ROD: I can’t fulfill a tour without Billy or Daisy.
WARREN: Eddie got mad—flew off the handle.
EDDIE: There’s only so long you can live your life while it’s being dictated to you by somebody else, you understand? And I don’t care how much money is in it for me, I’m not somebody’s lackey. I’m not some indentured servant. I’m a person. And I deserve a say in my own career.
WARREN: Pete said he was leaving regardless of what happened.
GRAHAM: It all just started crumbling down.
ROD: Daisy was MIA. Billy wanted to shut the whole thing down himself. Pete was out. Eddie refused to work with Billy. Graham and Karen wouldn’t speak to each other. I went to Graham and I said, “Talk some sense into Billy.”
And Graham told me he wouldn’t “say shit to Billy.”
And I thought, If the bottom falls out here, what am I going to do? I thought about signing other bands and doing this all over and taking another set of screwed-up people and trying to make their careers and I just…I don’t know.
WARREN: I appeared to be the only person who didn’t have his panties in a twist about something.
But we’d had a good ride. And if it was over…I guess, there wasn’t much I could do about that, was there? So, so be it.
BILLY: I never knew why Daisy left, exactly. What it was about that night, that show, that made her leave. But the way I saw it: I didn’t know how to write a good album without Teddy. And I didn’t know how to write a hit album without Daisy. And I couldn’t do it with either of them. And I wasn’t willing to let any of it cost me a fraction of what it had already cost me.
I turned to everybody on the bus and I said, “It’s over. The whole thing. It’s over.”
And not one person in the band—not Graham, not Karen, not Eddie or Pete, not even Warren or Rod—tried to convince me otherwise.
KAREN: When Daisy left, it was like the Ferris wheel stopped turning and we all got off.
DAISY: I left the band because Camila Dunne asked me to. And it was the very best thing I’ve ever done. It is how I saved myself. Because your mother saved me from myself.
I may not have known your mother very well.
But I promise you, I loved her very much.
And I was so very sorry to hear she passed away.
Author’s Note: My mother, Camila Dunne, died before the completion of this book.
I spoke with her a number of times during the course of my research, but I could not hear her point of view of the events that took place in Chicago on July 12 and 13 due to the fact that I learned the full scope of them only after her passing.
She died on December 1, 2012, at the age of sixty-three from heart failure, a complication of lupus. It brings me great comfort to be able to report that she died surrounded by our family, my father, Billy Dunne, at her side.
NICK HARRIS: Daisy Jones & The Six have never played together, never been seen together, since their show at Chicago Stadium.
DAISY: When I left Chicago, I made my way straight to Simone and I told her everything and she got me into rehab.
I’ve been sober since July 17, 1979. And when I left the facility, I changed my life. All of the things I’ve achieved since then have been because of that decision. When I left the music business, when I published my books, when I started meditating, when I started traveling the world, when I adopted my sons, and opened the Wild Flower Initiative, and changed my life for the better in ways that I could never even fathom in 1979—it was all possible because I got clean.
WARREN: I married Lisa Crowne. We have two kids, Brandon and Rachel. Lisa made me sell the houseboat. Now I live in Tarzana, California, in a huge house surrounded by strip malls, my kids are in college, and no one asks me to sign their tits anymore. I mean, occasionally Lisa does. Just to be nice. And I take her up on it. Because there are about a million different guys who would have loved to sign Lisa’s tits at some point in their lives. And I try to never lose sight of that.
PETE LOVING (bassist, The Six): I don’t have much to say about any of this. I don’t have any ill will toward anyone or anything. I have great memories of everybody. But that part of my life is long gone. I own my own artificial turf installation company now. Jenny and I live in Arizona. My kids are grown. It’s a good life.
That’s really all I have to contribute. I’m nearing seventy but I’m still looking forward, okay? I’m not looking back. You’re welcome to put this in your book but that’s going to have to be it for me.
ROD: I bought a place in Denver. For a little while, Chris lived with me. We had some good years together. And then he left. And I met Frank. My life is small and manageable. I sell real estate. I have what I think of as the best of both worlds. An easy life but with some wild stories about the good old days.
GRAHAM: When the band split, Karen and I…we were over. Our friendship was gone. We might run into each other once in a while but that’s about it.
It’s the ones who never loved you enough that come to you when you can’t sleep. You always wonder what the future might have held and you’ll never know. Maybe you almost don’t want to know. Don’t tell your aunt Jeanie that I’m talking like this. I don’t want her to get the wrong idea. I love her. I love your cousins.
And I’m damn glad your dad and I don’t work together anymore but we have fun playing around now and again. He still tries to tell me how to play my own guitar. [Laughs] But that’s just Billy. He taught both my kids piano, built the tree house in the backyard.
