Daisy Jones & the Six

by Taylor Jenkins Reid

  And I said, “Daisy, I’m sorry. Let’s just be on good terms, all right? Here, take my shirt.” I had on a T-shirt and then a button-down over it. Or maybe I was wearing a jacket or something. Anyway, I took it off and I put it around her arms.

  And she shrugged it off and she said, “I don’t need your fucking jacket.”

  DAISY: Billy always knows best. He knows when you’re not singing right. He knows how you should fix it. He knows what you should be wearing. I was so sick of being told by Billy how things were going to go.

  BILLY: I was sick and tired of being treated like I was her problem. She was my problem. And all I tried to do was give her my jacket.

  DAISY: I didn’t want his coat. What did I want his coat for?

  GRAHAM: Daisy was raising her voice a little bit. And the minute she did, Niccolo just came running in.

  KAREN: He was over by the couches we had in the corner, next to the cooler of beers. He always wore blazers over his T-shirts.

  WARREN: That fucker was drinking all the good beers.

  BILLY: He came running in toward me and grabbed me by my shirt. He said, “What’s the problem here?” I knocked his hand away and I could tell, by the look on his face when I did it, that he was trouble.

  GRAHAM: I was watching it happen—this fight brewing—and I was thinking, At what point do I step in here?

  I’m worried Billy’s gonna clock him.

  KAREN: You wouldn’t have thought, at first, that Niccolo was tough. Because he was so smarmy. And he wasn’t muscular or anything. And he was supposedly some prince or what have you. But I watched him puff out his chest a bit and, look, Billy’s a formidable guy. But you just got this sense that Niccolo was a little bit unhinged.

  WARREN: There’s a code to two men fighting it out. You don’t punch the nuts. You don’t really kick. You never bite. Niccolo would have bitten. You could just see it.

  BILLY: Could I have taken him out? Maybe. But I don’t think he wanted a fight any more than I did.

  DAISY: I was not quite sure what to do. I think I just waited, watching it happen.

  BILLY: He said, “You stay away from her, okay? You work together and that’s it. You don’t talk to her, you don’t touch her, you don’t even look at her.” I thought that was bullshit. I mean, sure, this guy can try to tell me what to do. But he shouldn’t tell Daisy what to do. I turned and I looked at Daisy and I said, “Is this what you want?”

  And she looked away for a moment and then she looked back at me and said, “Yes, that’s what I want.”

  DAISY: Oh, the tangled messes I’ve created in my life.

  BILLY: I couldn’t believe it. That she would…I had trusted her when all signs said that I shouldn’t. And I was done doing that. Completely done doing that. She was exactly who I’d thought she was. And I felt like I’d been an idiot for thinking otherwise. I put my hands up and I said, “All right, man. You won’t hear a peep from me.”

  EDDIE: I couldn’t believe it. Somebody had actually put Billy Dunne in his place.

  KAREN: It was that afternoon or maybe the next day that Jonah Berg came by for the first time. I was on pins and needles. I think we all were. Because Billy and Daisy wouldn’t even look at each other. We rehearsed “Young Stars” all afternoon, and even when they were singing together, in harmony, they weren’t looking at each other.

  JONAH BERG: I show up and I’m expecting this warm atmosphere. I mean, this is a band that has just finished a great album. One where they are clearly all on the same page, working together seamlessly. Or so I thought. But I walk in, and they are in the middle of a song, and Daisy and Billy are about as far away from each other as two people can be, while still on the same stage. It was, visually, very jarring. You don’t realize how often singers stand close to one another until you see two people facing forward, fifteen feet between the two of them, not even looking at each other.

  GRAHAM: I kept thinking, Just get it together while this guy is here.

  KAREN: In this instance, I’d say it was on Daisy to fix what had just happened. And she wasn’t gonna do that.

