Daisy Jones & The Six(75)

Billy: At some point, we got to talking about the album.

Daisy: I asked him something that had been plaguing me for the past couple months. “Are you worried we’ll never be able to write another album as good as this?”

Billy: I said, “I worry about it every fucking day.”

Daisy: All my life I’d wanted people to recognize my talent as a songwriter and Aurora had brought it, the recognition. And I’d immediately started to feel like an impostor.

Billy: The higher that album went, the more nervous I felt thinking about how to make another one. I’d be scribbling down songs in my notebook on the bus and I’d just end up crossing it all out and throwing it away because it wasn’t … I couldn’t tell if it was any good anymore. I didn’t know if I was just exposing myself as a fraud.

Daisy: He was the only one that could understand that level of pressure.

Billy: When morning came, I brought up rehab again.

Daisy: The thought I kept hearing in my head was Go for a little while just for a break. You don’t have to stop forever. That was my plan. To go to rehab without planning to quit forever. It made perfect sense to me. I’ll tell you: If a friend lied to me the way I lie to myself, I’d say, “You’re a shitty friend.”

Billy: I picked up the phone to call information to get the number for the rehab center I went to. But when I picked up the receiver, there was no dial tone. And someone on the other end was saying, “Hello?”

I said, “Hello?”

It was the concierge. He said, “I have an Artie Snyder on the phone for you.”

I told him to put it through but I was thinking, Why is my sound engineer calling me at the ass crack of dawn? I said, “Artie, what on earth … ?”

Daisy: Teddy had a heart attack.

Warren: A lot of people live through heart attacks. So when I found out, I thought … I didn’t immediately realize that meant he was dead.

Billy: Gone.

Graham: Teddy Price isn’t the kind of guy you think is going to die of a heart attack. Well, I mean, he ate like shit and drank a lot and didn’t take great care of himself but … He just seemed too … powerful, maybe. Like if a heart attack came to town he was going to tell it to screw off and it would.

Billy: It just knocked the wind right out of me. And my first thought when I got off the phone, the very first thought in my head was Why did I throw the booze out the window?





Rod: I got them all home to L.A. for the funeral.

Warren: We’d all been devastated to lose Teddy. But, man, watching Yasmine, his girlfriend, break down in these awful tears at his grave … I just kept thinking that so little in life mattered. But how Yasmine felt about Teddy … that mattered.

Graham: Teddy was a lot of things to a lot of people. I’ll never forget being at the memorial and seeing Billy holding Yasmine’s hand, trying to make her feel all right. Because I knew he wasn’t all right.

Every man needs a man to look up to. For better or worse, I had Billy. Billy had Teddy. And Teddy was gone.

Billy: Things had sort of spun out of control for me. I could barely make sense of anything. I couldn’t process it. Teddy being gone. Teddy being … dead. I think I died inside, for a little while. I know that sounds kind of extreme. But that’s what it felt like. It felt like my heart sort of turned to stone. Or … you know how people get cryogenically frozen? Like, they just put themselves on ice in the hopes that they can come back one day? That’s what happened to my soul. On ice.

I couldn’t handle reality. Not sober. Not without a drink or a … I just checked out. I checked out of my life. I had no other way of coping but to die inside. Because if I tried to stay alive, to live during that period of time, it might actually have killed me.

Daisy: When Teddy died, that was it. I’d decided there was no sense in getting sober. I rationalized it. You know, If the universe wanted me to get clean, it wouldn’t have killed Teddy. You can justify anything. If you’re narcissistic enough to believe that the universe conspires for and against you—which we all are, deep down—then you can convince yourself you’re getting signs about anything and everything.

Warren: I’d spent about three weeks on my boat. Smoking cigars, getting drunk, barely changing my clothes. Lisa and I had been talking a bit, since the show on SNL. She came out to see me. She said, “You live on a boat?”

I said, “Yeah.”

She said, “You’re an adult. Get a real house.” She had a point.

Eddie: I’d thought the best thing for all of us was to get back out on the road. We lost a cousin of mine in a car accident about ten or eleven years before, and my dad had said, “Work through pain.” That’s been my way ever since. I thought it might make Pete stay in the band. But, if anything, it made him more ready to leave.

Billy: One time, Camila asked me to scrub the toilet and I went in there and I started scrubbing the bowl and I just kept scrubbing it. And then she came in and she said, “What are you doing?”

I said, “I’m cleaning the toilet.”

She said, “You’ve been cleaning the toilet for forty-five minutes.”

I said, “Oh.”

Camila: I said to him, “You need to get back on the road, Billy. We’ll all go with you. But you need to get back out there. Sitting at home thinking is killing you.”