Daisy: Nicky and I flew to Rome for Christmas.
Eddie: Over the holiday, Pete asked Jenny to marry him and she said yes. I was real happy for him, you know? I gave him a big hug. He said, “I have to figure out when I’m going to tell everybody. I don’t know how they are gonna take it.”
I said, “What are you talking about? Nobody cares if you’re married.”
He said, “No, I’m leaving.”
I said, “Leaving?”
He said, “At the end of the tour, I’m quitting the band.”
We were at our parents’ house in the den. I said, “What are you talking about? Quitting the band?”
He said, “I told you I didn’t want to do this forever.”
I said, “You never said that.”
He said, “I’ve said that a thousand times to you. I told you this stuff doesn’t matter.”
I said, “You’re talking about giving all of this up for Jenny? Really?”
He said, “Not really for Jenny. For me. So I can get on with my life.”
I said, “What does that mean?”
He said, “I never wanted to be in a soft rock band. C’mon. You know that. I got on the train, I rode it for a little while. But my stop’s coming up.”
Daisy: Nicky and I got into a fight in the hotel room in Italy. He accused me of sleeping with Billy back in Kansas. I had no idea what he was even talking about. I didn’t even talk to Billy in Kansas. But he said he’d known for weeks and he was sick of watching me try to hide it. Things got intense, really quickly. I threw a few bottles at him. He smashed his hand through the window. I remember looking down and seeing gray tears falling down my face. They were stained with my mascara and eyeliner. I don’t remember exactly how it happened but one of my hoops got ripped out of my ear. Cut clear through. I was bleeding and crying and the room was trashed. And the next thing I know Nicky is holding me and we’re promising to never leave each other’s side and never fight like that again and I remember thinking, If this is what love is like, maybe I don’t want it.
Rod: We had booked Daisy’s flight to get in a full day early for the show in Seattle. I had her come in early because I was nervous she’d miss her flight and I needed to make sure we had a margin of error.
Daisy: The morning we were supposed to fly to Seattle, I woke up and Nicky was sitting over me. I realized I was soaking wet, sleeping in the base of the shower. I was groggy and confused but by that point I always woke up groggy and confused. I said, “What happened?”
He said, “I thought maybe you overdosed. On the Seconals or something. I couldn’t remember what else we took.” You know what happens when people overdose on Seconals? They die.
I said, “So you put me in the shower?”
He said, “I tried to wake you up. I didn’t know what else to do. You wouldn’t wake up. I was so scared.”
I looked at him and my heart just sank. Because, while I have no idea whether or not I overdosed or what exactly happened that night, I could tell he had been truly terrified.
And all he did was put me in the shower.
My husband believed I might die. And he didn’t so much as even call the concierge.
A switch flipped in me. It was like one of those breaker switches … Like on a circuit box. You know how they take a lot of pressure to flip? But then once they catch, they switch over with force? I switched over. I knew, right then and there, that I needed to get away from this person. That I had to take care of myself. Because if I didn’t …
He wasn’t gonna kill me but he would let me die.
I said, “Okay, thank you for watching me.” I said, “You must be tired. Why don’t you take a nap?” And then, when he was asleep, I packed all my things. I took both plane tickets and I went to the airport. When I got there, I found a pay phone. I called the hotel. I said, “I need to leave a message for Niccolo Argento in room 907.”
The lady said okay. Actually, she probably said, “Bene.”
I said, “Write, ‘Lola La Cava wants a divorce.’ ”
Warren: When we all got back after hiatus, that show in Seattle … Daisy seemed, I don’t know, lucid.
I said, “Where’s Niccolo?”
And Daisy said, “That period of my life is over.” That was it. End of discussion. I thought that was badass.
Simone: She called me and said she’d left Niccolo in Italy and I started clapping.
Karen: She started making sense when you were talking to her. She started showing up clearheaded to sound checks.
Daisy: I would not, unfortunately, use the word sober. But you know what? I showed up places on time. I did start doing that.
Billy: I don’t think I had realized just how much of her was gone until it was back.
Daisy: I had gotten back to being aware of myself onstage, those first months away from Nicky. Of being aware of my relationship with the audience. I started making a point to be in bed by a certain time and awake by a certain time. I had rules about when to do what drugs. Only coke at night, only six dexies at a time, or whatever number I’d come up with. Only champagne and brandy.
When I was onstage, I was singing with intention. Which I hadn’t done in a long time. I cared about the show. I cared about making it good. I cared about …
I cared about who I was singing with.
Rod: Daisy high is fun and carefree and a good time. If she’s having fun, you’re having fun. But if you want to rip people’s hearts out of their chests, bring Daisy back down to earth and have her sing her own songs. There’s nothing like it.
Daisy: I was drunk at the Grammys. But it barely mattered.
Billy: Before the award for Record of the Year was announced, sometime earlier in the night, Rod told me that Teddy didn’t want to speak. It’s sort of a producer’s award, but Teddy preferred to be the guy behind the guy, so Rod asked if I wanted to be the one to do it and I said, “It doesn’t matter. We aren’t gonna win.”
He said, “So it’s okay if I give it to Daisy?”
I said, “You’re giving her a big fat bowl of nothing but sure.”
Look, you can’t be right all the time.
Karen: When we won Record of the Year for “Turn It Off,” we were all standing up there, the six of us and Teddy. Pete wore a goddamn bolo tie. Hideous. I was so embarrassed for him. I thought, for certain, that Billy would be the one to give the acceptance speech. But Daisy went up to the mike instead. I thought, I hope she says something coherent. And then she did.
Billy: She said, “Thank you to everybody who listened to this song and understood this song and sang it along with us. We made it for you. For all of you out there hung up on somebody or something.”
Camila: “For everyone hung up on somebody or something.”
Daisy: I didn’t mean anything by it except to give a voice to people feeling desperate. I was feeling desperate about a lot of things. I was feeling desperate and also, somehow, more myself.
It’s funny. At first, I think you start getting high to dull your emotions, to escape from them. But after a while you realize that the drugs are what are making your life untenable, they are actually what are heightening every emotion you have. It’s making your heartbreak harder, your good times higher. So coming down really does start to feel like rediscovering sanity.