Daisy Jones & the Six

by Taylor Jenkins Reid

  And then they drop Aurora.

  CAMILA: The day the record hit the shelves, we took the girls down to Tower Records. We let Julia buy her own copy. I was a little wary of it, to be honest. It wasn’t exactly child-friendly. But it was her dad’s album. She was allowed to have her own copy of it. When we left the store, Billy said, “Who’s your favorite member of the band?”

  And I said, “Oh, Billy…”

  And Julia pipes up and goes, “Daisy Jones!”

  JIM BLADES: I was playing the Cow Palace the day Aurora came out, I think. And I had a roadie go down to the record store and get it so I could listen to it. I remember sitting there, before we were about to go on, listening to “This Could Get Ugly,” smoking a cigarette thinking, Why didn’t I think to get her to join my band?

  The writing was on the wall. They were gonna eclipse all of us.

  With that cover, too. That cover was perfect California summer rock ’n’ roll.

  ELAINE CHANG (biographer, author of Daisy Jones: Wild Flower): If you were a teenager in the late seventies, that cover was everything.

  The way Daisy Jones carried herself, the way she was in full control of her own sexuality, the way she showed her chest through her shirt but it felt like it was on her own terms…it was a seminal moment in the lives of so many teenage girls. Boys, too, I understand. But I’m much more interested in what it meant for girls.

  When you’re talking about images in which a woman is naked, subtext is everything. And the subtext of that photo—the way her chest is neither aimed at Billy nor at the viewer, the way her stance is confident but not suggestive—the subtext isn’t that Daisy is trying to please you or the man she’s with. The subtext isn’t “My body is for you.” Which is what so many nude photos are, what so many images of naked women are used for. The subtext—for her body, in that image—it’s self-possession. The subtext is “I do what I want.”

  That album cover is why I, as a young girl, fell in love with Daisy Jones. She just seemed so fearless.

  FREDDIE MENDOZA: It’s funny. When I shot the album cover, I thought it was just a gig. Now, all these years later, it’s all anybody asks about. That’s what happens when you do something legendary, right? Ah, well.

  GREG MCGUINNESS (former concierge, the Continental Hyatt house): Once “Turn It Off” came out, everybody in town was talking about that record.

  ARTIE SNYDER: The week it came out—the very week it came out—I got three job offers. People were buying that album, listening to it, loving it, and they wanted to know who mixed it.

  SIMONE: Daisy just blew up. She went from being well known to being an absolute sensation. She was it.

  JONAH BERG: Aurora was a perfect album. It was exactly what we all wanted it to be, but better than we anticipated. It was an exciting band putting out a confident, bold, listenable album from start to finish.

  NICK HARRIS: Aurora was romantic and brooding and heartbreaking and volatile all at once. In the age of arena rock, Daisy Jones & The Six managed to create something that felt intimate even though it could still play to a stadium. They had the impenetrable drums and the searing solos—they had songs that felt relentless in the best way possible. But the album also felt up close and personal. Billy and Daisy felt like they were right next to you, singing just to each other.

  And it was deeply layered. That was the biggest thing Aurora had going for it. It sounds like a good-time album when you first listen to it. It’s an album you can play at a party. It’s an album you get high to. It’s an album you can play as you’re speeding down the highway.

  But then you listen to the lyrics and you realize this is an album you can cry to. And it’s an album you can get laid to.

  For every moment of your life, in 1978, Aurora could play in the background.

  And from the moment it was released, it was a juggernaut.

  DAISY: It’s an album about needing someone and having them love someone else.

  BILLY: It’s an album about the push and pull of stability and instability. It’s about the struggle that I live almost every day to not do something stupid. Is it about love? Yeah, of course it is. But that’s because it’s easy to disguise almost anything as a love song.

  JONAH BERG: Billy and Daisy was our biggest-selling issue of the seventies.

  ROD: Rolling Stone did a lot to get people to buy the record. But the real money was in how many people bought tickets to the show because of that article.

