Daisy Jones & The Six - Taylor Jenkins Reid Page 0,5

was like Billy was in love with a new girl every week. He’d always been like that.

In elementary school, he’d asked out his second-grade teacher. Mom always said he was born girl crazy. She used to joke it’d be the end of him.

Warren: We played house parties and a bar here and there. For maybe about six months or so, maybe a little longer. Got paid in beer. Which, when you’re underage isn’t so bad.

Graham: We weren’t always hanging out in the, let’s say classiest of places. There were a few times a fight would break out over something and you were worried you might get caught in the cross fire. This one time we were playing a gig at a dive bar and this guy in the front got a little too jacked up on something. He starts swinging punches at people. I’m minding my own business playing my riffs when suddenly he’s coming for me!

And then it all went lightning fast. Boom. He was on the ground. Billy had taken him out.

Billy’d done the same thing when we were little kids. I was headed down to the five-and-dime and some kid tried to jump me for a couple nickels. Billy ran up to us and then just flattened him.

Warren: You knew back then not to say any shit about Graham if Billy could hear you. You know, Graham wasn’t that good when we were starting out. I remember one time Pete and I were saying to Billy, “Maybe we should replace Graham,” and Billy said, “Say that again and Graham and I will replace you.” [Laughs] Honestly, I thought that was cool. I was thinking, All right, I’m not gonna get involved then. Never did bother me much that Billy and Graham thought of the band as theirs. I liked thinking of myself as a drummer for hire. I was just trying to have a good time playing in a good band.

Graham: We started to play enough that some people around town knew who we were. And Billy was just starting to get into his lead singer thing. He had a look, you know? We all did. We stopped cutting our hair.

Billy: I wore jeans everywhere, got really into big belt buckles.

Warren: Graham and Pete started wearing these tight T-shirts. I’d tell them, “I can see your nipples.” But they thought that was cool.

Billy: We got hired for this wedding. It was a big deal. A wedding meant we were gonna be heard by, you know, a hundred people. I think I was nineteen.

We had auditioned for this couple with our best song. It was this slower, folkier song I’d written called “Nevermore.” Just thinking about it makes me cringe. Truly. I was writing about the Catonsville Nine and things like that. I thought I was Dylan. But we got the gig.

And about halfway through our show at this wedding, I notice this fifty-something guy dancing with this twenty-something girl and I thought, Does this guy know what a creep he looks like?

And then I realize it’s my dad.

Graham: Our father was there with this young girl, about our age. I realized it before Billy, I think. Recognized him from the pictures our mom kept in the shoe box under her bed.

Billy: I couldn’t believe it. He’d been gone ten years by that point. And he was supposed to be in Georgia. That asshole was just standing right in the middle of the dance floor, no idea his sons were up onstage. It had been so long since he’d seen us, he didn’t even recognize us. Not our faces or our voices, nothing.

When we finished playing, I watched him walk off the dance floor. Didn’t so much as look at us. I mean, what kind of sociopath do you have to be not to notice your own sons when they are right there in front of you? How is that even possible?

In my experience, biology kicks in. You meet that kid, and you know it’s yours, and you love that kid. That’s just how it works.

Graham: Billy asked a few people at the wedding about him. Turns out, our father had been living a few towns over. Friends with the bride’s family or something. Billy was boiling mad, saying, “He didn’t even recognize us.” I always thought that he probably did recognize us and just didn’t know what to say.

Billy: It messes with you, when your own father doesn’t care about you enough to say hello. I’m not