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.
BILLY: I was so happy to go home to my girls.
CAMILA: There was so much more to my life, so much more to my marriage, than the fact that my husband was in a band. I’m not saying that The Six wasn’t a major factor, of course it was. But we were a family. Billy was expected to leave his work at the door when he came home. And he did that.
When I think back to the late seventies, I do think a lot about the band and the songs and…everything that we were going through with that. But I mostly think about Julia learning to swim. And Susana’s first word sounding like “Mimia,” and how we couldn’t tell if she meant “Mama” or “Julia” or “Maria.” Or Maria always trying to pull Billy’s hair. And how he used to play a game with the girls called Who Gets the Last Pancake? As he was making pancakes, and the girls were eating them, he’d suddenly yell, “Who gets the last pancake?” And whichever girl put her hand up first got to eat it. But somehow, no matter what happened, he’d make them split the pancake.
That’s the kind of thing I remember more than anything.
BILLY: Camila and I had just closed on our new house in Malibu, in the hills. Bigger than any house I ever thought I’d live in. With this long driveway and trees shading every part except the deck. The deck was totally unobstructed. You could see all the way out to the ocean. Camila used to call it “the house ‘Honeycomb’ built.”
The two weeks that I was home for the holidays, we spent most of it moving in and getting settled. The first night we brought the girls, I said to Julia, “Which room do you want?” She was the oldest, so she got first pick. Her eyes went wide and she went off running down the hall, looking at each one. And then, she sat down on the floor in the middle of the hallway and she deliberated. And then she said, “I want the one in the middle.”
I said, “Are you sure?”
She said, “I’m sure.” She was just like her mom. Once she knew what she wanted, she knew.
ROD: That Christmas was the first time in a long time—a long, long time—that I didn’t have to do any work. That I could just enjoy myself. That I didn’t have to save some rock star from some crisis or make sure their rider was fulfilled or whatever I was doing.
I rented a cabin with this guy Chris. He and I moved in the same circles and I’d been seeing him whenever I was in town. We spent the holidays together in Big Bear. We made dinners together and went in the hot tub and played cards. For Christmas, I gave him a sweater and he gave me a day planner. And I thought, I want to be normal.
DAISY: Nicky and I flew to Rome for Christmas.
EDDIE: Over the holiday, Pete asked Jenny to marry him and she said yes. I was real happy for him, you know? I gave him a big hug. He said, “I have to figure out when I’m going to tell everybody. I don’t know how they are gonna take it.”
I said, “What are you talking about? Nobody cares if you’re married.”
He said, “No, I’m leaving.”
I said, “Leaving?”
He said, “At the end of the tour, I’m quitting the band.”
We were at our parents’ house in the den. I said, “What are you talking about? Quitting the band?”
He said, “I told you I didn’t want to do this forever.”
I said, “You never said that.”
He said, “I’ve said that a thousand times to you. I told you this stuff doesn’t matter.”
I said, “You’re talking about giving all of this up for Jenny? Really?”
He said, “Not really for Jenny. For me. So I can get on with my life.”
I said, “What does that mean?”
He said, “I never wanted to be in a soft rock band. C’mon. You know that. I got on the train, I rode it for a little while. But my stop’s coming up.”
DAISY: Nicky and I got into a fight in the hotel room in Italy. He accused me of sleeping with Billy back in Kansas. I had no idea what he was even talking about. I didn’t even talk to Billy in Kansas. But he said he’d known for weeks and he was sick of watching me try to hide it. Things got intense, really quickly. I threw a few bottles at him. He smashed his hand through the window. I remember looking down and seeing gray tears falling down my face. They were stained with my mascara and eyeliner. I don’t remember exactly how it happened but one of my hoops got ripped out of my ear. Cut clear through. I was bleeding and crying and the room was trashed. And the next thing I know Nicky is holding me and we’re promising to never leave each other’s side and never fight like that again and I remember thinking, If this is what love is like, maybe I don’t want it.
ROD: We had booked Daisy’s flight to get in a full day early for the show in Seattle. I had her come in early because I was nervous she’d miss her flight and I needed to make sure we had a margin of error.
DAISY: The morning we were supposed to fly to Seattle, I woke up and Nicky was sitting over me. I realized I was soaking wet, sleeping in the base of the shower. I was groggy and confused but by that point I always woke up groggy and confused. I said, “What happened?”
He said, “I thought maybe you overdosed. On the Seconals or something. I couldn’t remember what else we took.” You know what happens when people overdose on Seconals? They die.
