kids who drank and smoked my whole life. I even used to invite these hippies who lived next door to me to smoke in my room. They thought it was weird, but they liked the idea of holding these bong rip parties in a straight-edge kid’s room. It’s like they were trespassing, stepping where they didn’t belong. They had these enormous bongs—like, unnecessarily huge!—and they’d stand them up on the floor of my room while I pretended to study. I had no desire to smoke with them, but I loved the smell of marijuana, and the chill vibe these guys gave off when they were high. Also, I loved how serious they were about all of their equipment. They were like mad scientists setting up in their lab! Of course, looking back, I now realize I was probably stoned from all that secondhand smoke, but at the time I thought I was still doing my straight-edge thing.

Wasn’t until I was a couple months into my “postcollege” days at Biko that I took my first drink. I was the same hardcore kid at heart. I kept staging shows at Biko, which had quickly become the new iteration of the Pickle Patch—Pickle Patch 2.0!—and one of the bands that came through was Kill Sadie. I’d just put out their album on Dim Mak, and we were all good friends—a bunch of straight-edge guys who’d already broken the edge. I was pumped that they were coming to town. They had a lot of cred in our little community. On the music front, they bounced around a lot, kept morphing into all these different bands, all these different groupings. Out of Kill Sadie, they formed Minus the Bear, which became a very popular band for a while, and then out of that they became Pretty Girls Make Graves, that band I’d signed to Dim Mak. But at the time I was mostly focused on breaking out of the shell I’d made for myself, and I was looking forward to having some fun with these guys.

So I did. We partied hard. Whatever my Kill Sadie pals were drinking, I was drinking—only I had no idea what they were drinking or how much of it I could handle. I ended up puking all over this beautiful vegetable garden that was like the heart of our co-op. Oh, man … I was such a loser, such a lightweight. Kill Sadie had this one song called “A Ride in the Centrifuge,” and this was kind of like that. I felt like I’d been whipped around in some giant thrill ride and tossed onto the pavement. The guys I lived with wanted to kick me out of the house for that, because we grew our own vegetables, and to them it was like I’d just taken a shit on their lifestyle, but I managed to talk my way back into their good graces and stay on until I finished out the semester.

By the time I moved to Los Angeles a couple months later, I’d learned to hold my liquor. I began to understand why people would go to a bar to drink and socialize. There was something about the way the alcohol would lubricate the situation, get the conversation flowing, make the rest of the world melt away. Things were just so much easier with a drink or two, so much sweeter. It was like a whole new world opened up to me, and whatever awkwardness or shyness I still carried from those outside-looking-in days back in high school seemed to disappear as well. I wasn’t a heavy drinker, although I can see now that I was laying the foundation. I hadn’t exactly gone from zero to sixty, but I was cruising at a pretty good clip. Those first couple years after school, when I was ramping things up at Dim Mak and getting things started as a DJ, I’d have a drink from time to time. I’d have a bunch of drinks from time to time.

Wasn’t any kind of big deal … until, at last, it was.

I don’t think I realized it—in fact, I’m sure I didn’t—but I’d gone from a casual drinker to a drinker, and the difference was everything. It started to feel like I couldn’t get in the DJ booth without a drink or two before my sets, just to help me lose my inhibitions, and then that drink or two became two or three, then three or four. My go-to in those days was vodka and Red Bull. At first, I was a Jack-and-Coke guy, because that’s what my friends used to drink, but I realized I needed an extra jolt of energy. When I started drinking, alcohol had mostly a soporific effect. It’d make me more tired than drunk. I needed to feel lit, alive, energized, so I switched things up and hit on this Red Bull cocktail. The vodka would slow me down, and the Red Bull would jack me up, and it was all good.

I was firing!

Over time, though, my drinking got out of hand. Here again, I don’t think I realized it … but there it was. I started traveling to a ton of shows all over the world, mostly on my own, and the booze would keep me company. I didn’t really know anybody in all these out-of-the-way places, so each time I hit a new town I’d grab a drink and try to fit myself in. I started drinking more and more, harder and harder. I didn’t think of myself as an alcoholic or anything, but that had mostly to do with the fact that I wasn’t thinking. I was just doing. And in a lot of ways, I was doing okay—I didn’t miss a show, didn’t miss a beat, but I did miss a flight or two—like that time Matt and I slept through the gate announcements on our way to the Super Bowl after-party. Another time, I was so hungover I ended up missing two flights on the same leg. I fell asleep in front of my gate and missed the first flight, but then when I got it together to get myself rebooked and checked in for another flight, I passed out again and missed the second flight. I was laid out—and, yeah, I was exhausted from all the travel I was doing, but the drinking didn’t help.