  NICK HARRIS: You heard the album and you read about Billy and Daisy in Rolling Stone and you wanted to see it for yourself.

  You had to see it for yourself.

  With “Turn It Off” summitting the charts and spending four weeks in the top spot, and Aurora selling over 200,000 units every week, Daisy Jones & The Six was the act to see the summer of ’78. The Aurora Tour was selling out stadiums and booking holdover shows in major cities across the country.

  ROD: It was time to get the show on the road. I mean that literally.

  KAREN: There was a weird feeling on the buses. And by buses I mean the blue bus and the white bus. They both said “Daisy Jones & The Six” across them, but one had Billy’s denim shirt in the background and the other was Daisy’s tank top. We had two buses because we had so many people. But also because Billy and Daisy never wanted to have to even look at each other.

  ROD: The blue bus was Billy’s bus, unofficially. Billy and Graham and Karen and myself, some of the crew, were normally on there.

  WARREN: I took the white bus with Daisy and Niccolo and Eddie and Pete. Jenny was with Pete sometimes. The white bus was a much better time. Also, yeah, I’ll be on the bus with the tits painted on the window, thanks.

  BILLY: I had a full sober tour under my belt. I felt all right going back on the road.

  CAMILA: I sent Billy out on tour like I did almost everything with him back then…with hope. That’s all I could do, was just hope.

  OPAL CUNNINGHAM (tour accountant): Every day that I went into the office, I knew three things. One, the band would spend more money than they had the day before. Two, no one would listen to my advice about how to curb spending. Three, anything of import—be it as big as baby grand pianos for the suites or as small as Sharpies for the autographs—you had to make sure Billy and Daisy both had the exact same thing. That rider was twice as long as it needed to be because one of them would get mad if the other had something they didn’t.

  I’d call Rod and I’d say, “There is no way they need two Ping-Pong tables.”

  ROD: I always said, “Just clear it. Runner will pay.” I should have just made a recording of myself saying that. But I understood. Opal’s job was to make sure we weren’t wasting money. And we were wasting a lot of money. But we had the biggest album in the country at that moment. We could ask for whatever we wanted and it was in Runner’s best interest to give it to us.

  EDDIE: First day out on the road, we stop at some gas station. Pete and I get out and go inside to get a soda or something. “Turn It Off” was playing on the radio. That wasn’t that uncommon. Something like that had happened to us a lot in the past few years. But Pete makes a joke. He says to the guy, “Can you change the station? I hate this song.” The guy changes the station and “Turn It Off” is on the next station, too. I said, “Hey, man, how about you just turn it off?” He thought that was funny.

  GRAHAM: It was the first time I saw how—what’s the word I’m looking for?—how invested, I guess, people got in the band. Billy and I went to get a burger at a rest stop when we were somewhere in the desert. Arizona or New Mexico or something and this couple comes up to us. They say to Billy, “Are you Billy Dunne?”

  Billy says, “Yeah, I am.”

  And they say, “We love your album.” And Billy’s handling it great, being really gracious. He always was. He was great with fans. He made it seem like every person who compliment
ed him was the first person to do it. So Billy starts having a more one-on-one conversation with the guy and the woman pulls me aside and says, “I just have to know. Billy and Daisy? Are they together?”

  And I pulled my head back and I said, “No.”

  And she nodded like she understood what I was trying to say. Like she knew they were sleeping together but accepted that I couldn’t tell her that.

  WARREN: Real early on the tour, up in San Francisco, we check into this hotel the night before a show, and I walk right out of the white bus, Pete and Eddie coming out behind me. Graham and Karen come out of the blue bus. We walk right out onto the street and into the hotel, no problem.

  Then Billy walks out of the blue bus and within, I don’t know, thirty seconds, you hear girls start screaming. And then Daisy walks out of the white bus and this sound that you think can’t get any louder, this shrieking sound that damn near burst my eardrums, it gets even louder somehow, even more shrill. I turn around and Rod and Niccolo are trying to push ’em all back so Billy and Daisy can get into the hotel.