I guess I’m saying I feel lucky we had the band and we survived the band. Him and me.
Anyway, if you’re doing one of those where-are-they-now things, make sure you tell everybody that I have my own hot sauce. Dunne Burnt My Tongue Off.
EDDIE: I’m a record producer now. Probably what I should have been all along. I have a recording studio over in Van Nuys. I do all right. Ended up on top.
SIMONE: Disco died in 1979 and I tried to keep going after that but I just could not catch on on the radio the way I had in the clubs. So I invested my money, I got married, I had Trina, I got divorced.
And now Trina’s ten times more famous than I ever was, making money hand over fist, making music videos that are so crass Daisy and I would never have even thought about doing something as crazy as that. She sampled “The Love Drug” on her new one. “Ecstasy.” Boy, nothing is innuendo anymore. They all just come out and say it. But she’s a boss. I will give her that. She’s killing the game.
Damn right, my baby’s killing the game.
KAREN: After I left The Six, I took gigs playing in one touring band or another for twenty years. Retired in the late nineties. I did what I wanted with my life and I don’t regret any of it in the slightest.
My whole life, I have been a person who loves to sleep in a bed alone. And Graham is a guy who likes to wake up next to somebody. If he had had it his way, I’d’ve conformed to what everybody else did, to what everybody else wanted for their lives. But it wasn’t what I wanted.
Maybe if I was of the younger generation, marriage would have been more attractive to me. I see the way a lot of younger marriages are these days, truly egalitarian, nobody serving anybody else. But that wasn’t the mold I saw. That wasn’t a mold most of us even had back then. What I wanted didn’t fit in with having a husband. I wanted to be a rock star. And then I wanted to live alone. In a house in the mountains. And that’s what I’ve done.
But if you get to be my age and you can’t look back at your life and wonder about some of your choices…well, you have no imagination.
BILLY: I packed it all in, signed a publishing deal with Runner Records and I’ve been writing songs for pop singers since ’eighty-one. It’s a good life. It’s been quiet and stable even though I spent the eighties and nineties in a noisy house with three screaming girls and a great woman.
Somebody said the other day that I gave up my career for my family. And I suppose I did, though I think that makes it sound like it was more noble than it was. It was just a man hitting his limit. Not sure how much nobility there really is in that. It’s more that I knew that if I was going to hit that bar Camila had set for me, I had to walk away from that band.
Do you understand why I loved your mother the way I did?
She was an incredible woman. She was the greatest thing that ever happened to me. Give me all the platinum albums you want, all the drugs and all the Cuervo and all the fun times and the successes and the fame and all of it, I would hand them all back to you, just as the cost of my memories with her. She was an absolutely incredible, incredible woman. And I didn’t deserve her.
I’m not sure the world deserved her. I mean, don’t get me wrong. She was very pushy and around the mid-nineties she developed a really terrible taste in music, which, for a musician, is awfully hard to look past. And she made the world’s worst chili and she thought it was great and she’d make it all the time. [Laughs] I’m not saying anything you don’t know. But she had serious faults, too. She was stubborn to the point where she stopped talking to your grandma for a few years. But that stubbornness also really paid off a lot of the time. She was stubborn about me. And I’m the man I am because of it.
When she was diagnosed with lupus, I think we were all set back. And I wouldn’t wish that disease on anybody. But I was determined to take it as an opportunity to give back to your mother. I could take over when she was too tired, when her body ached too much. I could be home to raise you girls so it didn’t fall on her to do everything. I could be her partner and be by her side through it all.
We bought the house in North Carolina…I guess it’s about twenty years ago now. After you and your sisters were all off at college. We scoured the coastline, looking for exactly the house she had seen in her dreams. We didn’t find it so we built it. There’s no honeycomb there. It’s not exactly the one in the song. It’s just a two-story ranch with acres of land and a bay she liked to go crabbing in. But it was the home she’d always wanted. I feel so lucky to have been the man to do that for her.
I know you know how hard it was to lose her. We’re all still reeling from it.
I admit I’m feeling lonelier than lonely these days, with you and your sisters spread out all over the country and your mom gone. It’s been over five years now. She wasn’t supposed to go that early. Taking a woman like that, at sixty-three, seems cruel even for a vengeful God. But it’s the hand she was dealt—the hand we’ve all been dealt. So I’m playing it.
You know, I didn’t talk to you very much about all of this when you were growing up. Never wanted to bog you down with my own issues, my own stories. Your life isn’t about me, honey, my life is about you.
But I will say that I’m thankful to you for asking these questions and giving me something to do.
