Daisy Jones & the Six Read online

  WARREN: I looked over when Billy was writing his little list about whether Daisy should join the band, and he didn’t have that many cons and it seemed like he was really searching his brain for some.

  I said, “Make sure you write ‘Gives you a hard-on you’d rather not have’ in the cons section.”

  He told me I didn’t know what I was talking about. I said, “All right, you don’t want my opinion.”

  He said, “Yes, I do.” And I looked at him and he said, “Fine, I don’t.”

  So I sat back, sipped my Bloody Mary, and went back to reading the instructions on the barf bag.

  KAREN: Billy came back to where Graham and I were with this list. He’d slowly come to the conclusion that he wanted more hits and Daisy would bring us more hits.

  I said, “You know, she might turn us down.” That thought never occurred to Billy or Graham. But Daisy had more hype than even we did.

  GRAHAM: We decided we’d do one album with Daisy. See how it went.

  BILLY: I was making a decision that affected a lot of people. What is good for me might not necessarily be good for everybody else. I had to weigh that. Warren, Graham, Karen, Rod. They all wanted to get bigger, to top the charts. We all did. I had to take that into account.

  No matter how much I may have preferred to keep a healthy distance from her personally.

  WARREN: I wasn’t sure why Billy was stressing about it so much. He was just going to do whatever Teddy told him to do anyway.

  KAREN: People have said Billy didn’t want Daisy to join the band because he didn’t want to share the spotlight but I don’t think that was the case. Billy wasn’t really an insecure guy in that way. That was sort of the problem with him, really. Was that he wasn’t intimidated by anyone else’s talent.

  I think she just…unsettled him. However you want to interpret that.

  BILLY: By the time we landed at LAX, I decided that it was a good idea to at least float the idea by Teddy. If he thought we should do an album with Daisy, then I’d ask her.

  ROD: When we landed, I caught up to Billy and checked in, asked him what he was thinking. He said he wanted to talk to Teddy about whether Daisy should join the band. So I pulled Billy over to a pay phone and I called Teddy and I said, “Teddy, tell Billy what you told me this morning.”

  GRAHAM: Of course Teddy was on board with Daisy joining the band!

  BILLY: Teddy reminded me that when we first met, I’d told him I wanted to be the biggest band in the world. He said, “You two singing together is how you do that.”

  EDDIE: When we landed, Pete and I caught up with Warren and Graham and Karen and they said, “We’re gonna ask Daisy to join the band,” and I couldn’t believe it.

  Once again, No. One. Fucking. Asked. Me.

  DAISY: They were all whispering and huddled up and I caught Rod’s eye and he winked at me and I knew.

  BILLY: I got off the phone with Teddy and I said to Rod, “All right, tell her she’s in.” And then I got in a cab and went straight home to my girls.

  KAREN: When we all left the airport that day, we all headed in our own directions. It was like school was out for the summer.

  BILLY: The moment I walked in the door of my home, it was like Daisy and my band and the music and the gear and the tour…none of it existed. I was ready to get Camila strawberry ice cream at any hour of the night and to play any tea parties Julia wanted. My family was all that mattered.

  CAMILA: Billy came home and he needed a day or two, to decompress. But then there he was. With us when he was with us. And happy. And I thought, Wow. Okay. We’re figuring this out. We’re doing this right.

  ROD: I gave it a few days. I let the dust settle a little bit, made sure Billy wasn’t going to change his mind. And then I called Daisy.

  DAISY: I’d checked back in to my favorite cottage at the Marmont.

  SIMONE: When Daisy got back from the road, I was back, too. And I think it is important to mention that after that tour, Daisy was jacked up. I mean, she was higher than all get-out, all the time. I thought, What happened to you out there? She could barely handle being alone. Always calling people to come over, always begging me not to get off the phone. She didn’t like being home by herself. She didn’t like things being calm.

  DAISY: I was having a few people over when Rod called. It was the day I’d shot my Cosmo cover. I’d done an interview while we were in Europe and that afternoon I’d done the photo shoot.

