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.
EDDIE: “This Could Get Ugly” went great at dress. And at the last minute, Billy wants to do “A Hope Like You.” A slow ballad. And he wants to play the keys instead of Karen. So it’s just him and Daisy onstage.
BILLY: I wanted to really surprise everyone. I wanted to do something unexpected. I thought it could be…something to really remember.
DAISY: I thought it sounded really, really cool.
GRAHAM: It all happened so fast. One minute we’re all supposed to go out there to play “This Could Get Ugly” and the next, Billy and Daisy are going out there alone to play a different song.
KAREN: I’m the keyboard player. If someone is out there with Daisy, it seemed like it should have been me. But I understand what he was selling when he went out there. I got it. Doesn’t mean I liked it.
ROD: It was a brilliant move. The two of them out there alone. It made for great TV.
WARREN: They were facing each other, Billy at the piano, Daisy standing opposite him with the mike. The rest of us watched from the sidelines.
DAISY: Billy started playing and I caught his eye, for just a moment, before I started singing. And…[pauses] It just seemed so obvious, so painfully embarrassingly obvious. Without Nicky there to distract me, without keeping myself so drugged up I wasn’t even mentally present, it just seemed so obvious that I loved him.
That I was in love with him.
And getting high and going to Thailand and marrying a prince wasn’t going to make me stop. And him being married to somebody else…That wasn’t going to stop it either. I think I finally resigned myself to it in that moment. Just how sad it all was.
And then I started singing.
KAREN: You know when you can hear that there is a lump in somebody’s throat? That’s what she sounded like. And it…it killed everybody in the room. Her looking at him like that. Singing to him like that. Singing, “It doesn’t matter how hard I try/can’t earn some things no matter why.” I mean, c’mon.
BILLY: I loved my wife. I was faithful to my wife from the very minute I straightened up. I tried desperately to never feel anything else for any other woman. But…[breathes deeply] Everything that made Daisy burn, made me burn. Everything I loved about the world, Daisy loved about the world. Everything I struggled with, Daisy struggled with. We were two halves. We were the same. In that way that you’re only the same with a few other people. In that way that you don’t even feel like you have to say your own thoughts because you know the other person is already thinking them. How could I be around Daisy Jones and not be mesmerized by her? Not fall in love with her?
I couldn’t.
I just couldn’t.
But Camila meant more. That’s just the very deepest truth. My family meant more to me. Camila meant more to me. Maybe, for a little while there, Camila wasn’t the person I was the most drawn to. Or…
…
…
…
Maybe Camila wasn’t the person I was the most in love with. At that time. I don’t know. You can’t…Maybe she wasn’t. But she was always the person I loved the most. She was always the person I would choose.
It is Camila, for me. Always.
Passion is…it’s fire. And fire is great, man. But we’re made of water. Water is how we keep living. Water is what we need to survive. My family was my water. I picked water. I’ll pick water every time. And I wanted Daisy to find her water. Because I couldn’t be it.
GRAHAM: Watching Billy play the piano and look at Daisy, I thought, I hope Camila doesn’t see this.
BILLY: You try playing a song like that with a woman like Daisy knowing your wife will see it. You try doing that. And then tell me you’re not about to lose your goddamn mind.
ROD: It was electric, that performance. The two of them, together, performing to each other. It felt like they were ripping their hearts out on national TV. Those moments don’t happen all the time. If you were up late that Saturday night watching them, you felt like you’d witnessed something big.
KAREN: When the song was over, the small audience there erupted and Billy and Daisy took their final bow. And the rest of us came out and joined them. And, you know, I did kind of have this feeling, then, that we were big and we were only going to get bigger. It was the first time that I thought, Are we going to be the biggest band in the world?
WARREN: We went to the after-party with the whole cast and everybody. Lisa Crowne was the host and I thought, you know, Just play it cool with her and maybe she’ll be into you. And so that’s what I did. And then she was.
GRAHAM: When I looked over, sometime in the early morning, and Warren had his arm around Lisa Crowne, I thought, Shit, we must be really fucking famous. I mean, we’d have to be for Warren to have a chance with Lisa Crowne.
EDDIE: Pete and I partied with the SNL band to the point where I couldn’t feel my own nose and Pete puked into a tuba.
WARREN: By the time I left with Lisa, I didn’t see Daisy anywhere.
GRAHAM: At some point, we all lost track of Daisy.