I wouldn’t say I was spiraling out of control, but I was certainly spiraling. And I wasn’t in control of shit. I wasn’t myself. And the whole time I was shuttling back and forth to be at my father’s side in the hospital, I was drinking. I’d gone from never touching a drop of alcohol to feeling like I needed it to keep me going.

It was a dark time in my life and in the life of my family, and as I was diving deeper into the DJ scene, I started to feel all this pressure. Just to be clear, it was a self-inflicted kind of pressure, but as I was playing to bigger and bigger crowds, it felt to me like I was really pushing it. I was on the road constantly, afraid to slow down, afraid to stop and think about the choices I was making. My thing was to keep moving, you know. To stay busy. The road was my new life, my new friend, my new reality.

This was the ride I was on, and there was no getting off.

All that touring, all that drinking … it cost me a long-term relationship with my girlfriend at the time. It cost me a little bit of momentum and focus at Dim Mak. It got in the way of how things were with my family. It started to fuck with my health, my head. I was just a complete mess, and things would get worse before they got better.

Way worse.

About a year after my father died, I lost another someone close to me—my great friend DJ AM, rest in peace, was found dead in his New York City apartment from an apparent drug overdose. More than anyone else in and around the LA music scene, in and around the DJ scene, it was Adam who encouraged me, inspired me. I hit this earlier, but I want to hit it harder here. We were inseparable for a while—but then, as I started traveling, we kind of splintered off in our own directions. We each had these relentless, ridiculous schedules, and underneath all that craziness I suppose there was always the thought that we would reconnect whenever life and career put us in the same place at the same time.

Only that’s not exactly how things shook out. AM had a history of drug addiction. He used to speak openly about it. He’d tried to kill himself at one point early on in his career, and he spoke about that, too. He’d been sober the entire time I knew him, when we were close. He was in AA, and he took it seriously, but you could see he had this obsessive personality. If you were at his house, for example, and he liked a certain cereal, you could open one of the kitchen cabinets and find, like, ten boxes of the stuff. If he liked a certain shoe … ten pairs. Everything with AM was extreme, in excess.

He was like a mentor to me. A life coach. Every time I had a problem, he’d talk me through it. Didn’t matter what time it was. Didn’t matter what he had going on. He’d stop whatever he was doing and listen. I’d never had a friend like that before—he was so selflessly and endlessly available to me, and I used to wonder if he thought of me in the same way. But then our lives went off in these different directions and the dailiness went out of our friendship. We’d still talk from time to time, and we’d get together when we were nearby, but it wasn’t the same—and it weighed on me that it wasn’t the same.

Next thing I knew, the news broke that he was in a plane crash—a Learjet 60 he was in overran a runway in South Carolina and crashed into an embankment and burst into flames. There were six people on board. AM and Travis Barker were the only survivors.

AM was shaken by the incident. Travis, too—he swore off flying after that. Their friends were affected as well. I’d just played a show with the two of them, so I started to think it could have been me on that plane. I was having all these crazy what if? thoughts—couldn’t shake ’em. AM and Travis were both severely burned in the crash, so I drove down to the burn center immediately to see them. I saw Travis first. He was up and lucid, told me the whole story. What a fucking nightmare! Such sadness! Then I walked down the hall to see AM, and he was still out of it. He had this wild Spider-Man–type net over his face, was hooked up to an IV. His arms looked like the pigskin of a football. I broke down, seeing him like that. Seeing him here, like that. Walking up and down the hallways of this unit, you’d see the worst kind of burn victims. It was gruesome, horrifying. But there was something about seeing my friend like that, looking like an open wound, that I just couldn’t handle. I don’t mean to make the moment seem like it was all about me, because it wasn’t like that, but I started to see myself in that hospital bed. Those crazy what if? thoughts were front and center.

AM was in such tremendous pain when he came to, and he had his AA sponsor there with him, to kind of coach him through the pain meds dilemma. I remember AM was torn up about having to take pain medication. He’d been clean for so goddamn long, he didn’t want to lose that feeling of strength that came with all those years of sobriety, but at the same time the pain was just unbearable.

