And she looked at them and said, “Oh, yeah.” That was it. Just oh, yeah.
Karen: Daisy slowly became a person none of us felt much like dealing with. And for the most part, we really didn’t have to. She wasn’t particularly needy or anything. The only issues were when she let things get so out of control, it was everyone’s problem. Like when she almost burned down the Chelsea.
Daisy: Nicky fell asleep having a smoke and the pillow caught fire at the Omni Parker House in Boston. I woke up because of the heat next to my face. Singed my hair. I had to put out the flames with the extinguisher I found in the closet. Nicky was completely unfazed by the whole thing.
Simone: I called her when I heard about the fire. I called her in Boston, I called her in Portland. I kept calling. She didn’t return my calls.
Billy: I told Rod to get her help.
Rod: I offered to take her and Nicky to rehab and she said I was being silly.
Graham: She’d slur a word here or there, she took a fall down the stage steps at some point. I think maybe in Oklahoma. But Daisy knew how to make everything look like fun and games.
Daisy: We were in Atlanta. And Nicky and I had partied all night and somebody had mescaline. Nicky thought it was a great idea to do mescaline. Everybody else had gone to bed and so it was just Nicky and me, high on a lot of stuff at once. The mescaline had just kicked in.
We broke the lock on the door leading up to the roof at the hotel we were staying at. The fans that had staked outside the lobby of the hotel had all gone home. That’s how late it was. He and I stood there, looking at the empty space where earlier in the day they had all been standing. It seemed romantic, the two of us up there. Everything quiet. Nicky took my hand and led me to the very edge of the roof.
I made a joke, I said, “What are you up to? You want us to jump?”
And Nicky said, “Could be fun.”
I … Let me put it this way: When you find yourself high on the roof of a hotel with a husband who doesn’t outright say that the two of you shouldn’t jump off, you start to realize you have a lot of problems. That wasn’t my rock bottom. But it was the first time I looked around and thought, Oh, wow, I’m falling.
Opal Cunningham: A large part of the growing budget was accounting for what damages they would leave behind. It was always Daisy’s room that cost the most. We were paying hand over fist for broken lamps, broken mirrors, burnt linens. A lot of busted locks. Hotels expect a certain amount of wear and tear, especially when a band is coming through. But this was enough that they were demanding more than just keeping the security deposit.
Warren: I think it was around the southern leg of the tour that you could tell Daisy was … I don’t know. Losing it. She was forgetting some of the words to the songs.
Rod: Before the show in Memphis, everyone’s getting ready to go out onstage and no one could find Daisy. I was searching all over for her. Asking everyone about her. I finally found her in one of the bathrooms in the lobby. She’d passed out in one of the stalls. Her butt was on the floor, one of her arms over her head. For a second—a split second—I thought she was dead. I shook her and she woke up.
I said, “You’re supposed to go onstage.”
She said, “Okay.”
I said, “You need to get sober.”
And she said, “Oh, Rod.” And she stood up, walked to the mirror, checked her makeup, and then walked backstage to meet the rest of the band like everything was right as rain. And I thought, I don’t want to be in charge of this woman anymore.
Eddie: New Orleans. Fall of ’seventy-eight. Pete finds me at sound check and says, “Jenny wants to get married.”
I say, “All right, so marry her.”
Pete says, “Yeah, I think I will.”
Daisy: If you’re fucked up all the time, you piece things together slower than you should. But I started to realize that Nicky never paid for anything, that he didn’t have any of his own money. And he kept buying us more blow. I’d say, “I’m good. I’ve had enough.” But he always wanted more. Wanted me to have more.
We were on the bus one morning, maybe December or so. We were laying down in the back, while everyone else was up front. I think we were stopped somewhere around Kansas because when I looked out the window all I saw were plains. No hills, not much civilization, even. I woke up and Nicky was there with a toot, right there. I just had this fleeting thought, What if I didn’t? So I said, “No, thanks.”
And Nicky laughed and said, “No, c’mon.” And he put it right in my face and I snorted it.
And as I turned my head, to look down the aisle, I saw that Billy had stepped onto the bus for some reason, was talking to Warren or something. But … he saw the whole thing. And I caught his eye for a moment and I just got so sad.
Billy: I made it a point to stay off the white bus. Nothing good for me happened on the white bus.
Graham: We all went home for Christmas and New Year’s.
Billy: I was so happy to go home to my girls.
Camila: There was so much more to my life, so much more to my marriage, than the fact that my husband was in a band. I’m not saying that The Six wasn’t a major factor, of course it was. But we were a family. Billy was expected to leave his work at the door when he came home. And he did that.
When I think back to the late seventies, I do think a lot about the band and the songs and … everything that we were going through with that. But I mostly think about Julia learning to swim. And Susana’s first word sounding like “Mimia,” and how we couldn’t tell if she meant “Mama” or “Julia” or “Maria.” Or Maria always trying to pull Billy’s hair. And how he used to play a game with the girls called Who Gets the Last Pancake? As he was making pancakes, and the girls were eating them, he’d suddenly yell, “Who gets the last pancake?” And whichever girl put her hand up first got to eat it. But somehow, no matter what happened, he’d make them split the pancake.
That’s the kind of thing I remember more than anything.
Billy: Camila and I had just closed on our new house in Malibu, in the hills. Bigger than any house I ever thought I’d live in. With this long driveway and trees shading every part except the deck. The deck was totally unobstructed. You could see all the way out to the ocean. Camila used to call it “the house ‘Honeycomb’ built.”
The two weeks that I was home for the holidays, we spent most of it moving in and getting settled. The first night we brought the girls, I said to Julia, “Which room do you want?” She was the oldest, so she got first pick. Her eyes went wide and she went off running down the hall, looking at each one. And then, she sat down on the floor in the middle of the hallway and she deliberated. And then she said, “I want the one in the middle.”
I said, “Are you sure?”
She said, “I’m sure.” She was just like her mom. Once she knew what she wanted, she knew.
Rod: That Christmas was the first time in a long time—a long, long time—that I didn’t have to do any work. That I could just enjoy myself. That I didn’t have to save some rock star from some crisis or make sure their rider was fulfilled or whatever I was doing.
I rented a cabin with this guy Chris. He and I moved in the same circles and I’d been seeing him whenever I was in town. We spent the holidays together in Big Bear. We made dinners together and went in the hot tub and played cards. For Christmas, I gave him a sweater and he gave me a day planner. And I thought, I want to be normal.