BILLY: I was polite, a
nd I went to the bar with everybody. But I couldn’t stay long. SNL parties are not where you want to be when you’re sober.
When I got back to my hotel, I got a call from [Camila] and we talked for a little while and there was a lot that we weren’t saying. She had watched the show and I think she was wrestling with how to feel about all of it. We talked around it a long time. And then she said she wanted to go to sleep and I said, “Okay,” and then I said, “I love you. You are my ‘Aurora.’ ” And she said she loved me too and hung up the phone.
CAMILA: No matter who you choose to go down the road with, you’re gonna get hurt. That’s just the nature of caring about someone. No matter who you love, they will break your heart along the way. Billy Dunne has broken my heart a number of times. And I know I’ve broken his. But yes, that night watching them on SNL…that was one of the times that my heart cracked.
But I just kept choosing trust and hope. I believed he was worthy of it.
DAISY: I was sitting in a booth next to Rod at the SNL party and a bunch of girls went into the bathroom to do a line and I was so bored. I was so incredibly bored of my life. Of the speed and coke and the cycle. It was like watching a movie for the hundredth time. You already know when the bad guy’s gonna show up, you already know what the hero will do. It was so boring, the thought of it, that I wanted to die. I wanted real life, for once. Anything real. So I got up and I got in a cab and I went back to the hotel and I went to Billy’s room.
BILLY: There was a knock at my door. Just as I was falling asleep. And at first I just let the person knock. I figured it was Graham and it could wait until the morning.
DAISY: I just kept knocking. I knew he was in there.
BILLY: Finally, I get out of bed and I’m in just my skivvies. And I answer and I say, “What do you want?” And then I look and it’s Daisy.
DAISY: I just needed to say what I needed to say. I had to say it. It was then or it was never and it couldn’t be never. I couldn’t live like that.
BILLY: I was genuinely in shock. I could not believe it.
DAISY: I said, “I want to get clean.”
Billy immediately pulled me into his room. And he sat me down and he said, “Are you sure?”
I said, “Yes.”
And he said, “Let’s get you into rehab now.”
He picked up the phone and he started dialing and I got up and I hung up the phone and I said, “Just…right now just sit with me. And help me…understand what I’m doing.”
BILLY: I didn’t know how to help somebody else. But I wanted to. I wanted to help somebody the way Teddy had helped me. I owed so much to him, felt so grateful to him. For getting me into rehab when he did. And I wanted to do that for someone. I wanted to do it for her. I wanted her to be safe and healthy. I wanted that for her…I…yeah, I wanted that for her very badly.
DAISY: Billy and I talked about rehab and what that would mean and he told me a little bit about what it would be like. It seemed so daunting. I was starting to wonder if I didn’t really mean it. If I wasn’t actually ready to go through with it. But I kept trying to believe in myself, that I could. At one point, Billy asked if I was sober. Was I sober right then?
I’d had a drink or two at the party, I’d had dexies earlier in the day. I couldn’t have told you what sober meant, exactly. Had everything worn off? Did I even remember what it was like to be entirely straight?
Billy opened the minibar to get a soda and there were all these nips in there of tequila and vodka and I looked at them. And Billy looked at them. And then he just took them and walked to the window and threw them out the window. You could hear a few of them break on the roof of the floor below. I said, “What are you doing?”
Billy just said, “That’s rock ’n’ roll.”
BILLY: At some point, we got to talking about the album.
DAISY: I asked him something that had been plaguing me for the past couple months. “Are you worried we’ll never be able to write another album as good as this?”
BILLY: I said, “I worry about it every fucking day.”
DAISY: All my life I’d wanted people to recognize my talent as a songwriter and Aurora had brought it, the recognition. And I’d immediately started to feel like an impostor.
BILLY: The higher that album went, the more nervous I felt thinking about how to make another one. I’d be scribbling down songs in my notebook on the bus and I’d just end up crossing it all out and throwing it away because it wasn’t…I couldn’t tell if it was any good anymore. I didn’t know if I was just exposing myself as a fraud.
DAISY: He was the only one that could understand that level of pressure.
BILLY: When morning came, I brought up rehab again.
DAISY: The thought I kept hearing in my head was Go for a little while just for a break. You don’t have to stop forever. That was my plan. To go to rehab without planning to quit forever. It made perfect sense to me. I’ll tell you: If a friend lied to me the way I lie to myself, I’d say, “You’re a shitty friend.”
