Daisy Jones & the Six Page 5

  GRAHAM: We finished recording everything in November, I think.

  EDDIE: We finished up around March.

  GRAHAM: Now, it was probably another month, maybe two, that Billy and Teddy were in the studio going over the mixes.

  I would go in some days, listen to what they were doing. I had some thoughts and Billy and Teddy always heard me out. And then they played us the final mix and I was blown away.

  EDDIE: No one was allowed in the studio except Teddy and Billy. They were working on that thing for months. And then finally we were all allowed to hear it.

  But it was dynamite. I said to Pete, I said, “We sound fuckin’ great.”

  BILLY: We played it for Rich Palentino in the conference room over at the Runner offices. I was tapping my foot so hard underneath that table. I was nervous. This was our shot. If Rich didn’t like it, I was thinking I might explode.

  WARREN: To us back then, Rich was this old guy in his suit and tie. I thought, This corporate fucker is judging me? He looked like such an agent of the man.

  GRAHAM: I had to stop watching Rich and just close my eyes and listen. And when I did, I thought, There’s no way this guy isn’t gonna dig this.

  BILLY: The last note of “When the Sun Shines on You” played and I was staring at Rich. Graham and Teddy are staring, too—we’re all staring at him. Rich gets this small smile on his face and he goes, “You’ve got a great album here.”

  And when Rich liked it, that was it. It was like the last bit of me that was grounded down to earth just flew off, like someone had pulled the rip cord and I was flying.

  NICK HARRIS (rock critic): Their self-titled debut was a respectable entrance into the rock scene. It was straitlaced and economical, sort of a no-frills blues-rock album from a band that knew how to write a decent love song and had really perfected the art of the drug innuendo. A little bit folky, very catchy, lots of swagger, big riffs, hard drums, and that great Billy Dunne smooth growl.

  It was an auspicious start.

  After an album cover shoot, industry events, an interview with Creem magazine, and big early buzz for the album, Runner Records and Rod Reyes started planning a thirty-city tour.

  BILLY: Everything was happening so fast. And I was…You’re an underdog for so long and then one day you’re not. And when you start to feel real success, when you start to live large and all that, you have to stop and ask yourself if you think you really deserve it.

  Anyone that isn’t a complete asshole will come up with the answer “No.” Because of course you don’t. When guys you grew up with are working three jobs. Or they’re lost overseas like we lost Chuck. Of course you don’t deserve it. You have to learn how to reconcile those two things. Having it and not deserving it. Or, you do what I did, and refuse to think about it.

  That’s why I was eager to get on the road, to start touring. When you’re on the road, you don’t really have to deal with real life. It’s almost like hitting the pause button.

  EDDIE: We were headed out on a big tour, you know what I’m saying? Getting interviewed in cool places, getting our own bus. It felt good. It felt real good.

  BILLY: The night before we were getting on the bus, Camila and I, we were laying in bed, tangled up in the sheets. She had grown her hair out even longer by that point. God, I could just get lost in that hair.

  Her hair and her hands always smelled kinda earthy, kind of herbal. She used to grab rosemary branches and crush them up in her hands and then run her hands through her hair. Every time I smell rosemary, even now, it’s like I am instantly back there, stupid and young, living in a house in the canyon with my band and my girl.

  And that night, the one before we left, I just kept smelling the rosemary in her hair. It was then, right before I was gonna leave for the tour in the morning, that she told me.

  CAMILA: I was seven weeks pregnant.

  KAREN: Camila wanted kids. Me, I always knew kids weren’t in the cards for me. I think it’s a feeling you get. I think you have it in your heart or you don’t.

  And you can’t put it in your heart if it’s not there.

  And you can’t pull it out of your heart if it is.

  And it was in Camila’s heart.

  BILLY: I was happy, at first. I think. Or…[pauses] I was trying really hard to be happy about it. I think I knew…I was happy about it. I was just so scared it was all I could see.