  JONAH BERG: But even with this tension in the room, the band sounded great. And the songs they were playing were great. That’s one thing that The Six has always done, and they did it even better when they had Daisy on board. They made music that—it could be the first time you heard a song—but you were tapping your foot along with them. That’s a testament to the work of Warren Rhodes and Pete Loving. Daisy Jones & The Six get a lot of credit for the intrigue of their lyrics—and certainly everyone’s paying attention to Billy and Daisy, as well they should—but that was one hell of a rhythm section.

  BILLY: I asked Rod, at some point, if we could reschedule Jonah to another day.

  ROD: It was too late to move Jonah. He was already there watching them rehearse.

  DAISY: I didn’t see why Billy had to make such a big deal out of it. We could easily have just made nice in front of Jonah Berg.

  JONAH BERG: After a few songs, they take a break, they all come say hi to me at various points. I shared a cigarette with Warren outside and I figured he was my best chance at the truth. I said, “Level with me. Something’s up here.”

  And he said, “Nothing’s up.” Just kind of shrugged his shoulders like he had no idea what I was talking about. And I trusted him. I believed that nothing out of the ordinary had happened, that this was just the way they worked together. Billy and Daisy just truly didn’t get along. And probably never really had.

  BILLY: I think it was that night that Jonah wanted to take us all out for a beer but I had told Camila I’d be home to help her get the kids in the bath, so I asked Jonah if he could do the next night and it didn’t seem to be a problem for him.

  EDDIE: We’re all supposed to be putting this band first, and Billy blows off the first night we’re supposed to be hanging out with Rolling Stone for the cover.

  DAISY: I figured it was good news Billy was going home. I could take the first swing at the interview without worrying about him being around.

  JONAH BERG: I appreciated that Daisy made herself available to me. So often, you go into a situation and you have certain band members that won’t really talk to you. Daisy made it easy to get a story.

  ROD: Daisy didn’t want to go home. You know when you’re with someone and it’s clear they want to just keep hanging out, keep partying all night, keep working all night, keep doing whatever it is all night, because they don’t want to go and face whatever they have waiting for them at home?

  That was Daisy when she was married to Niccolo.

  JONAH BERG: We all go out that night, everybody but Billy. First, we head out to this Bad Breakers show over on the Strip. And it seems really obvious to me that Karen and Graham must be sleeping together. And I say to them, I said, “Are you two an item?” And Graham says yes and Karen says no.

  GRAHAM: I didn’t understand. I just didn’t understand Karen.

  KAREN: Graham and I could never last, it was never…I just needed it to exist in a vacuum, where real life didn’t matter, where the future didn’t matter, where all that mattered was, you know, how we felt that day.

  JONAH BERG: Warren seemed busy hitting on every woman he could find. And Eddie Loving was talking my ear off, talking about tuning or something. Pete was off with some girl he was seeing. So I decided to focus on Daisy. She was who I wanted to get the most from anyway.

  Now, I will say this: A lot of people were getting high on whatever they could get their hands on back then. That wasn’t anything new. And even as a journalist, there wasn’t much you couldn’t allude to in the pages of a magazine, certainly one like Rolling Stone. You could imply all sorts of stuff about what everybody was getting up to. But there were some people who didn’t seem like they were snorting things for fun. There were some people out there who were getting high because they couldn’t hold
it together without it. And it was my personal opinion, that the drug habits of those people were sort of…off-limits. A lot of people in my position felt differently. A lot of them behaved differently, wrote differently.

  I certainly got into a few situations over the years where I felt pressured—or was pressured, I should say—to out those people in the interest of selling magazines. So I tended to not even write down what I observed, or tell a single person what I saw, if I thought somebody I was interviewing had a serious drug problem. It was a very “see no evil” sort of thing. For me.

  When I’m with Daisy that night, we are hanging out in the back of the crowd. And I look over and Daisy is rubbing her gums. And at first I thought it was coke but I realize she was snorting amphetamines. She did not seem like a recreational user, I guess is what I’m saying. And there seemed a significant difference in the Daisy I met on tour the year before and this Daisy now. She was more frenetic, less eloquent. Sadder, maybe. No, that’s not it. Less joyful.