He needed those meds, of course, but they set him off on another downward spiral. He started using again. Weed, crack … whatever. He stiff-armed his friends, his AA sponsor, kept saying he had it together, just needed this one day, this one week, to burn this desire out of his system, and then he’d start the clock again on being clean. Saying he could get his shit back together at any time. Saying it was all good.

Aw, fuck … it breaks my heart to revisit all of this, because we’d been so tight, but we kind of went off in our separate directions again after Adam was released from the burn unit. I went back to doing my own thing, consumed by what was going on with my father, and AM was just trying to get his life back together, build himself back up. When the news broke about his death, the first reports said police had found a crack pipe at his side, and toxicology reports later showed that he had traces of cocaine, oxycodone, hydrocodone, clonazepam, and a slew of other drugs in his system.

I was devastated—flattened, really. We were like brothers, the two of us, and I felt so fucking guilty that I hadn’t been there for him in the months leading to that plane crash, in the months after. I’d been so swallowed up by my own shit, I couldn’t see the shit my friend was dealing with … and now he was gone. It killed me that I hadn’t been there for him, killed me that all these chunks of time had gone by where I hadn’t even thought of him, that’s how swallowed up I was by what was going on with me. In my head, I had it fixed that I was barreling toward success, and nothing would get in the way of that. Nothing would stop this wave I told myself I was riding. Not the loss of my father. Not the financial struggles we were having at Dim Mak. Not the alcohol. Nothing. And now, with Adam gone like that, it forced me to reflect on the way I was living.

I realized I hadn’t really talked to anyone in my family since my father had died.

I hadn’t spent any time with my mom.

I didn’t have a girlfriend—or any type of stable, steadying relationship.

I was unmoored, bouncing from one gig to the next and hoping blindly, stupidly, that the direction I was headed in was the direction I was meant to be going.

Like I said, I was a complete fucking mess, so as soon as I processed the news of Adam’s death, as soon as I ran out of tears, I swore off drinking.

Cold stop.

It was the only way I knew to get my head right. I didn’t swear off alcohol entirely, because I’d still take a sip in celebration or on a special occasion, but what I was able to chase immediately was the urge to drink. The feeling that I needed to drink to get by … that’s what left me when AM died, and to this day I’m grateful that I was able to step away from that urge so easily.

Yep, Adam’s death was my wake-up call. And it’s not like I lifted myself from these low, low moments and decided to embrace the straight-edge lifestyle again. No, the term had lost its meaning for me. The scene had lost its meaning. But what meant something to me still was this hard-won determination to live clean, to live healthy.

Meant everything, actually.

Long as I’m on it, I want to spend some time here on two other deaths that left me reeling—two deaths that stand as reminders of the knife-edge we sometimes walk when we spend our lives on the road, chasing approval, acceptance, validation … whatever it is that drives us in the music business. Doesn’t matter if you’re a DJ or a musician or a roadie … there are pressures that attach to the fast-paced touring lifestyle, there are demons, and those pressures and demons only get bigger when you mix in drugs and alcohol.

It gets to you, the constant need to give the fans a good time, to lift them from the routine of their daily lives and give them a shot of energy and excitement, even if you’re feeling shitty. Even if you’re kept from your own routines.

Now, I don’t pretend to understand what it means to be clinically depressed. I don’t understand the black funk people slip into when they’re feeling lost or suffocated. That shit’s way beyond my pay grade, you know—and, mercifully, way beyond my experience. But I get it. I do. I’ve looked down that rabbit hole a time or two when I was lost in the fog of drink, when I was feeling tired and broken and lonely and slapped around by the road. No, I was never so far gone that I ever thought about killing myself, but I could see how those thoughts might look. I could play that scene out and imagine the combustion of moment and mindlessness that would allow them to appear.

Tragically, the road is littered with stories of artists who struggle with depression, fall to depression. Sometimes, those stories hit way too close to home …

I first heard about Chester Bennington’s death in a text message. I was sitting on my bed in a hotel room in New York, in the middle of a long slog of my own. Feeling bone-tired, alone. The message didn’t make any sense to me at first. I’d seen Chester not that long ago. He seemed healthy, happy. He was in the middle of a major tour for Linkin Park’s new album, One More Light. By all outward appearances, it looked like he was crushing it, riding high.

I thought, This can’t be right. I thought, No fucking way.

I called my manager, Matt, to see if he had any information. He was always plugged into the news as it happened. And it took talking it through for a while with Matt for me to get my head around the news. Chester was such a singular talent. A special talent. One of the most compelling voices in music.