BILLY: I picked up the phone to call information to get the number for the rehab center I went to. But when I picked up the receiver, there was no dial tone. And someone on the other end was saying, “Hello?”
I said, “Hello?”
It was the concierge. He said, “I have an Artie Snyder on the phone for you.”
I told him to put it through but I was thinking, Why is my sound engineer calling me at the ass crack of dawn? I said, “Artie, what on earth…?”
DAISY: Teddy had a heart attack.
WARREN: A lot of people live through heart attacks. So when I found out, I thought…I didn’t immediately realize that meant he was dead.
BILLY: Gone.
GRAHAM: Teddy Price isn’t the kind of guy you think is going to die of a heart attack. Well, I mean, he ate like shit and drank a lot and didn’t take great care of himself but…He just seemed too…powerful, maybe. Like if a heart attack came to town he was going to tell it to screw off and it would.
BILLY: It just knocked the wind right out of me. And my first thought when I got off the phone, the very first thought in my head was Why did I throw the booze out the window?
ROD: I got them all home to L.A. for the funeral.
WARREN: We’d all been devastated to lose Teddy. But, man, watching Yasmine, his girlfriend, break down in these awful tears at his grave…I just kept thinking that so little in life mattered. But how Yasmine felt about Teddy…that mattered.
GRAHAM: Teddy was a lot of things to a lot of people. I’ll never forget being at the memorial and seeing Billy holding Yasmine’s hand, trying to make her feel all right. Because I knew he wasn’t all right.
Every man needs a man to look up to. For better or worse, I had Billy. Billy had Teddy. And Teddy was gone.
BILLY: Things had sort of spun out of control for me. I could barely make sense of anything. I couldn’t process it. Teddy being gone. Teddy being…dead. I think I died inside, for a little while. I know that sounds kind of extreme. But that’s what it felt like. It felt like my heart sort of turned to stone. Or…you know how people get cryogenically frozen? Like, they just put themselves on ice in the hopes that they can come back one day? That’s what happened to my soul. On ice.
I couldn’t handle reality. Not sober. Not without a drink or a…I just checked out. I checked out of my life. I had no other way of coping but to die inside. Because if I tried to stay alive, to live during that period of time, it might actually have killed me.
DAISY: When Teddy died, that was it. I’d decided there was no sense in getting sober. I rationalized it. You know, If the universe wanted me to get clean, it wouldn’t have killed Teddy. You can justify anything. If you’re narcissistic enough to believe that the universe conspires for and against you—which we all are, deep down—then you can convince yourself you’re getting signs about an
ything and everything.
WARREN: I’d spent about three weeks on my boat. Smoking cigars, getting drunk, barely changing my clothes. Lisa and I had been talking a bit, since the show on SNL. She came out to see me. She said, “You live on a boat?”
I said, “Yeah.”
She said, “You’re an adult. Get a real house.” She had a point.
EDDIE: I’d thought the best thing for all of us was to get back out on the road. We lost a cousin of mine in a car accident about ten or eleven years before, and my dad had said, “Work through pain.” That’s been my way ever since. I thought it might make Pete stay in the band. But, if anything, it made him more ready to leave.
BILLY: One time, Camila asked me to scrub the toilet and I went in there and I started scrubbing the bowl and I just kept scrubbing it. And then she came in and she said, “What are you doing?”
I said, “I’m cleaning the toilet.”
She said, “You’ve been cleaning the toilet for forty-five minutes.”
I said, “Oh.”
CAMILA: I said to him, “You need to get back on the road, Billy. We’ll all go with you. But you need to get back out there. Sitting at home thinking is killing you.”
ROD: At some point, you have to get back on the bus.
GRAHAM: You think that tragedy means that the world is over but you realize the world is never over. It’s just never over. Nothing will end it.
And I kept focusing on the fact that, with Karen and I, you know, life is just beginning.
KAREN: I was very thankful to Rod that he got us back out on the road. That he didn’t let us capsize.
BILLY: I did what Camila said. I got back out there. The first show, we were in Indianapolis. I flew out with the band. Camila and the girls were going to join me at the next stop.
Indianapolis was…it was tough. I showed up at the hotel, checked in, saw Graham, saw Karen, and then at sound check there was Daisy. She was wearing overalls. She looked strung out. You could see it. Her sunken eyes and her skinny arms. I had a hard time looking at her.
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