Daisy Jones & The Six (Page 42)

GRAHAM: When we got to Vegas, I finally said, “C’mon, you have to talk to me.”

KAREN: I just blurted it out. Told him. I said, “I’m pregnant.”

GRAHAM: I didn’t know what to say.

KAREN: He didn’t talk for a long time. Just paced around the room. I said, “I don’t want to do this. Go through with it.”

GRAHAM: I figured she was just wrestling with it a bit. I said to her, “Let’s just give this some time. We still have time, right?”

KAREN: I told him I wasn’t going to change my mind.

GRAHAM: I said the wrong thing. I knew it was the wrong thing. I said, “We can get a different keyboardist, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

KAREN: I don’t really blame Graham, honestly. He was just thinking like most people. I said, “Do you understand how hard I worked to get here? I’m not giving this up.”

GRAHAM: I didn’t want to say it but I thought it seemed selfish. Choosing anything over our baby.

KAREN: He kept calling it “our baby.” Our baby our baby our baby.

GRAHAM: I told her that she should just take some time. That’s all I said.

KAREN: It was our baby but it was my responsibility.

GRAHAM: People change their minds about this stuff all the time. You think you don’t want something and then you realize you do.

KAREN: He said that I didn’t know what I was saying and that if I didn’t go forward with the pregnancy I’d regret it for the rest of my life. He just didn’t understand.

I wasn’t scared of regretting not having a child. But I was scared of regretting having a child.

I was scared of bringing an unwanted life into this world. I was scared of living my life, feeling like I’d anchored myself to the wrong dock. I was scared of being pushed to do something I knew I did not want. Graham didn’t want to hear it.

GRAHAM: Things got heated and I stormed out. We had to have the conversation when we felt calm. You can’t scream about something like that.

KAREN: My mind wasn’t going to change. I’ve been judged for it every time I’ve said it but I’ll keep saying it: I never wanted to be a mother. I never wanted children.

GRAHAM: I just kept thinking, She’ll change her mind. I thought, We will get married and have a baby and figure it all out. She was going to realize how much she wanted to be a mother, how much family meant to her.

DAISY: After the Grammys, Billy and I started talking again. Well, sort of. We had just won for a song we wrote together, a song we sung together, and that resonated with me.

BILLY: She leveled out. She loosened up. With Niccolo gone, it was…easier to have a conversation with her.

DAISY: We were on an overnight flight to New York to do Saturday Night Live. Rich had given us the Runner jet. I think almost everybody had fallen asleep. Billy was on the other side of the plane from me. But our chairs were sort of facing each other. I had on a tiny dress and I was cold and I took a blanket and wrapped it around myself and I saw Billy see me. And he laughed.

BILLY: Some people will never stop being themselves. And you think it drives you crazy but it is the very thing you will think about when they are gone. When you don’t have them in your life anymore.

DAISY: I looked at him and I laughed, too. And it was, for a moment, at least, like we could be friends again.

ROD: By the time they did Saturday Night Live, “Young Stars” had become a hit, too. It was number 7 on the charts, I think. Somewhere in the Top Ten. We were selling so many albums they couldn’t print them fast enough. Runner had teed up “This Could Get Ugly” as the next hit.

DAISY: For SNL, the decision was that we would do “Turn It Off” as the first song, and then we would do “This Could Get Ugly” for the second.

KAREN: I bet Warren that Daisy wouldn’t be wearing a bra and I won two hundred bucks.

WARREN: We’re all deciding what we were gonna wear and I bet Karen fifty bucks that Billy wore a denim shirt and Daisy didn’t wear a bra. I won fifty bucks.

KAREN: During dress, Daisy and Billy were actually speaking to each other. You could tell there had been a shift, somewhere.

GRAHAM: We did the dress rehearsal for “Turn It Off” and it went really well. So did “This Could Get Ugly.”

BILLY: When the show started, I planned on doing it just like we’d rehearsed.

DAISY: Lisa Crowne announced us, you know, “Ladies and gentlemen, Daisy Jones & The Six,” and the crowd went crazy. I’d been in huge stadiums with crowds cheering but it felt different. This small group of people just in front of us, making that much noise. It was this jolt of energy.

