Daisy Jones & The Six(67)

For every moment of your life, in 1978, Aurora could play in the background.

And from the moment it was released, it was a juggernaut.

Daisy: It’s an album about needing someone and having them love someone else.

Billy: It’s an album about the push and pull of stability and instability. It’s about the struggle that I live almost every day to not do something stupid. Is it about love? Yeah, of course it is. But that’s because it’s easy to disguise almost anything as a love song.

Jonah Berg: Billy and Daisy was our biggest-selling issue of the seventies.

Rod: Rolling Stone did a lot to get people to buy the record. But the real money was in how many people bought tickets to the show because of that article.

Nick Harris: You heard the album and you read about Billy and Daisy in Rolling Stone and you wanted to see it for yourself.

You had to see it for yourself.





Aurora


   World


   Tour




        1978–1979





With “Turn It Off” summitting the charts and spending four weeks in the top spot, and Aurora selling over 200,000 units every week, Daisy Jones & The Six was the act to see the summer of ’78. The Aurora Tour was selling out stadiums and booking holdover shows in major cities across the country.



Rod: It was time to get the show on the road. I mean that literally.

Karen: There was a weird feeling on the buses. And by buses I mean the blue bus and the white bus. They both said “Daisy Jones & The Six” across them, but one had Billy’s denim shirt in the background and the other was Daisy’s tank top. We had two buses because we had so many people. But also because Billy and Daisy never wanted to have to even look at each other.

Rod: The blue bus was Billy’s bus, unofficially. Billy and Graham and Karen and myself, some of the crew, were normally on there.

Warren: I took the white bus with Daisy and Niccolo and Eddie and Pete. Jenny was with Pete sometimes. The white bus was a much better time. Also, yeah, I’ll be on the bus with the tits painted on the window, thanks.

Billy: I had a full sober tour under my belt. I felt all right going back on the road.

Camila: I sent Billy out on tour like I did almost everything with him back then … with hope. That’s all I could do, was just hope.

Opal Cunningham (tour accountant): Every day that I went into the office, I knew three things. One, the band would spend more money than they had the day before. Two, no one would listen to my advice about how to curb spending. Three, anything of import—be it as big as baby grand pianos for the suites or as small as Sharpies for the autographs—you had to make sure Billy and Daisy both had the exact same thing. That rider was twice as long as it needed to be because one of them would get mad if the other had something they didn’t.

I’d call Rod and I’d say, “There is no way they need two Ping-Pong tables.”

Rod: I always said, “Just clear it. Runner will pay.” I should have just made a recording of myself saying that. But I understood. Opal’s job was to make sure we weren’t wasting money. And we were wasting a lot of money. But we had the biggest album in the country at that moment. We could ask for whatever we wanted and it was in Runner’s best interest to give it to us.

Eddie: First day out on the road, we stop at some gas station. Pete and I get out and go inside to get a soda or something. “Turn It Off” was playing on the radio. That wasn’t that uncommon. Something like that had happened to us a lot in the past few years. But Pete makes a joke. He says to the guy, “Can you change the station? I hate this song.” The guy changes the station and “Turn It Off” is on the next station, too. I said, “Hey, man, how about you just turn it off?” He thought that was funny.

Graham: It was the first time I saw how—what’s the word I’m looking for?—how invested, I guess, people got in the band. Billy and I went to get a burger at a rest stop when we were somewhere in the desert. Arizona or New Mexico or something and this couple comes up to us. They say to Billy, “Are you Billy Dunne?”

Billy says, “Yeah, I am.”

And they say, “We love your album.” And Billy’s handling it great, being really gracious. He always was. He was great with fans. He made it seem like every person who complimented him was the first person to do it. So Billy starts having a more one-on-one conversation with the guy and the woman pulls me aside and says, “I just have to know. Billy and Daisy? Are they together?”

And I pulled my head back and I said, “No.”

And she nodded like she understood what I was trying to say. Like she knew they were sleeping together but accepted that I couldn’t tell her that.

Warren: Real early on the tour, up in San Francisco, we check into this hotel the night before a show, and I walk right out of the white bus, Pete and Eddie coming out behind me. Graham and Karen come out of the blue bus. We walk right out onto the street and into the hotel, no problem.

Then Billy walks out of the blue bus and within, I don’t know, thirty seconds, you hear girls start screaming. And then Daisy walks out of the white bus and this sound that you think can’t get any louder, this shrieking sound that damn near burst my eardrums, it gets even louder somehow, even more shrill. I turn around and Rod and Niccolo are trying to push ’em all back so Billy and Daisy can get into the hotel.