I got off the phone with Matt and buried my head in my pillow. I was overcome, overwhelmed. I’d known Chester for only five or six years, but that was more than enough time to come to love him, admire him, respect the hell out of him. We’d worked together on a couple songs, performed together a couple times, flitted in and out of each other’s lives for a while. I was overwhelmed by the sadness of it, the cruelty of it. The nearness of it, if that makes sense. What struck me most of all was how his death would destroy his wife, his kids … his great friend Mike Shinoda. The rest of the band, too—they were all so tight. I wept for them and for the millions of Linkin Park fans around the world. It was such a heartbreak—and then, when it was reported that Chester’s death was a suicide, I lost it all over again, because in this one desperate act I could see a hundred others.

Soon as I had my shit together, I sent a text to Mike, told him how fucking sorry I was. Told him I was here for him and the rest of the guys in the band. Told him it felt like I’d lost a piece of my heart.

Somewhere in there I took the time to give thanks that I’d been able to step away from alcohol in time to get my head straight, because part of me feared what I would do if I ever felt desperately lost or alone when there were a couple bottles at hand.

I went back into the studio after Chester died and opened up the stems on the two songs we’d done together with Linkin Park—“Darker Than Blood” and “A Light That Never Comes.” I got lost all over again in the music we made together. It ended up that I made a new drop for “A Light That Never Comes,” and then I did a mash-up of the two songs and started playing them in my sets. It meant the world to me, to be able to channel my emotions into my music … into Chester’s music. And to donate all the proceeds from those songs to the One More Light Fund, which the band was setting up.

A couple weeks later, Mike Shinoda called and told me about a benefit the band was putting together at the Hollywood Bowl in Chester’s memory. He asked if I could make it, and of course I agreed. I canceled whatever shows I had going on for that date, and flew in for the concert—from Kentucky, I think. Somehow, I kept it together enough to perform “A Light That Never Comes,” with Bebe Rexha joining me onstage to sing the Chester parts. I also dropped a new remix for “One More Light,” this achingly sad Linkin Park song. It’s such a beautiful, powerful ballad, and it was one of the great blessings of my career to be able to reimagine it in this new light, for Chester, and as I played it for the first time that night, I was struck by the way the song seemed to foreshadow Chester’s death. It was like a love letter to a wounded soul who was maybe feeling lost and suicidal, telling him or her to hang on, not lose hope.

Who cares if one more light goes out?

In a sky of a million stars

It flickers, flickers

To this day, I’m still playing that remix to close out some of my sets, and each time out I have to fight back tears. Each time, I think what it would have meant to have a chance to play that song for Chester a final time—maybe get him to see the warmth and wisdom in his words in a way that might have lifted him from the darkness.

Such a voice. Such a talent. Such a loss.

Tim Bergling was a different kind of animal.

He wasn’t built for a life on the road, a life on a public stage. He was an incredible musician, a gifted songwriter, a beautiful singer. He understood music theory and composition … one of those rare talents who could do it all. But unlike, say, Prince, Tim was working in the EDM space, where his talents as a producer were just as impressive as his musicianship.

He was in the studio constantly. He was a complete master of his craft—one of the most influential figures in EDM, period.

Hell, he’s the reason EDM even exists, and it just worked out that as dance music seeped into our festival culture, it dragged Tim along with it. As the trend-stamping DJ Avicii, he was at the heart of an evolution in EDM, where the DJ started to command attention, and he wasn’t cut out for that shit. Tim would have been the first to tell you how nervous he’d get every time he had to do a set. And it was more than just nerves, he sometimes said. It was an uneasiness, a disquiet. He felt out of his element. But he was just so fucking good at what he did that he couldn’t escape the pull of the stage.

Tim was making music as Avicii almost from the time I started working in that space, but he was just a kid. I can remember him turning up at one of our Dim Mak Sundays parties at Drai’s Hollywood when he was just nineteen or twenty years old. In those days, he was putting out records on this underground Australian label called Vicious—and even then you could tell he was special. There was something introspective, poetic, kinetic about his music—you knew right away when you were in the grip of an Avicii song.

We did this tour together in 2011 called Identity Festival, which was around the time Avicii exploded with his hit song “Levels.” That song was as big as it gets—the anthem of anthems. He was just white-hot in those days, and he stayed white-hot—really, he was such a brilliant creative force. We bonded on that tour, kept talking about ways we might collaborate in the future. In fact, just before he died, I was working on a track I was planning to send to him, just to get his take—it felt to me like the perfect song for us to work on together.

