Daisy Jones & The Six - Taylor Jenkins Reid Page 0,110

understood what she meant. When she got to her door, Camila looked back at me and it was the first time I realized she was nervous. Her fingers were shaking as she put her key in the door.

And then she slipped into her room. And she was gone.

Billy: I went back up to my hotel room and I shut the door behind me and slumped against it. Camila and the girls were asleep and I just watched them. And then I broke down crying, right there on the floor. And I thought to myself, That’s it. I’m done. It’s gonna come down to rock ’n’ roll or my life and I’m not choosing rock ’n’ roll.

Daisy: I was on the next flight out.

Rod: The next morning, I see Daisy’s gone and she’s left a note saying she’s left the band and would never come back.

Warren: I woke up in the morning and Daisy had left. Graham and Karen didn’t want to be in the same room with each other. Then Billy comes onto the white bus and announces he’s taking a break from touring. So Rod has to cancel the rest of the tour.

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 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.

Then

and

Now

1979–Present

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