  EDDIE: I once saw Billy decline to give a group of fans his autograph by saying, “I just play music, man. I’m no more important than anybody else.” Watching that arrogant son of a bitch pretend to be humble was enough to make me want to scream. Pete kept telling me, “None of this matters. Don’t get all confused thinking it matters.” I didn’t get what he meant until it was all too late, I think.

  DAISY: When people asked for my autograph, I used to write, “Stay Solid, Daisy J.” But when it was a young girl—which wasn’t often but it did happen from time to time—I used to write, “Dream big, little bird. Love, Daisy.”

  ROD: People were excited about this band. They wanted to hear the album live. And Billy and Daisy could really deliver the goods. Not only were they dynamite but they were…hard to read. Enigmatic. They sang beautifully together, but they rarely got on the same mike. Sometimes they would look at each other and when they did, you couldn’t figure out what they were thinking.

  This one time in Tennessee, Daisy was singing “Regret Me” and Billy was doing backup and she turned toward him, at the end, at the very end, and sang right to him. She was looking right at him and singing at the top of her lungs. Her face went a little red. And he sang, looking right back at her. He didn’t break her gaze. Then the song was over and they went on. Even I couldn’t have told you what exactly had just happened.

  KAREN: In general, if you paid attention, you saw a lot of dirty looks between them. Especially during “Regret Me.” Especially during that.

  ROD: If you went to a Daisy Jones & The Six show thinking they hated each other, you could find some damning evidence for that. And if you went thinking something was up with them, that the hatred maybe masked something else, you could find evidence for that, too.

  BILLY: You can’t write songs with somebody, write songs about somebody, know that some of the songs you’re singing are ones they wrote about you…and not feel something…not be drawn to them.

  Were there times I looked across the stage at Daisy and found myself unable to look away? I mean…yeah. Certainly, if you look at press photos from that tour, concert photos and what have you…you’ll see a lot of pictures of Daisy and I looking into each other’s eyes. I told myself we were putting it on but it’s hard to decipher, really. What was performance and what wasn’t? What were we doing to sell records and what did we really mean? Honestly, maybe I knew at one time but I don’t know anymore.

  DAISY: Nicky was often jealous of what happened onstage.

  “Young Stars” was about two people who were drawn to each other but forced to deny it. “Turn It Off” was about trying to fall out of love with someone you can’t help but love. “This Could Get Ugly” was about knowing that you know someone even better than their partner does. These were dicey songs to be singing with someone. These were songs that made you feel something—made me feel what I felt when I wrote them. Nicky knew that. That was a very big part of our relationship. Making sure Nicky felt okay. That he was happy, making sure he was having a good time.

  WARREN: Night after night, it was packed shows, with a screaming crowd. With people singing along to every word. And then it always ended with Billy going back to his hotel room and the rest of us staying out partying until we found somebody to screw.

  Except Daisy and Niccolo. They stayed out later than everybody. Everybody went to bed knowing Daisy and Niccolo thought the night was still young.

  DAISY: The drugs aren’t so cute anymore when you wake up with dried blood under your nose so often that cleaning it off is part of your morning routine, like brushing your teeth. And you always have new bruises and you don’t know why. When there’s a knot in the back of your hair because you have forgotten to brush it for weeks.

  EDDIE: Her hands were blue. We were backstage getting ready to go on in Tulsa and I looked at her and I said, “Your hands look kind of blue.”

  And she looked at them and said, “Oh, yeah.” That was it. Just oh, yeah.

  KAREN: Daisy slowly became a person none of us felt much like dealing with. And for the most part, we really didn’t have to. She wasn’t particularly needy or anything. The only issues were when she let things get so out of control, it was everyone’s problem. Like when she almost burned down the Chelsea.

  DAISY: Nicky fell asleep having a smoke and the pillow caught fire at the Omni Parker House in Boston. I woke up because of the heat next to my face. Singed my hair. I had to put out the flames with the extinguisher I found in the closet. Nicky was completely unfazed by the whole thing.