I said, “So you put me in the shower?”
He said, “I tried to wake you up. I didn’t know what else to do. You wouldn’t wake up. I was so scared.”
I looked at him and my heart just sank. Because, while I have no idea whether or not I overdosed or what exactly happened that night, I could tell he had been truly terrified.
And all he did was put me in the shower.
My husband believed I might die. And he didn’t so much as even call the concierge.
A switch flipped in me. It was like one of those breaker switches…Like on a circuit box. You know how they take a lot of pressure to flip? But then once they catch, they switch over with force? I switched over. I knew, right then and there, that I needed to get away from this person. That I had to take care of myself. Because if I didn’t…
He wasn’t gonna kill me but he would let me die.
I said, “Okay, thank you for watching me.” I said, “You must be tired. Why don’t you take a nap?” And then, when he was asleep, I packed all my things. I took both plane tickets and I went to the airport. When I got there, I found a pay phone. I called the hotel. I said, “I need to leave a message for Niccolo Argento in room 907.”
The lady said okay. Actually, she probably said, “Bene.”
I said, “Write, ‘Lola La Cava wants a divorce.’ ”
WARREN: When we all got back after hiatus, that show in Seattle…Daisy seemed, I don’t know, lucid.
I said, “Where’s Niccolo?”
And Daisy said, “That period of my life is over.” That was it. End of discussion. I thought that was badass.
SIMONE: She called me and said she’d left Niccolo in Italy and I started clapping.
KAREN: She started making sense when you were talking to her. She started showing up clearheaded to sound checks.
DAISY: I would not, unfortunately, use the word sober. But you know what? I showed up to places on time. I did start doing that.
BILLY: I don’t think I had realized just how much of her was gone until it was back.
DAISY: I had gotten back to being aware of myself onstage, those first months away from Nicky. Of being aware of my relationship with the audience. I started making a point to be in bed by a certain time and awake by a certain time. I had rules about when to do what drugs. Only coke at night, only six dexies at a time, or whatever number I’d come up with. Only champagne and brandy.
When I was onstage, I was singing with intention. Which I hadn’t done in a long time. I cared about the show. I cared about making it good. I cared about…
I cared about who I was singing with.
ROD: Daisy high is fun and carefree and a good time. If she’s having fun, you’re having fun. But if you want to rip people’s hearts out of their chests, bring Daisy back down to earth and have her sing her own songs. There’s nothing like it.
DAISY: I was drunk at the Grammys. But it barely mattered.
BILLY: Before the award for Record of the Year was announced, sometime earlier in the night, Rod told me that Teddy didn’t want to speak. It’s sort of a producer’s award, but Teddy preferred to be the guy behind the guy, so Rod asked if I wanted to be the one to do it and I said, “It doesn’t matter. We aren’t gonna win.”
He said, “So it’s okay if I give it to Daisy?”
I said, “You’re giving her a big fat bowl of nothing but sure.”
Look, you can’t be right all the time.
KAREN: When we won Record of the Year for “Turn It Off,” we were all standing up there, the seven of us and Teddy. Pete wore a goddamn bolo tie. Hideous. I was so embarrassed for him. I thought, for certain, that Billy would be the one to give the acceptance speech. But Daisy went up to the mike instead. I thought, I hope she says something coherent. And then she did.
BILLY: She said, “Thank you to everybody who listened to this song and understood this song and sang it along with us. We made it for you. For all of you out there hung up on somebody or something.”
CAMILA: “For everyone hung up on somebody or something.”
DAISY: I didn’t mean anything by it except to give a voice to people feeling desperate. I was feeling desperate about a lot of things. I was feeling desperate and also, somehow, more myself.
It’s funny. At first, I think you start getting high to dull your emotions, to escape from them. But after a while you realize that the drugs are what are making your life untenable, they are actually what are heightening every emotion you have. It’s making your heartbreak harder, your good times higher. So coming down really does start to feel like rediscovering sanity.
And when you rediscover your sanity, it’s only a matter of time before you start to get an inkling of why you wanted to escape it in the first place.
BILLY: When we walked off the stage, with that award, I caught her eye. And she smiled at me. And I thought, She’s turning it around.
ELAINE CHANG: Daisy accepting the Grammy for Record of the Year, where her hair is disheveled and she’s wearing the bangles up to her elbows and she’s got on this thin cream silk slip dress and she seems entirely in control of that band and confident in her talent…that night alone might be why she’s considered one of the sexiest rock singers of all time.