NICK HARRIS: By the time Daisy Jones & The Six performed “Turn It Off” on Saturday Night Live, they were performing a song almost everyone in the country knew. It was the Record of the Year.

Daisy was wearing faded black jeans and a satin pink tank top. Of course, she’s got the bracelets on. She’s barefoot. Her hair is this brilliant red. She was dancing around the stage, singing her heart out, and tapping the tambourine. She looked like she was having a great time. And Billy Dunne is in his classic denim and denim. He’s up close on the mike, watching her, having a great time himself. They looked like they belonged up there together.

The band is hitting every beat with a crispness and a freshness that you don’t expect when a song has been played as many times as you know they’ve played this song.

And Warren Rhodes is a showstopper for anybody interested in learning what it means to hold an entire band together with the drums. He was electric behind those things. If you could take your eye off Daisy and Billy long enough, it would go right to him slamming down on the floor toms.

And then as the song progresses, and the lyrics get a bit more pointed, Billy and Daisy both seem transfixed with one another. They move to the same mike and they sing facing one another. This emotive, hot-blooded song about wishing you could get over someone…they seem like they are singing to each other.

BILLY: There was so much going on during that performance. I had to be aware of my timing and the words and where I was looking and where the camera was. And then…I don’t know…Suddenly Daisy was there next to me and I forgot about everything but just looking at her and singing this song that we wrote together.

DAISY: The song ended, and I sort of snapped out of it, and Billy and I looked at the audience and then he took my hand and we bowed. That was the first time my body had so much as grazed his in a very long time. It was the sort of thing where, even after he let go, my hand still hummed.

GRAHAM: Daisy and Billy had something no one else had. And when they played it up, when they actually engaged with each other…It’s what made us. That was one of those moments where you think their talent is absolutely worth all the bullshit.

WARREN: Between songs, Billy told me he had an idea for “A Hope Like You.” I liked the idea. I told him as long as everybody else was okay with it, then I was, too.

EDDIE: “This Could Get Ugly” went great at dress. And at the last minute, Billy wants to do “A Hope Like You.” A slow ballad. And he wants to play the keys instead of Karen. So it’s just him and Daisy onstage.

BILLY: I wanted to really surprise everyone. I wanted to do something unexpected. I thought it could be…something to really remember.

DAISY: I thought it sounded really, really cool.

GRAHAM: It all happened so fast. One minute we’re all supposed to go out there to play “This Could Get Ugly” and the next, Billy and Daisy are going out there alone to play a different song.

KAREN: I’m the keyboard player. If someone is out there with Daisy, it seemed like it should have been me. But I understand what he was selling when he went out there. I got it. Doesn’t mean I liked it.

ROD: It was a brilliant move. The two of them out there alone. It made for great TV.

WARREN: They were facing each other, Billy at the piano, Daisy standing opposite him with the mike. The rest of us watched from the sidelines.

DAISY: Billy started playing and I caught his eye, for just a moment, before I started singing. And…[pauses] It just seemed so obvious, so painfully embarrassingly obvious. Without Nicky there to distract me, without keeping myself so drugged up I wasn’t even mentally present, it just seemed so obvious that I loved him.

That I was in love with him.

And getting high and going to Thailand and marrying a prince wasn’t going to make me stop. And him being married to somebody else…That wasn’t going to stop it either. I think I finally resigned myself to it in that moment. Just how sad it all was.

And then I started singing.

KAREN: You know when you can hear that there is a lump in somebody’s throat? That’s what she sounded like. And it…it killed everybody in the room. Her looking at him like that. Singing to him like that. Singing, “It doesn’t matter how hard I try/can’t earn some things no matter why.” I mean, c’mon.

BILLY: I loved my wife. I was faithful to my wife from the very minute I straightened up. I tried desperately to never feel anything else for any other woman. But…[breathes deeply] Everything that made Daisy burn, made me burn. Everything I loved about the world, Daisy loved about the world. Everything I struggled with, Daisy struggled with. We were two halves. We were the same. In that way that you’re only the same with a few other people. In that way that you don’t even feel like you have to say your own thoughts because you know the other person is already thinking them. How could I be around Daisy Jones and not be mesmerized by her? Not fall in love with her?