But I never got around to it.

I was riding in the backseat of an Uber in New York when my phone started blowing up with the news that he was gone. It was April 2018. Avicii was just twenty-eight years old. I was devastated. The first reports didn’t say anything about suicide, but I had an idea. Not because he’d ever said anything. He was such a dynamic presence—he lit up every room he was in!—but at the same time you could see he was tortured, troubled. He seemed to move inside this magical force field, while he himself never appeared all that comfortable, especially when he was on stage, performing.

My most cherished memory of Avicii cuts against this idea that he was out of his element when he was on stage. We were at the Tomorrowland festival, in Belgium, which I had closed out for the past bunch of years. Avicii was playing in the second-to-last slot, just before me on the main stage. For whatever reason, I always got a case of the nerves when I played that festival. It made no sense: I’d been in that featured spot for five years, and yet it still had me on edge.

Well, this one year, Avicii came backstage after his set and noticed I was a little out of it. He was good about that—plugged in to the people around him, to the mood of the room.

He’d always been open about his own jitters as a performer, so I figured I could come clean with him. I said, “Don’t know what it is, Tim. I’ve played this festival a million times, but I’m nervous as hell.”

Just putting it out there made me feel a little better.

Avicii just looked at me and flashed this wide, welcoming smile. He didn’t say a word, just kept grinning, so I kept talking—said, “I’m freaking out, man. I’m, like, not ready to play.”

As I was yammering, Avicii was walking over to me, still smiling. When he reached me, he collected me in a giant bear hug—picked me right up off the floor and squeezed tight, like he was hugging the fear right out of me.

And, in a way, he was. Drawing it right out of me and perhaps reclaiming it for himself.

My photographer Caesar Sebastian was with me backstage that night and he happened to capture the moment—it’s one of my favorite pictures. I put it up on Instagram, and people really responded to it. In a single shot, it told a bunch of stories. It told a story of how the pressures of touring and performing can get to you, even if you’ve been down this road before. It told a story of how a young visionary set aside his own fears and generously offered to swallow up mine, once the weight of performing his own set had been lifted.

Mostly, it told the story of this giant of a performer who was never quite himself on stage but who went out of his way to ease his friend’s suffering.

When you lose someone close to you, someone who’s had a big influence on you, it pushes you to reexamine things, maybe look a little longer, a little deeper, at some of the ways you’ve been living. Me, I was a complete fucking mess in the early stages of my career as a DJ. It’s a wonder I had any career at all. It’s only now that I can see I wasn’t doing everything I could to connect with my fans. In fact, you could even say I was doing everything I could to keep them at a distance. It wasn’t them … it was me. They were fully invested in what I was putting out there—the music, the energy, the emotion—but a part of me was holding back. You can’t give of yourself entirely when you’re shit-faced half the time. When you’re phoning it in instead of being dialed-in, the way I am now.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but my early shows had no essence to them … no heart … no personality. I couldn’t put myself into what I was doing, because I was hiding in the fog of being drunk. The way it worked with me, when I was drunk, all my emotions were exaggerated. If I was really happy, I’d kick it up to super fucking happy. If I was depressed, I’d take it down to super fucking depressed. The alcohol would just spank me around and drag me to this place of extremes, and what that meant when I was performing was that I’d get stuck inside this bubble of my own making, surrounded by a swirl of emotions that had nothing to do with the audience and everything to do with whatever was going on in my own head. I couldn’t see beyond that, so it made sense that my fans couldn’t see me.

All that time breathing in my own air, I couldn’t really touch what was right in front of me, what was to the side of me. I had no situational awareness, was simply filling the spaces where I was playing with sound and noise, which for a DJ is like the kiss of death. My head was so far up my own butt, there’s no way I could have picked up on what these crowds were putting out. All I cared about was the music I was playing, when my focus should have been on what the people in the crowd were hearing. And do you know what? As soon as I quit drinking, I was able to shift my focus, and play my music with intention. I’d pick out people in the crowd and play to them. I’d look into their eyes, take in their expressions, try to imagine myself in their experience. I started thinking like a sociologist, wondering how this or that fan might respond to the feelings embedded in a song, in a hook, in a snatch of lyric.

Connectivity … that became my thing. Should have been my thing all along, but I didn’t have the head for that when I was drinking.

Straight-edge or not, I needed to keep a clear head if I wanted what I was doing to matter.