  She said to me, “Do you want to go outside?” I nodded and we went into the parking lot and we sat on the hood of my car. And Daisy said, “All right, Jonah. Let’s do this. Ask your questions.”

  And I said, “If you don’t want to go on the record now, because you’re…not in the right state of mind, you need to say so.”

  And she said, “No, let’s talk.”

  I had given her an explicit out. And she turned it down. That’s all I felt obligated to do. So I said, “What’s going on between you and Billy?”

  Then it all just started pouring out of her.

  DAISY: I shouldn’t have said what I said. And then Billy shouldn’t have gone and done what he did.

  BILLY: I come into the rehearsal space the next day and everybody’s there and they are all talking and messing around and Jonah says, “When should we set aside some time to talk?”

  And I say, “Let me see when Daisy’s free.”

  And he says, “Well, I want to get some time just the two of us, if you’re good with that.” That’s when I started to get worried. Just the way he said it…I sort of had this feeling like, What did she do? I looked over at her and she was up at the mike, talking to somebody. And she had on tiny shorts again in this cold studio. And I just thought, Put some fucking pants on. That’s what I was thinking. You’re cold. Stop dressing like it’s gonna be hot in here. You know that it’s cold in here every day. But of course she was hot, she was sweating bullets from all the drugs in her body. I knew that.

  DAISY: I think that if I had gone up to Jonah that day, after talking to him that night, and tried to take it all back, he might have let me. And I considered it. I really did.

  JONAH BERG: I absolutely would not have agreed to let Daisy rescind her comments. People have asked it before. I’ve always said no. That’s why I’m very clear at the beginning, when I start recording. I make sure people understand what they are doing when they talk to me.

  I gave Daisy plenty of outs. She moved forward. At that point, the question of integrity shifts from being my problem to her problem.

  BILLY: So we rehearse for the morning and Daisy and I just can’t get the harmony right in the last verse of the song but I don’t want to get into a fight with her in front of Jonah. I also don’t want to be performing this poorly in front of him either. The last thing I want is an article that says that we don’t have what it takes live. So when we break, I ask Graham to talk to her and he agrees. And Daisy and I, for at least the rest of that session, just sort of communicated through Graham.

  GRAHAM: I mean, how was I supposed to keep track of their bullshit? Who’s not talking to who when and for what goddamn reason? I’ve got my own problems. I’ve got my own heart cracking, man. I’m in love with a woman that I am starting to think doesn’t love me and I’m not telling a single soul about it and you don’t see me asking for intermediaries to save me from my own brand of crap, do you?

  BILLY: After we call it a day, I go out with Jonah and I’m sitting there, banging the 57 on a bottle of ketchup, when he says, “Daisy says you spent your first tour cheating on your wife and dealing with alcoholism and drug addiction, possibly a heroin addiction. She says you’re in recovery now but that you missed the birth of your first daughter because you were in rehab.”

  WARREN: I don’t consider myself to be very high on the list of good people. But you don’t tell other people’s stories.

  DAISY: I did so many stupid things back then. Basically for all of the seventies. I did a lot of things that hurt people or hurt myself. But that one has always stuck out to me as one I particularly regret. Not just because of Billy. Although, I did feel badly that I shared something he told me in confidence. But I regret it more because I could have hurt his family.

  And I just…[pauses] I would never want to do that. Truly.

  BILLY: You know, one of the things you learn in recovery is that self-control is the only control we have. That all you can do is make sure your own actions are sound because you can’t control the actions of others. That’s why I didn’t do what I wanted to do, which was take the bottle of ketchup and throw it at the window. And I did not reach across the table and wring Jonah Berg’s neck. And I did not get in the car, find Daisy, and start screaming at her. I did not do any of those things.

