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.”
Rod: At some point, you have to get back on the bus.
Graham: You think that tragedy means that the world is over but you realize the world is never over. It’s just never over. Nothing will end it.
And I kept focusing on the fact that, with Karen and I, you know, life is just beginning.
Karen: I was very thankful to Rod that he got us back out on the road. That he didn’t let us capsize.
Billy: I did what Camila said. I got back out there. The first show, we were in Indianapolis. I flew out with the band. Camila and the girls were going to join me at the next stop.
Indianapolis was … it was tough. I showed up at the hotel, checked in, saw Graham, saw Karen, and then at sound check there was Daisy. She was wearing overalls. She looked strung out. You could see it. Her sunken eyes and her skinny arms. I had a hard time looking at her.
I’d failed her. She had asked me to help her get sober. And once Teddy died, I abandoned her.
Daisy: That first night back, I think we were in Ohio, I was so embarrassed to even let Billy see me. Because I had come to him and said that I wanted to get sober. And then I hadn’t done it. I’d fallen even further than before.
Karen: I told Graham I’d decided to have an abortion. And he said I was crazy. And I told him I wasn’t. And he asked me not to do it.
I said, “Are you going to quit this band to raise this baby?” And he didn’t respond. And that was it.
Graham: I thought we were still discussing it.
Karen: He knew. He knew what I was going to do. He just feels more comfortable pretending he didn’t. He has that luxury.
Billy: Camila and the girls came to join us in Dayton. I picked them up from the airport and as I was waiting for them, I could see a guy ordering a tequila on the rocks at the bar. I could hear the ice in the glass. I could see it sitting in the tequila. It was announced that their plane was stuck on the runway and I was sitting there, staring at the gate.
As I was telling myself that I wasn’t going to order a drink, I walked over to the bar and I sat down on a stool. The guy behind the counter said, “What can I get you?” And I stared at him. And he said it again. And then I hear, “Daddy!” and I looked and there was my family.
Camila said, “What’s going on?”
I stood up and I smiled at her and, in that moment, I had it under control. I said, “Nothing. I’m good.”
She gave me a glance and I said, “I promise.” And I picked up my girls in a big bear hug and I felt okay. I felt all right.
Camila: To be honest, that’s when I questioned my own faith. Finding him sitting at a bar. Flags went up.
I started to wonder if maybe Billy was capable of doing something that I would be incapable of forgiving.
Karen: Camila was with us from then on. For as long as that tour lasted. She’d fly back and forth, sometimes she had all the girls with her. But she almost always had Julia there. Julia was about five, by that point, I want to say.
Daisy: Every night was starting to feel like torture. It had been one thing to sing with Billy when I was with someone else, when I didn’t know how I felt, when I had lies I could hide behind. Denial is like an old blanket. I loved to get on under that thing and curl up and sleep. But, leaving Nicky, singing that song with Billy on live TV, telling him I wanted to get clean … I’d ripped the blanket off of myself. And there was no putting it back on. And it was killing me. The vulnerability, the rawness. It was killing me to get up there on that stage. To sing with him.
When we did “Young Stars,” I was praying Billy would look at me and acknowledge what we were saying to each other. And when we did “Please,” I was begging him to pay attention to me. I was having a hard time singing “Regret Me” with any real anger because I wasn’t angry, most of the time. Not anymore. I was sad. I was so goddamn sad.