  Some of the girls from the shoot came over to my place afterward and we were drinking pink champagne and about to go for a swim when the phone rang. I picked it up and I said, “Lola La Cava speaking.”

  ROD: Daisy’s pseudonym was always Lola La Cava. She had too many men trying to corner her. We had to start deflecting about where she was at any given time.

  DAISY: I remember the phone call exactly. I had the bottle of champagne in my hand and there were two girls on the couch and another one doing a line off my vanity. I remember being irritated because she was getting coke in the spine of my journal.

  But then Rod said, “It’s official.”

  ROD: I said, “The band wants you to do a full album with them.”

  DAISY: I was through the roof.

  ROD: I could hear Daisy doing a bump as I talked to her. I always struggled with that when it came to my musicians—and it never got easier. Should I monitor their drug use or not? Was it any of my business? If I knew they were using, was it my place to determine how much was too much? If it was my place, then how much was too much?

  I never came up with an answer.

  DAISY: When we got off the phone, I screamed into the room and one of the girls asked what I was so excited about and I said, “I’m joining The Six!”

  None of them cared very much. In general, when you have drugs to spare and a nice cottage to do them in, you’re probably not attracting people that care about you.

  But I was so happy that night. I danced around the room for a bit. I opened another bottle of champagne. I had more people over. And then, around three in the morning, when the party died down, I was too amped to go to bed. I called Simone and I told her the news.

  SIMONE: I did worry. I wasn’t sure being on tour with a rock band was turning out to be good for her.

  DAISY: I told Simone I was going to go pick her up and we were going to celebrate.

  SIMONE: It was the middle of the night. I’d been sleeping. I had my hair wrapped, my sleep mask on. I wasn’t going anywhere.

  DAISY: She told me that she would come meet me in the morning for breakfast but I kept insisting. She finally told me I didn’t sound safe to drive. I got mad and got off the phone.

  SIMONE: I thought she was going to bed.

  DAISY: I had too much energy running through me. I tried to call Karen but she didn’t answer. I finally decided I had to tell my parents. For some reason, I thought they would be proud of me. Not sure why. After all, I had the number 3 song in the country just a few months prior and they hadn’t so much as tracked me down to send a note. They didn’t even know I was back in town.

  Suffice it to say, heading to their house at 4:00 A.M. was not the smartest idea. But you don’t get high for smart ideas.

  Their place wasn’t far—a mile down the road, a world away—so I decided to walk. I started up Sunset Boulevard and into the hills. I got to my parents’ about an hour later.

  So there I was, standing in front of my childhood home, and somehow I decided that my old room looked lonely. So I climbed over the fence and up the gutter pipe, smashed the window of my bedroom, and got in my own bed.

  I woke up to see the cops standing over me.

  ROD: I do wonder what I should have done differently with Daisy.

  DAISY: My parents didn’t even know it was me in the bed. They heard somebody and called the police. Once it was straightened
out, they weren’t going to press charges. But by that point, the bag of coke in my bra, the joints in my change purse—it didn’t look good.

  SIMONE: I got a call that morning from Daisy from jail. I bailed her out and I said, “Daisy, you gotta stop all this.” And she just let it go in one ear and out the other.

  DAISY: I wasn’t in jail long.

  ROD: I saw her a few days later and she had this cut on her right hand, from the outside edge of her pinkie all the way down past her wrist. I said, “What happened here?”

  She looked at it like it was the first time she’d seen it. She said, “I have no idea.” She started talking about something else. And then out of nowhere, about ten minutes later, she goes, “Oh! I bet it’s from when I smashed the window to break into my parents’ house.”

  I said, “Daisy, are you okay?”

  She said, “Yeah, why?”

  BILLY: A few weeks after the tour ended, I woke up at four in the morning to Camila shaking my shoulders and telling me she was in labor. I grabbed Julia out of bed and raced Camila to the hospital.

