Daisy Jones & The Six(56)

Daisy: I had rehearsed my speech on the way over.

Billy: It was hard to make a case against it but I still tried.

Daisy: I said, “There’s no reason not to record this song. Unless, there’s something else bothering you?”

Billy: I said, “There’s nothing bothering me, but I just say no.”

Daisy: “You aren’t the boss of the band, Billy.”

Billy: I said, “We write together, and I’m not writing that with you.” Daisy grabbed the papers and stomped out of the room and I thought that was that.

Daisy: I pulled everybody in the lounge. Everybody that was there.

Karen: Daisy literally dragged me by the sleeve.

Warren: I’m standing at the back door with a joint in my hand and I feel Daisy’s hand on my shoulder and she’s pulling me back into the studio.

Eddie: Pete was in the booth with Teddy. I’d been in the john. When I came out, Pete had come out, too. To see what was going on.

Graham: Pete and I were sitting in the lounge, working on something when suddenly, everyone’s standing in front of us.

Daisy: I said, “I’m going to sing you all a song.”

Billy: I found them all in the lounge. I was thinking, What the fuck is going on?

Daisy: I said, “And then we’re going to vote on whether it should get recorded and put on the album.”

Billy: I was so angry it was like I surpassed hot and went cold. Just frozen there, stunned. I could feel the blood drain out of me, like someone pulled the stop on a tub.

Daisy: I just went for it. Nothing accompanying me, just singing the song the way I heard it in my head. “When you look in the mirror/take stock of your soul/and when you hear my voice, remember/you ruined me whole.”

Karen: Her voice was guttural. Part of it was that she was clearly drunk or buzzed or something. And her voice was scratchy. But the combination of the two. It was an angry song. And she was angry singing it.

Eddie: It was rock ’n’ roll! It was rage, man. She thrashed. When I tell people what it’s like to make a rock album, I tell them about that day. I tell them about standing there in front of the hottest chick you’ve ever seen in your life, while she’s singing her guts out, and everybody’s feeling like she’s about to lose her goddamn mind. In the best way possible.

Warren: You know when she had me? When I knew that song was fucking great? When she said, “When you think of me, I hope it ruins rock ’n’ roll.”

Billy: When she finished, everyone was dead quiet. And I thought, Okay, good. They don’t like it.

Daisy: I said, “Who thinks the song should be on the album, raise your hand?” And Karen’s hand went straight up.

Karen: I wanted to play on that song. I wanted to rock out onstage with a song like that.

Eddie: It’s a scorned-woman song but it was a great one. I put my hand straight up. And Pete did, too. I think he liked that it really felt like dangerous stuff, you know? So much of what we were doing on that album sounded so soft.

Warren: I said, “Put me down as a yes,” and then I put my joint back to my lips and went back to the parking lot.

Graham: We wouldn’t have been voting if Billy liked the song, right? My instinct was to back him up. But it was also a great song.

Daisy: Everybody has their hands up but Graham and Billy. And then Graham put his up, too.

I looked at Billy in the back. I said, “Six against one.” He nodded at me, at everybody, and he walked away.

Eddie: We recorded it without him.





Rod: It was time to think about how we were going to market this album. So I set the band up with a photographer friend of mine, Freddie Mendoza. Real talented guy. I played him a couple of the early tracks from the album just to give him a sense of what we were going for. He said, “I see it in the desert mountains.”

Karen: For some reason I remember Billy saying he wanted to shoot the cover with us on a boat.

Billy: I’d thought we should do a shot of the sunrise. We’d already decided the album should be called Aurora, I think.

Daisy: Billy had decided the album should be called Aurora and nobody could really argue with him. But it was not lost on me. That this album I worked my ass off on was named after Camila.

Warren: I thought we should shoot the cover on my boat. I thought that would be cool.

Freddie Mendoza (photographer): I was told to get a picture of the whole band with Billy and Daisy as the focus. Really no different than any other band photo shoot, right? You have to be keenly aware of who you’re featuring and how to make it seem natural.

Rod: Freddie wanted a desert vibe. Billy said it was fine. So that was that.

Graham: We all had to be at this spot in the Santa Monica Mountains at the crack of dawn.

Warren: Pete was something like an hour late.

Billy: I looked at us all, as we were standing around waiting for the photographer to set up the shot, and I sort of stepped outside of myself a bit. I tried to see us as others would see us.

I mean, Graham was always a good-looking guy. Bigger than me, stronger than me. He’d grown a little rounder over the years we’d been living high on the hog but it looked good on him. And Eddie and Pete were gangly guys but they dressed well. And Warren had that mean ‘stache that was cool back then. Karen was gorgeous in an understated way. And then there was Daisy.