Shortly after that, they recorded the famous video of the band performing “Impossible Woman” at Madison Square Garden—where she’s singing deep from her gut and fearless about even the highest notes, where Billy Dunne can’t seem to keep his eyes off her.
All of this was during those months just after she had left Niccolo Argento. That’s when she was fully self-actualized, fully in command of herself. All the magazines were talking about her, everybody knew who she was. All of rock ’n’ roll wanted to be her.
Spring of ’seventy-nine is the Daisy Jones we all talk about when we talk about Daisy Jones. You would have thought she was on top of the world.
KAREN: There’s something I haven’t mentioned.
GRAHAM: Did Karen tell you about it? It’s not my place to say anything if she hasn’t told you already. But…I guess if she did, then it’s okay.
KAREN: We were in Seattle, I think, when I realized what was going on.
EDDIE: I never brought it up with Graham and Karen, that I knew they were sleeping together. But I did think it was odd they kept it so quiet. People would have been happy for them. Maybe it was just a one-time thing between them. Sometimes, my memory is so hazy I wonder if I imagined it. But I don’t think I did. I don’t think I would make up something like that.
KAREN: I was taking a shower in the hotel and Graham had the adjoining room and he came in. And then he got in the shower with me. I pulled him into me, put my arms around him. That’s part of what I liked about Graham so much, was how big he was, how strong he was. He was hairy and bulky and I liked all of that. I liked how gentle he was, too. But this time, as he pressed his chest into mine, my boobs felt swollen. They felt sore. And I knew. I just knew.
I’d heard women talk about being able to sense when they were pregnant. But I thought it was some Flower Power shit. But it’s true. At least for me. I was twenty-nine. I knew my body. And I knew I was pregnant. This dread just seeped into me. It was like it started at my head and filled my whole body. I remember being so thankful when Graham heard Warren knocking on his door because he rushed out of the shower.
I was so relieved to be alone. To not have to pretend to be human, in that moment. Because I felt…gone. I felt like my soul had left my body and I was just a shell. I stayed in the shower for I don’t even know how long. I just stayed in there, under the showerhead, staring off into space until I could muster the energy to step out.
GRAHAM: You know how sometimes you can tell that something is off with somebody? But you can’t put your finger on it? And you ask what’s wrong and they seem to have no idea what you’re talking about? You feel crazy. You feel like you’re going crazy. This feeling in your gut that the person you love isn’t okay. But they look okay. They look okay.
KAREN: I took a pregnancy test in Portland. I’d kept it a secret from everybody. But then…that meant I was alone in my hotel room. Seeing the line turn pink or whatever color it was. I stared at it for a long time. And then I called Camila. I said, “I’m pregnant.” I said, “I don’t know what to do.”
CAMILA: I said, “Do you want a family?”
And she said, “No.” When she said “no…” it sounded like this croak. In her throat.
KAREN: It was silent on the phone. And then Camila said, “Oh, honey, I’m so sorry.”
GRAHAM: When we got to Vegas, I finally said, “C’mon, you have to talk to me.”
KAREN: I just blurted it out. Told him. I said, “I’m pregnant.”
GRAHAM: I didn’t know what to say.
KAREN: He didn’t talk for a long time. Just paced around the room. I said, “I don’t want to do this. Go through with it.”
GRAHAM: I figured she was just wrestling with it a bit. I said to her, “Let’s just give this some time. We still have time, right?”
KAREN: I told him I wasn’t going to change my mind.
GRAHAM: I said the wrong thing. I knew it was the wrong thing. I said, “We can get a different keyboardist, if that’s what you’re worried about.”
KAREN: I don’t really blame Graham, honestly. He was just thinking like most people. I said, “Do you understand how hard I worked to get here? I’m not giving this up.”
GRAHAM: I didn’t want to say it but I thought it seemed selfish. Choosing anything over our baby.
KAREN: He kept calling it “our baby.” Our baby our baby our baby.
GRAHAM: I told her that she should just take some time. That’s all I said.
KAREN: It was our baby but it was my responsibility.
GRAHAM: People change their minds about this stuff all the time. You think you don’t want something and then you realize you do.
KAREN: He said that I didn’t know what I was saying and that if I didn’t go forward with the pregnancy I’d regret it for the rest of my life. He just didn’t understand.
I wasn’t scared of regretting not having a child. But I was scared of regretting having a child.
I was scared of bringing an unwanted life into this world. I was scared of living my life, feeling like I’d anchored myself to the wrong dock. I was scared of being pushed to do something I knew I did not want. Graham didn’t want to hear it.