  I started focusing on whatever I could to make it make sense. I decided that we needed to get married right away. We had been planning to have a wedding sometime after the tour but I decided we needed to do it right then. I don’t know why that mattered to me…but…[pauses] The moment I knew she was pregnant I felt like we had to make sure we were a proper family.

  CAMILA: Karen knew an ordained minister. She got his number from a friend of hers and we called him late that night. He came right over.

  EDDIE: It was four in the morning.

  CAMILA: Karen decorated the porch out back.

  KAREN: I strung strips of aluminum foil all through the trees. [Laughs] It doesn’t sound great in the context of all the environmental shit now. It looked really pretty, in my defense. It swayed with the wind and it bounced the light of the moon.

  GRAHAM: Warren had some Christmas lights in his drum kit because he liked to light up his toms. I asked if we could use ’em and he gave me some guff about how he had already packed them up. I said, “Warren, get me your lights now before I tell everyone what an asshole you are.”

  WARREN: It wasn’t my problem Billy and Camila decided to get married in the middle of the night.

  KAREN: By the time Graham and I were done with it, it looked pretty far out. Almost like the sort of place you’d want to get married even if you had forever to plan it.

  BILLY: As Camila was getting dressed, I went into the bathroom and I looked at myself in the mirror. I just kept telling myself I could do it. I can do this. I can do this. I walked down to the patio and then Camila came down in a white T-shirt and a pair of jeans.

  KAREN: She had on a yellow crochet top. She looked so pretty.

  CAMILA: I wasn’t nervous at all.

  EDDIE: I had one piece of film left in my Polaroid so I took a photo. I accidentally cut off their heads. You can just see Camila’s legs and her hair down her back. You can see Billy’s chest a bit. They are holding hands in the picture, facing each other. I was so mad I missed their faces. But I was also trippin’ balls.

  GRAHAM: Camila said something about loving Billy no matter what he did, something about them, with this baby, being a team. But she said it like they were a real sports team. I looked over and Pete was crying. He was trying to hide it but it was obvious. There were tears in his eyes. I think I gave him a look like, “Seriously?” And he just shrugged.

  WARREN: Pete cried the whole damn time. [Laughs] That guy cracked me up.

  BILLY: Camila said—I remember just how she said it—she said, “It’s us, our team, forever and always. And I will always root for us.” But there was this voice in my head that was telling me I shouldn’t be anybody’s father. I couldn’t quiet it. It just…it kept reverberating in my head. You’re gonna fuck it all up. You’re gonna fuck it all up.

  GRAHAM: Look, as a man without a dad, you don’t have the foggiest idea what you’re supposed to do and you don’t have anyone to ask.

  I got it later, when I had my own kids. It’s like being first in the line, cutting down the path with a machete. Just the word Dad. This word that we equated with deadbeat, asshole, alcoholic. Now it described Billy, too. He was supposed to find a way to make that word fit onto him. At least, when I went through it, I had Billy to look to. Back then, Billy didn’t have anybody.

  BILLY: The voice kept saying, If you don’t have a father, how can you be a father?

  That voice…[pauses] That was the beginning of a bad time. Where I
was not myself. Actually, no. I don’t like putting it that way—you’re never not yourself. You’re always you. It’s just, sometimes, who you are…who you are is a shitty person.

  KAREN: They kissed each other and I could tell Camila was tearing up. Billy picked her up into his arms. He ran her upstairs and we all laughed. I paid the minister guy because Billy and Camila forgot to.

  BILLY: I remember laying there in that bed with Camila—right after we got married—and I just wanted to leave. I kept waiting for it to be time to get on the bus, because I just…I couldn’t face her. I knew she’d be able to tell what was going on inside my head if she got too good a look at my face.

  I wasn’t good at lying to her. I’m not sure if that’s a good or a bad thing. People think lying is all bad but…I don’t know. Lying protects people sometimes.

  I laid there as the sun came up and I heard the bus pull in and I jumped out of bed, kissed her goodbye.

  CAMILA: I didn’t want him to go. But I also would never have let him stay.

