Warren: I saw that and I just had to start laughing. Jonah Berg always thinks he’s one step ahead when he’s two steps behind.
Karen: If there was any chance that Billy and Daisy were going to put the pettiness behind them and work together, really work together, over the course of the tour, I think that magazine interview ended it. I don’t think there was much coming back from it.
Rod: Is there any headline that is going to make you want to see Daisy Jones & The Six perform live more than that?
Billy: I didn’t care if Daisy was mad at me. I didn’t care one bit.
Daisy: We both did things we shouldn’t have. When someone says your talent is wasted on you and he says it to a reporter knowing full well it’s going to make it into print, you aren’t really inclined to mend fences.
Billy: You can’t claim the high ground when you go around throwing other people and their families under the bus.
Rod: There’s no diamond record without that Rolling Stone article. That article was the first step in their music transcending the limits of music. It was the first step toward Aurora not only being an album, but an event. It was the last kick it needed to blast off.
Karen: “Turn It Off” debuted at number 8 on the Billboard charts.
Rod: Aurora came out June 13, 1978. And we didn’t hit with a splash. We hit with a cannonball.
Nick Harris （rock critic）： This was an album people had been waiting for. They wanted to know what would happen when you put Billy Dunne and Daisy Jones together for an entire album.
And then they drop Aurora.
Camila: The day the record hit the shelves, we took the girls down to Tower Records. We let Julia buy her own copy. I was a little wary of it, to be honest. It wasn’t exactly child-friendly. But it was her dad’s album. She was allowed to have her own copy of it. When we left the store, Billy said, “Who’s your favorite member of the band?”
And I said, “Oh, Billy …”
And Julia pipes up and goes, “Daisy Jones!”
Jim Blades （lead singer of Mi Vida）： I was playing the Cow Palace the day Aurora came out, I think. And I had a roadie go down to the record store and get it so I could listen to it. I remember sitting there, before we were about to go on, listening to “This Could Get Ugly,” smoking a cigarette thinking, Why didn’t I think to get her to join my band?
The writing was on the wall. They were gonna eclipse all of us.
With that cover, too. That cover was perfect California summer rock ’n’ roll.
Elaine Chang （biographer, author of Daisy Jones: Wild Flower）： If you were a teenager in the late seventies, that cover was everything.
The way Daisy Jones carried herself, the way she was in full control of her own sexuality, the way she showed her chest through her shirt but it felt like it was on her own terms … it was a seminal moment in the lives of so many teenage girls. Boys, too, I understand. But I’m much more interested in what it meant for girls.
When you’re talking about images in which a woman is naked, subtext is everything. And the subtext of that photo—the way her chest is neither aimed at Billy nor at the viewer, the way her stance is confident but not suggestive—the subtext isn’t that Daisy is trying to please you or the man she’s with. The subtext isn’t “My body is for you.” Which is what so many nude photos are, what so many images of naked women are used for. The subtext—for her body, in that image—it’s self-possession. The subtext is “I do what I want.”
That album cover is why I, as a young girl, fell in love with Daisy Jones. She just seemed so fearless.
Freddie Mendoza: It’s funny. When I shot the album cover, I thought it was just a gig. Now, all these years later, it’s all anybody asks about. That’s what happens when you do something legendary, right? Ah, well.
Greg McGuinness: Once “Turn It Off” came out, everybody in town was talking about that record.
Artie Snyder: The week it came out—the very week it came out—I got three job offers. People were buying that album, listening to it, loving it, and they wanted to know who mixed it.
Simone: Daisy just blew up. She went from being well known to being an absolute sensation. She was it.
Jonah Berg: Aurora was a perfect album. It was exactly what we all wanted it to be, but better than we anticipated. It was an exciting band putting out a confident, bold, listenable album from start to finish.
Nick Harris: Aurora was romantic and brooding and heartbreaking and volatile all at once. In the age of arena rock, Daisy Jones & The Six managed to create something that felt intimate even though it could still play to a stadium. They had the impenetrable drums and the searing solos—they had songs that felt relentless in the best way possible. But the album also felt up close and personal. Billy and Daisy felt like they were right next to you, singing just to each other.
And it was deeply layered. That was the biggest thing Aurora had going for it. It sounds like a good-time album when you first listen to it. It’s an album you can play at a party. It’s an album you get high to. It’s an album you can play as you’re speeding down the highway.
But then you listen to the lyrics and you realize this is an album you can cry to. And it’s an album you can get laid to.
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.