Daisy Jones & The Six - Taylor Jenkins Reid Page 0,85

it to exist in a vacuum, where real life didn’t matter, where the future didn’t matter, where all that mattered was, you know, how we felt that day.

Jonah Berg: Warren seemed busy hitting on every woman he could find. And Eddie Loving was talking my ear off, talking about tuning or something. Pete was off with some girl he was seeing. So I decided to focus on Daisy. She was who I wanted to get the most from anyway.

Now, I will say this: a lot of people were getting high on whatever they could get their hands on back then. That wasn’t anything new. And even as a journalist, there wasn’t much you couldn’t allude to in the pages of a magazine, certainly one like Rolling Stone. You could imply all sorts of stuff about what everybody was getting up to. But there were some people who didn’t seem like they were snorting things for fun. There were some people out there who were getting high because they couldn’t hold it together without it. And it was my personal opinion, that the drug habits of those people were sort of … off-limits. A lot of people in my position felt differently. A lot of them behaved differently, wrote differently.

I certainly got into a few situations over the years where I felt pressured—or was pressured, I should say—to out those people in the interest of selling magazines. So I tended to not even write down what I observed, or tell a single person what I saw, if I thought somebody I was interviewing had a serious drug problem. It was a very “see no evil” sort of thing. For me.

When I’m with Daisy that night, we are hanging out in the back of the crowd. And I look over and Daisy is rubbing her gums. And at first I thought it was coke but I realize she was snorting amphetamines. She did not seem like a recreational user, I guess is what I’m saying. And there seemed a significant difference in the Daisy I met on tour the year before and this Daisy now. She was more frenetic, less eloquent. Sadder, maybe. No, that’s not it. Less joyful.

She said to me, “Do you want to go outside?” I nodded and we went into the parking lot and we sat on the hood of my car. And Daisy said, “All right, Jonah. Let’s do this. Ask your questions.”

And I said, “If you don’t want to go on the record now, because you’re … not in the right state of mind, you need to say so.”

And she said, “No, let’s talk.”

I had given her an explicit out. And she turned it down. That’s all I felt obligated to do. So I said, “What’s going on between you and Billy?”

Then it all just started pouring out of her.

Daisy: I shouldn’t have said what I said. And then Billy shouldn’t have gone and done what he did.

Billy: I come into the rehearsal space the next day and everybody’s there and they are all talking and messing around and Jonah says, “When should we set aside some time to talk?”

And I say, “Let me see when Daisy’s free.”

And he says, “Well, I want to get some time just the two of us, if you’re good with that.” That’s when I started to get worried. Just the way he said it … I sort of had this feeling like, What did she do? I looked over at her and she was up at the mike, talking to somebody. And she had on tiny shorts again in this cold studio. And I just thought, Put some fucking pants on. That’s what I was thinking. You’re cold. Stop dressing like it’s gonna be hot in here. You know that it’s cold in here every day. But of course she was hot, she was sweating bullets from all the drugs in her body. I knew that.

Daisy: I think that if I had gone up to Jonah that day, after talking to him that night, and tried to take it all back, he might have let me. And I considered it. I really did.

Jonah Berg: I absolutely would not have agreed to let Daisy rescind her comments. People have asked it before. I’ve always said no. That’s why I’m very clear at the beginning, when I start recording. I make sure people understand what they are doing when they talk to me.

I gave Daisy plenty of outs. She moved forward. At