  GRAHAM: When I got up in the morning, Billy was already standing there outside the bus, talking to Rod.

  BILLY: We were all loaded up and the bus driver pulled out of the driveway and Camila had just run down to the front stoop in her nightgown. She’d rushed down to wave goodbye. I waved back but…I had a hard time looking at her.

  GRAHAM: He was very hard to read. That morning, that bus ride.

  BILLY: That night, we pulled into Santa Rosa, we started getting ready for our show at Inn of the Beginning. But I wasn’t in the right mind.

  EDDIE: Our first show of the tour did not go well. And there was no reason for it to go poorly except that we just weren’t in sync the way we should have been, you know? Billy reversed two of the verses on “Born Broken.” And then Graham came in late on a bridge.

  KAREN: I wasn’t too worried about it. But you could tell Billy and Graham were upset about how it went.

  BILLY: Afterward, we went back to the hotel. Girls started pouring into the room. There was a loaded bar there for us. I had more to drink than I should have. I had a highball glass in one hand and the bottle of Cuervo in the other. Just kept pouring myself a new glass. New glass, new glass, new glass.

  I remember Graham telling me to slow it down. But there was too much running through me.

  I was gonna be a father and I was a husband and Camila was back in L.A. and we had just played this awful show, and our album had just come out and we didn’t know how it would do.

  Tequila quieted the whole thing down.

  So when Graham told me to stop, I wasn’t gonna listen. And you know, there’s coke lying around. And I’m doing that. And somebody’s got quaaludes and I grab a few of those.

  WARREN: We were in two adjoining rooms at this motel and I was getting into it with this girl over in the corner of the one room. Cool chick—she was wearing a scarf as a shirt—and all of a sudden she jumped up and asked where her sister was. I didn’t even know she had a sister with her.

  Somebody called out, “I think she’s with Billy.”

  BILLY: Sometime around three or four in the morning I think I blacked out. When I woke up I was in the hotel bathtub…I wasn’t alone. [Pauses] There was a…blond girl, laying on top of me. I’m so embarrassed to be telling you this but it’s true.

  I got up and puked.

  GRAHAM: When I woke up, I saw Billy standing out in the parking lot smoking a cigarette. He was pacing back and forth, kind of talking to himself, looked a little crazy. I went out there and he said, “I fucked up. I fucked it all up.”

  I knew what had happened. I’d tried to stop it. But there was no stopping him. I said, “Just don’t do it again, man. That’s all. Just don’t do it again.”

  He nodded and said, “Yeah.”

  BILLY: I called Camila just to hear her voice. I knew I couldn’t tell her what I’d done. I told myself that I would never do it again and that’s what was important.

  CAMILA: You’re asking me if I knew he was going to be unfaithful as if that’s a thing that you know or you don’t know. Like it’s black and white. But it’s not. You suspect, then you sort of un-suspect. Then you suspect again. Then you tell yourself you’re crazy. Then you ask yourself whether fidelity is really something you value above all else.

  Let me put it this way: I’ve seen a lot of marriages where everyone is faithful and no one is happy.

  BILLY: At the end of the call, Camila said she had to go and I said, “All right,” and then I remember she said, “Okay, honey, we love you.”

  And I said, “We?”

  And she said, “Me and the baby.”

  And that just…I think I hung up the phone before I could even say goodbye.

  KAREN: Camila had become my friend. I hated Billy for putting me in a position to either tell Camila what he’d done or lie to her.

  BILLY: Drinking, drugging, sleeping around, it’s all the same thing.

  You have these lines you won’t cross. But then you cross them. And suddenly you possess the very dangerous information that you can break the rule and the world won’t instantly come to an end.

  You’ve taken a big, black, bold line and you’ve made it a little bit gray. And now every time you cross it again, it just gets grayer and grayer until one day you look around and you think, There was a line here once, I think.

  GRAHAM: It got to be a rhythm: get to town, sound check, play, party, get on the bus. And the better we started playing, the more we partied. Hotels, girls, drugs. Over and over. Hotels, girls, drugs. For all of us. But especially Billy.