  When she was lying in that bed, sweating and screaming, I held her hand and I put a cold cloth on her head and I kissed her cheeks and I held her legs. Then we found out she had to have a C-section, and I stood right there—as close as they’d let me—and I held her hand as she went in and I told her she didn’t need to be scared, that everything was going to be okay.

  And then there they were. My twin girls. Susana and Maria. Squooshed little faces, heads full of hair. But I could instantly tell them apart.

  I realized, looking at them…[pauses] I realized that I’d never seen a newborn. I’d never seen Julia as a brand-new baby girl.

  I handed Maria over to Camila’s mom for a moment and I went into the bathroom and I shut the door and I broke down. I…I needed some time to deal with my own shame.

  But I did deal with it. I didn’t try to bury it in something else. I went into that bathroom and I looked at myself in the mirror and I faced it.

  GRAHAM: Billy was a good father. Yes, he’d been a drug addict who missed the first few months of his daughter’s life. And yeah, that’s shameful. But he was fixing himself. For his kids. He was making it right and doing better every single day. It was a hell of a lot more than any man in our family had ever done.

  He was sober, he put his kids first, he would and did do anything for his family. He was a good man.

  I guess I’m saying…if you redeem yourself, then believe in your own redemption.

  BILLY: I had this moment there in the hospital, when it was just me, and Camila, and my three girls, and I thought, What am I doing out on the road?

  I went on this long epic speech to Camila, I said, “I’m giving it all up, honey. I don’t want anything but this family. The five of us. That’s all I want or need.” I really meant it. I probably went on for ten minutes. I said, “I don’t need rock ’n’ roll. I just need you.”

  And Camila—keep in mind she’s just had a C-section—I will never forget it, she goes, “Oh, shut the hell up, Billy. I married a musician. You’ll be a musician. If I wanted to drive a station wagon and have a meatloaf ready at six o’clock, I would have married my father.”

  CAMILA: Billy would sometimes make these grand proclamations. And they sounded good, because he’s an artist. He knows how to paint a picture. But he was almost always on some flight of fancy. I’m the one that often had to say, “Yoo-hoo, hi, hello, come back down to the earth now, please.”

  KAREN: Camila knew who Billy was better than he did. A lot of women would have said, “You’ve had your fun, but we’ve got three kids now.” Camila loved Billy exactly as he was. I dug that about her so much.

  And I really think Billy loved her the same way she loved him. I really do. When they were in the same place at the same time, you could tell he was just so taken with her. He’d stay quiet and let her be the one to talk. And I always noticed that he used to squeeze the lime into her drink before he handed it to her whenever we were all out somewhere. He’d take his own lime and squeeze it into her glass, too. He’d squeeze the two wedges in and then throw them in with the ice. It seemed like a beautiful thing to have, somebody giving you their lime wedge. I mean, I hate lime, actually. But you get the point.

  GRAHAM: Karen hated all citrus because she said it felt sticky on her teeth. That’s why she hated soda, too.

  BILLY: Teddy came and visited us in the hospital. He brought this big bouquet for Camila and stuffed animals for the girls. As he was leaving, I walked him down to the elevators and he told me he was proud of me. He said I’d really turned it all around. I said, “I did it all for Camila.”

  And Teddy said, “I believe that.”

  CAMILA: When the twins were just a few weeks old, my mom had taken them for a walk one afternoon and Billy asked me to sit down. He said he’d written another song for me.

  BILLY: It was called “Aurora.” Because Camila…she was my aurora. She was my new dawn, my daybreak, my sun peeking over the horizon. She was all of it.

  It was just a piano melody at that point, but I had all the lyrics. So I sat down at the piano and played it for her.

  CAMILA: The first time I heard it, I cried. I mean, you know the song. It would have been impossible for me to not feel bowled over by those words. He had written me others but…this one…I loved it and I felt loved listening to it.

  And it was pretty, too. I would have loved that song even if it wasn’t about me. It was that good.

  BILLY: She got teary and then she said, “You need Daisy on it. You know that.”