I hope this sheds some light on all of it for you, sweetheart. I really do. About your mom and me and the band. Sometimes I’m surprised people still care. I’m surprised they still play us on the radio. Sometimes I listen. The other day, they were playing “Turn It Off” on the classic rock station. I sat in the car in the driveway and listened.
[Laughs] We were pretty good.
DAISY: We were great. We were really great.
From: Camila Dunne
To: Julia Dunne Rodriguez, Susana Dunne, Maria Dunne
Date: November 5, 2012 11:41 P.M.
Subject: Your Dad
Hi Girls,
I need your help.
After I’m gone, give your dad some time. And then please tell him to call Daisy Jones. Her number is in my date book in the second drawer of my nightstand.
Tell your father I said at the very least, the two of them owe me a song.
Love,
Mom
CHASING THE NIGHT
Trouble starts when I come around
Everything’s painted red when I’m in town
Light me up and watch me burn it down
If you’re anointing a devil, I’ll take my crown
Foot on the gas, add fuel to the fire
I’m already high and going higher
Charging faster, ready to ignite
Headed for disaster, chasing the night
You turn wrong when you turn right
White light at first sight
Oh, you’re chasing the night
But it’s a nightmare chasing you
Life’s coming to me in flashes
Wearing my bruises like badges
Don’t know when I learned to play with matches
Must want it all to end in ashes
Foot on the gas, add fuel to the fire
I’m already high and going higher
Charging faster, ready to ignite
Headed for disaster, chasing the night
You turn wrong when you turn right
White light at first sight
Oh, you’re chasing the night
But it’s a nightmare chasing you
Foot on the gas, add fuel to the fire
I’m already high and going higher
Foot on the gas, add fuel to the fire
Look me in the eye and flick the lighter
Oh, you’re chasing the night
But it’s a nightmare, honey, chasing you
THIS COULD GET UGLY
The ugly you got in you
Well, I got it, too
You act like you ain’t got a clue
But you do
Oh, we could be lovely
If this could get ugly
Write a list of things you’ll regret
I’d be on top smoking a cigarette
Oh, we could be lovely
If this could get ugly
The things you run from, baby, I run to
And I know it scares you through and through
No one knows you like I do
Try to tell me that ain’t true
Oh, we could be lovely
If this could get ugly
C’mon now, honey
Let yourself think about it
Can you really live without it?
Oh, we could be lovely
If this could get ugly
IMPOSSIBLE WOMAN
Impossible woman
Let her hold you
Let her ease your soul
Sand through fingers
Wild horse, but she’s just a colt
Dancing barefoot in the snow
Cold can’t touch her, high or low
She’s blues dressed up like rock ’n’ roll
Untouchable, she’ll never fold
She’ll have you running
In the wrong direction
Have you coming
For the wrong obsessions
Oh, she’s gunning
For your redemption
Have you headed
Back to confession
Sand through fingers
Wild horse, but she’s just a colt
Dancing barefoot in the snow
Cold can’t touch her, high or low
She’s blues dressed up like rock ’n’ roll
Untouchable, she’ll never fold
Walk away from the impossible
You’ll never touch her
Never ease your soul
You’re one more impossible man
Running from her
Clutching what you stole
TURN IT OFF
Baby, I keep trying to turn away
I keep trying to see you a different way
&nbs
p; Baby, I keep trying
Oh, I keep trying
I gotta give up and turn this around
There’s no way up when you’re this far down
And, baby, I keep trying
Oh, I keep trying
I keep trying to turn this off
But, baby, you keep turning me on
I keep trying to change how I feel
Keep trying to tell myself that this isn’t real
Baby, I keep trying
Oh, I keep trying
Can’t take off when there’s no runway ahead
And I can’t get caught up in this all over again
Baby, I keep trying
Oh, I keep trying
I keep trying to turn it off
But, baby, you keep turning me on
I’m on my knees, my arms wide
I’m finding ways to stay alive
Lord knows I’m pleading, pleading
To keep this heart still beating, beating
I keep trying to turn it off
But, baby, you keep turning me on
Baby, I’m dying
But, baby, I’m trying
I can’t keep selling
What you’re not buying
So I keep trying to turn it off
And, baby, you keep turning me on
I’m on my knees, my arms wide
I’m finding ways to stay alive
Lord knows I’m pleading, pleading
To keep this heart still beating, beating
I keep trying to turn it off
But, baby, you keep turning me on
PLEASE
Please me
Please release me
Touch me and taste me
Trust me and take me
Say the things left unsaid
It’s not all in my head
Tell me the truth, tell me you think about me
Or, baby, you can forget about me
Please me
Daisy Jones & the Six Page 26