  WARREN: We had a rule back then; we each had five matchsticks. That’s how we’d invite people back to the party after. If they had a matchstick, they were in. We could give them out to any girl in the crowd we saw. Obviously, we tried to steer clear of weirdos.

  ROD: Let me tell you what it means to manage a rock band. We’re driving all over hell and creation, roadies and crew and the whole nine. And not one person—not one member of that band—asked themselves how we were always stocked up on gas.

  End of ’seventy-three was the oil crisis, there was a gas shortage. The tour manager and I are bribing gas station attendants like our lives depend on it. I’m switching out license plates.

  And no one even notices because they’re all sleeping around and drunk and high.

  KAREN: Billy turned into someone I didn’t recognize on that tour. He’d pass out in the bus with a girl under his arm, invite girls with us from one city to another.

  EDDIE: I mean, Billy had one of the roadies deliver tequila and quaaludes to him at all hours of the night.

  KAREN: The album was doing pretty well and our tour got extended. I was talking to Camila about it and she said, “Karen, should I come join you guys?”

  I couldn’t get the words out of my mouth fast enough. I said, “No, stay there.”

  WARREN: Let me sum up that early tour for you: I was getting laid, Graham was getting high, Eddie was getting drunk, Karen was getting fed up, Pete was getting on the phone to his girl back home, and Billy was all five, at once.

  EDDIE: I was backstage after the Ottawa show, having a few beers with the Midnight Dawn guys. Graham was with me. Karen, too. Pete was waiting for his girl Jenny. She was driving up from Boston. I hadn’t met her by that point. Because Pete was always really private. His high school girlfriend never met our parents! So I was excited to finally meet Jenny, see what all this fuss was about.

  And then in she walks, tall as hell, long blond hair, wearing this tiny little dress and these super-tall shoes, legs up to her neck, and I thought, No wonder Pete’s obsessed with this girl.

  And then right behind her, I see Camila.

  CAMILA: I wanted to surprise him. I missed him. I was bored. I was…getting nervous. I mean, I had gotten married, I was six months pregnant, and I was spe
nding the majority of my time alone in a massive old house in Topanga Canyon. There were a lot of reasons I went.

  But, yes, one of the reasons was to see if things were okay. To see what he was up to. Of course it was.

  KAREN: I had told her not to come. But she didn’t listen to me. She came to surprise Billy.

  She was just starting to show. Maybe five months pregnant? Something like that. She had on this big maxidress. Her hair pulled back.

  GRAHAM: I spotted Camila and I thought, Oh, no. But I kind of strolled on out the door. Once I was out of view, I booked it. I figured Billy was either on the bus or at the hotel. I wasn’t sure which but I had to take a chance. I ran the two blocks to the hotel.

  I should have chosen the bus.

  KAREN: She found him on the bus. Part of me wished I could have stopped her and part of me was glad it was going to be all out in the open.

  EDDIE: I wasn’t there but I heard she walked in on him getting, well…I don’t know how else to say it…oral sex, I guess I should say. From a groupie.

  BILLY: It was like I’d been playing with fire but somehow I was genuinely surprised when I burnt myself.

  I remember Camila’s face. It was…she wasn’t mad or hurt so much as truly shocked. She was just frozen, taking it in with no reaction. She stared at me as I scrambled to get myself presentable.

  The girl I was with just ran out—like she didn’t want to be in the middle of anything.

  When the door of the bus shut, I looked at Camila and I said, “I’m sorry.” That was the first thing I said, really the only thing I said. That’s when Camila finally seemed to process exactly what had happened, what was happening.

  CAMILA: I believe what I said was, and you know, earmuffs, but I believe what I said was “Who the fuck do you think you are, cheating on me? You think there’s a woman alive who is better than what you have?”

  WARREN: I was outside talking to some of the crew guys and I caught the tail end of it. I could see a bit through the windshield. It looked to me like she hit him. I think she had a bag with her and I think she slugged him with the bag. And then the two of them left the bus.