  I stared right at him, and I could feel my breath growing really hot. I could feel my chest expanding up and down. I felt like a lion, like I was capable of destroying him. But I closed my eyes and I stared at the back of my own eyelids and I said, “Please do not print that.”

  JONAH BERG: That confirmed for me that it was true. But I said, “If you can give me something else to write about, then I won’t.” I mean, I told you. I don’t like printing secrets when they’re sad. I got into journalism to tell rock ’n’ roll stories. Not to tell depressing ones. Give me rock stars sleeping with groupies, give me the crazy shit you did on PCP. Great. But I’ve never liked publishing depressing shit. People’s families falling apart and all that. I said, “Give me something rock ’n’ roll.” That felt like a win-win.

  And Billy said, “How about this? I can’t fucking stand Daisy Jones.”

  BILLY: I will tell you exactly what I said. It’s right there in the article. I said, “She’s a selfish brat who’s been given everything she wants her entire life and thinks it’s because she deserves it.”

  JONAH BERG: When he said, “Talent like Daisy’s is wasted on people like Daisy,” I went, Oh, wow. Okay. Here is a great article. It was a way more interesting story to tell, in my opinion. What’s gonna sell more copies? Billy Dunne used to be an alcoholic and now he’s reformed? Or the two lead singers in this hip new band loathe each other?

  It was no contest. The world was filled with Billy Dunnes. So many men in this world missed their daughters’ births or stepped out on their wives or whatever else he did. Sorry to say it but that’s the world we live in. But not many people are so creatively in sync with someone they despise. That was fascinating.

  My editor loved the idea. He couldn’t have been more amped about it.

  I told the photographer what I wanted for the cover and he said it would be easy enough to splice together from the photos he had taken. So I went back to New York and I wrote that article in forty-eight hours. I never write articles that fast. But it was just so easy. And those articles are always the best ones—the kind you swear wrote themselves.

  GRAHAM: The entire point of having Jonah Berg out with us was so that he could write an article about what a smart move it was to have Daisy join the band. And, instead, he writes about Billy and Daisy hating each other.

  EDDIE: It felt like those two assholes let their own personal crap taint the band and the music and all the hard work we’d all put into it.

  ROD: It all landed so perfectly. The band just couldn’t see it. They couldn’t see how great it was.

  We released “Turn It
Off” as the first single. We booked the band on Midnight Special. We had them doing radio spots all over the country leading up to the album dropping. And then, the same week Aurora hits the shelves, so does the Rolling Stone cover.

  Billy’s profile shot on one side, Daisy’s on the other, their noses almost touching.

  And it says, “Daisy Jones & The Six: Are Billy Dunne and Daisy Jones Rock ’n’ Roll’s Biggest Foes?”

  WARREN: I saw that and I just had to start laughing. Jonah Berg always thinks he’s one step ahead when he’s two steps behind.

  KAREN: If there was any chance that Billy and Daisy were going to put the pettiness behind them and work together, really work together, over the course of the tour, I think that magazine interview ended it. I don’t think there was much coming back from it.

  ROD: Is there any headline that is going to make you want to see Daisy Jones & The Six perform live more than that?

  BILLY: I didn’t care if Daisy was mad at me. I didn’t care one bit.

  DAISY: We both did things we shouldn’t have. When someone says your talent is wasted on you and he says it to a reporter knowing full well it’s going to make it into print, you aren’t really inclined to mend fences.

  BILLY: You can’t claim the high ground when you go around throwing other people and their families under the bus.

  ROD: There’s no diamond record without that Rolling Stone article. That article was the first step in their music transcending the limits of music. It was the first step toward Aurora not only being an album, but an event. It was the last kick it needed to blast off.

  KAREN: “Turn It Off” debuted at number 8 on the Billboard charts.

  ROD: Aurora came out June 13, 1978. And we didn’t hit with a splash. We hit with a cannonball.

  NICK HARRIS (rock critic): This was an album people had been waiting for. They wanted to know what would happen when you put Billy Dunne and Daisy Jones together for an entire album.