GRAHAM: Things got heated and I stormed out. We had to have the conversation when we felt calm. You can’t scream about something like that.
KAREN: My mind wasn’t going to change. I’ve been judged for it every time I’ve said it but I’ll keep saying it: I never wanted to be a mother. I never wanted children.
GRAHAM: I just kept thinking, She’ll change her mind. I thought, We will get married and have a baby and figure it all out. She was going to realize how much she wanted to be a mother, how much family meant to her.
DAISY: After the Grammys, Billy and I started talking again. Well, sort of. We had just won for a song we wrote together, a song we sung together, and that resonated with me.
BILLY: She leveled out. She loosened up. With Niccolo gone, it was…easier to have a conversation with her.
DAISY: We were on an overnight flight to New York to do Saturday Night Live. Rich had given us the Runner jet. I think almost everybody had fallen asleep. Billy was on the other side of the plane from me. But our chairs were sort of facing each other. I had on a tiny dress and I was cold and I took a blanket and wrapped it around myself and I saw Billy see me. And he laughed.
BILLY: Some people will never stop being themselves. And you think it drives you crazy but it is the very thing you will think about when they are gone. When you don’t have them in your life anymore.
DAISY: I looked at him and I laughed, too. And it was, for a moment, at least, like we could be friends again.
ROD: By the time they did Saturday Night Live, “Young Stars” had become a hit, too. It was number 7 on the charts, I think. Somewhere in the Top Ten. We were selling so many albums they couldn’t print them fast enough. Runner had teed up “This Could Get Ugly” as the next hit.
DAISY: For SNL, the decision was that we would do “Turn It Off” as the first song, and then we would do “This Could Get Ugly” for the second.
KAREN: I bet Warren that Daisy wouldn’t be wearing a bra and I won two hundred bucks.
WARREN: We’re all deciding what we were gonna wear and I bet Karen fifty bucks that Billy wore a denim shirt and Daisy didn’t wear a bra. I won fifty bucks.
KAREN: During dress, Daisy and Billy were actually speaking to each other. You could tell there had been a shift, somewhere.
GRAHAM: We did the dress rehearsal for “Turn It Off” and it went really well. So did “This Could Get Ugly.”
BILLY: When the show started, I planned on doing it just like we’d rehearsed.
DAISY: Lisa Crowne announced us, you know, “Ladies and gentlemen, Daisy Jones & The Six,” and the crowd went crazy. I’d been in huge stadiums with crowds cheering but it felt different. This small group of people just in front of us, making that much noise. It was this jolt of energy.
NICK HARRIS: By the time Daisy Jones & The Six performed “Turn It Off” on Saturday Night Live, they were performing a song almost everyone in the country knew. It was the Record of the Year.
Daisy was wearing faded black jeans and a satin pink tank top. Of course, she’s got the bracelets on. She’s barefoot. Her hair is this brilliant red. She was dancing around the stage, singing her heart out, and tapping the tambourine. She looked like she was having a great time. And Billy Dunne is in his classic denim and denim. He’s up close on the mike, watching her, having a great time himself. They looked like they belonged up there together.
The band is hitting every beat with a crispness and a freshness that you don’t expect when a song has been played as many times as you know they’ve played this song.
And Warren Rhodes is a showstopper for anybody interested in learning what it means to hold an entire band together with the drums. He was electric behind those things. If you could take your eye off Daisy and Billy long enough, it would go right to him slamming down on the floor toms.
And then as the song progresses, and the lyrics get a bit more pointed, Billy and Daisy both seem transfixed with one another. They move to the same mike and they sing facing one another. This emotive, hot-blooded song about wishing you could get over someone…they seem like they are singing to each other.
BILLY: There was so much going on during that performance. I had to be aware of my timing and the words and where I was looking and where the camera was. And then…I don’t know…Suddenly Daisy was there next to me and I forgot about everything but just looking at her and singing this song that we wrote together.
DAISY: The song ended, and I sort of snapped out of it, and Billy and I looked at the audience and then he took my hand and we bowed. That was the first time my body had so much as grazed his in a very long time. It was the sort of thing where, even after he let go, my hand still hummed.
GRAHAM: Daisy and Billy had something no one else had. And when they played it up, when they actually engaged with each other…It’s what made us. That was one of those moments where you think their talent is absolutely worth all the bullshit.
WARREN: Between songs, Billy told me he had an idea for “A Hope Like You.” I liked the idea. I told him as long as everybody else was okay with it, then I was, too.