  And you know what? I did know that. Even as I was writing it, I had known it. I wrote it to be a piano and vocal harmony. Before we even got back into the studio, I was writing for Daisy.

  GRAHAM: That period of time when Billy was with his girls and Daisy was coming on board…well, it was a great opportunity for me to step up and take more of a center role in things. I was coordinating getting us all back together to start talking about a new album. I was discussing time lines with Rod and Teddy. It was fun.

  Actually, it wasn’t that fun, it was just that I was happy. Everything seems fun when you’re happy.

  KAREN: The money was rolling in. I wanted to make smart decisions with it so I went out with a realtor for one day, and found a pad in Laurel Canyon and bought it.

  Pretty soon, Graham unofficially moved in. We spent that spring and summer just the two of us together. We’d grill on the patio for dinner and go see shows every night and sleep late in the mornings.

  GRAHAM: Karen and I spent whole weekends high as shit, rich as hell, playing songs together, and not telling anybody where we were or what we were up to. It was our little secret. I didn’t even tell Billy.

  People say that life keeps moving, but they don’t mention that it does stop sometimes, just for you. Just for you and your girl. The world stops spinning and just lets you two lie there. Feels like it, anyway. Sometimes. If you’re lucky. Call me a romantic if you have to. Worse things to be.

  BILLY: I trusted Graham to handle everything with the band. I knew it was in good hands and my head was elsewhere.

  DAISY: Simone left to make the rounds on another tour.

  SIMONE: I was hitting the road for the Superstar album. And in between shows, I was going to be based more in New York than L.A. The disco scene was really about doing the Hustle at Studio 54. So that’s where I was going.

  DAISY: She seemed worried about me. I told her, “Go on. I’ll see you soon.” I was excited about everything I had in front of me. I was joining a band.

  GRAHAM: I had everything straightened out. I’d talked to Rod and Teddy. Billy said he was ready to get started. And I had come up with a date to reasonably deliver an album. So I called a meeting.

  WARREN: I was starting to live large from the money coming in. I’d bought my boa
t by then. I had a one-bedroom Gibson that I docked in Marina del Rey. Lots of cool chicks hanging out around there. Kept my drums at the house in Topanga and wasted away my nights and weekends drinking beers on the water.

  EDDIE: Pete had spent our downtime with Jenny back in Boston. They were getting really serious.

  Me, I didn’t like being home. I liked being on the road, you know what I mean? So I was ready to get back to work. I didn’t even mind the idea of dealing with Billy that much. Now, that’s saying something.

  When Graham called to say it was time for us all to get together, I couldn’t get there fast enough. I called up Pete and said, “You got to get on the first flight back out here. Vacation’s over.”

  DAISY: We all met up at the Rainbow—the band, me, Rod, Teddy—and everybody was catching up. Warren was talking about his boat and Pete was talking about Jenny Manes and Billy was showing Rod pictures of his twins. Everyone was really getting along. I mean, even Eddie and Billy seemed like they were doing all right. And Rod got up and he had his beer in his hand and he gave a toast about me joining the band.

  ROD: I think I said, “The seven of you are only headed higher and higher,” or something like that.

  BILLY: I thought, Boy, seven people in a band sounds like a lot.

  DAISY: Everyone was clapping and Karen hugged me and I felt really welcomed, I really did. So I stood up as everyone was talking and I picked up my brandy and I held it out for a toast and I said, “I am so glad you all invited me to join you on this album.”

  GRAHAM: Daisy starts doing this little speech and at first I think it’s nothing major.

  DAISY: It was tough to get a read on Billy. He hadn’t called me since I’d been offered a spot in the band. I hadn’t heard much from anyone about how this was all going to go or how he was feeling about it. I just wanted to make sure everything was clear. I said, “I’m coming on board officially because I want to be a member of this team. An important member. I hope you all see this album as mine just as much as it’s anybody’s. Graham’s or Warren’s or Pete’s and Eddie’s or Karen’s…”