Daisy Jones & The Six - Taylor Jenkins Reid Page 0,9
nice ring. But I wanted somebody fascinating.
Graham: Around ‘seventy-one, we booked a few shows in New York.
Eddie: New York was … it was how you knew you were somebody.
Graham: One night, we’re playing a bar over in the Bowery and out on the street, smoking a cigarette, is a guy named Rod Reyes.
Rod Reyes (manager, The Six): Billy Dunne was a rock star. You could just see it. He was very cocksure, knew who to play to in the crowd. There was an emotion that he brought to his stuff.
There’s just a quality that some people have. If you took nine guys, plus Mick Jagger, and you put them in a lineup, someone who had never heard of the Rolling Stones before could still point to Jagger and say, “That’s the rock star.”
Billy had that. And the band had a good sound.
Billy: When Rod came up to us after that show at the Wreckage … that was the watershed moment.
Rod: When I started working with the band, I had some ideas. Some of which were well received and others … not so much.
Graham: Rod told me I needed to cut out half of my solos. Said they were interesting for people that loved technical guitar work but boring for everyone else.
I said, “Why would I play to people who don’t care about good guitar?”
He said, “If you want to be huge, you gotta be for everybody.”
Billy: Rod told me to stop writing about stuff I didn’t know about. He said, “Don’t reinvent the wheel. Write about your girl.” Hands down, best career advice I ever got.
Karen: Rod told me to wear low-cut shirts and I said, “Dream on,” and that was about the end of that.
Eddie: Rod started getting us gigs all over the East Coast. Florida to Canada.
Warren: Let me tell you the sweet spot for being in rock ’n’ roll. People think it’s when you’re at the top but no. That’s when you’ve got the pressure and the expectations. What’s good is when everybody thinks you’re headed somewhere fast, when you’re all potential. Potential is pure fuckin’ joy.
Graham: The longer we were out on the road, the wilder we all got. And Billy wasn’t exactly … Look, Billy liked attention. Especially from women. But, at least at that point, that’s all it was. Just attention.
Billy: It was a lot to balance. Loving somebody back home, being out on the road. Girls were coming backstage and I was the one they wanted to meet. I was … I didn’t know what a relationship was supposed to look like.
Camila: We’d started to get into fights, Billy and I. I will admit I wanted something impractical, back then. I wanted to date a rock star but I wanted him available at all times. I’d get mad when he couldn’t do exactly what I wanted. I was young. So was he.
Sometimes it would get so bad that we’d stop talking for a few days. And then one of us would call the other and apologize and things would go back the way they were. I loved him and I knew he loved me. It wasn’t easy. But as my mother used to remind me, “You’ve never been interested in easy.”
Graham: This one night, Billy and I were back home and getting in the van to head out to Tennessee or Kentucky or somewhere. Camila came to see us off. And when Rod pulled up in the van, Billy was saying goodbye.
He moved the hair out of Camila’s face and put his lips on her forehead. I remember that he didn’t even really kiss her. He just held his lips there. And I thought, I’ve never cared about anyone like that.
Billy: I wrote “Señora” for Camila and, let me tell you, people liked that song a lot. Pretty soon, at our best shows, people were getting up out of their seats, starting to dance, singing along.
Camila: I didn’t have the heart to tell him that I was technically a “señorita.” I mean, choose your battles. Besides, once I listened to it … “Let me carry you/on my back/the road looks long/and the night looks black/but the two of us are bold explorers/me and my gold señora.”
I loved it. I loved that song.
Billy: We cut a demo of “Señora” and “When the Sun Shines on You.”
Rod: My real contacts were all out in L.A. by then. I said to the band, I think it was maybe ‘seventy-two … I said, “We gotta go out