  SIMONE: I called her when I heard about the fire. I called her in Boston, I called her in Portland. I kept calling. She didn’t return my calls.

  BILLY: I told Rod to get her help.

  ROD: I offered to take her and Nicky to rehab and she said I was being silly.

  GRAHAM: She’d slur a word here or there, she took a fall down the stage steps at some point. I think maybe in Oklahoma. But Daisy knew how to make everything look like fun and games.

  DAISY: We were in Atlanta. And Nicky and I had partied all night and somebody had mescaline. Nicky thought it was a great idea to do mescaline. Everybody else had gone to bed and so it was just Nicky and me, high on a lot of stuff at once. The mescaline had just kicked in.

  We broke the lock on the door leading up to the roof at the hotel we were staying at. The fans that had staked outside the lobby of the hotel had all gone home. That’s how late it was. He and I stood there, looking at the empty space where earlier in the day they had all been standing. It seemed romantic, the two of us up there. Everything quiet. Nicky took my hand and led me to the very edge of the roof.

  I made a joke, I said, “What are you up to? You want us to jump?”

  And Nicky said, “Could be fun.”

  I…Let me put it this way: When you find yourself high on the roof of a hotel with a husband who doesn’t outright say that the two of you shouldn’t jump off, you start to realize you have a lot of problems. That wasn’t my rock bottom. But it was the first time I looked around and thought, Oh, wow, I’m falling.

  OPAL CUNNINGHAM: A large part of the growing budget was accounting for what damages they would leave behind. It was always Daisy’s room that cost the most. We were paying hand over fist for broken lamps, broken mirrors, burnt linens. A lot of busted locks. Hotels expect a certain amount of wear and tear, especially when a band is coming through. But this was enough that they were demanding more than just keeping the security deposit.

  WARREN: I think it was around the southern leg of the tour that you could tell Daisy was…I don’t know. Losing it. She was forgetting some of the words to the songs.

  ROD: Before the show in Memphis, everyone’s getting ready to go out onstage and no one could find Daisy. I was searching all over for her. Asking everyone about her. I finally found her in one of
the bathrooms in the lobby. She’d passed out in one of the stalls. Her butt was on the floor, one of her arms over her head. For a second—a split second—I thought she was dead. I shook her and she woke up.

  I said, “You’re supposed to go onstage.”

  She said, “Okay.”

  I said, “You need to get sober.”

  And she said, “Oh, Rod.” And she stood up, walked to the mirror, checked her makeup, and then walked backstage to meet the rest of the band like everything was right as rain. And I thought, I don’t want to be in charge of this woman anymore.

  EDDIE: New Orleans. Fall of ’seventy-eight. Pete finds me at sound check and says, “Jenny wants to get married.”

  I say, “All right, so marry her.”

  Pete says, “Yeah, I think I will.”

  DAISY: If you’re fucked up all the time, you piece things together slower than you should. But I started to realize that Nicky never paid for anything, that he didn’t have any of his own money. And he kept buying us more blow. I’d say, “I’m good. I’ve had enough.” But he always wanted more. Wanted me to have more.

  We were on the bus one morning, maybe December or so. We were laying down in the back, while everyone else was up front. I think we were stopped somewhere around Kansas because when I looked out the window all I saw were plains. No hills, not much civilization, even. I woke up and Nicky was there with a toot, right there. I just had this fleeting thought, What if I didn’t? So I said, “No, thanks.”

  And Nicky laughed and said, “No, c’mon.” And he put it right in my face and I snorted it.

  And as I turned my head, to look down the aisle, I saw that Billy had stepped onto the bus for some reason, was talking to Warren or something. But…he saw the whole thing. And I caught his eye for a moment and I just got so sad.

  BILLY: I made it a point to stay off the white bus. Nothing good for me happened on the white bus.

  GRAHAM: We all went home for Christmas and New Year’s.