GRAHAM: When Camila started coming out with us, I’ll admit I didn’t think she’d last much longer than the others. But I should have known she was different. I mean, first time I met her, she came to a gig of ours wearing a Tommy James shirt. She knew good music.
WARREN: The rest of us were really starting to get laid, man. And Billy was taking himself off the market. We’d all be with chicks and he’d be sitting there, smoking a joint, having a beer to keep himself busy.
I came out of a girl’s room one time, zipping my pants up, and Billy was sitting on the sofa, watching Dick Cavett. I said, “Man, you gotta ditch that girlfriend.” I mean, we all liked Camila, she was foxy and she’d tell you your business right to your face, which I liked. But c’mon.
BILLY: I’d been infatuated before, called it love. But when I met [Camila], it was something different altogether. She just…made the world make sense to me. She even made me like myself more.
She’d come watch us practice and listen to my new stuff and give me really good notes on it all. And there was a calmness to her that…nobody else had. It felt like when I was with her, I knew everything would be fine. It was like I was following the North Star.
You know, Camila was born content, I think. She wasn’t born with whatever chip on her shoulder some of us are born with. I used to say I was born broken. She was born whole. That’s where the lyrics to “Born Broken” came from.
CAMILA: When Billy met my parents for the first time, I was a little nervous. You only get one chance to make a first impression, especially with them. I picked out his outfit, down to his socks. Made him wear the only tie he had.
They loved him. Said he was charming. But my mom was also worried about me putting my trust in some guy in a band.
BILLY: Pete was the only one who seemed to understand why I’d have a girlfriend. Chuck, one time, as we were packing up for a show, said, “Just tell her you aren’t a one-woman guy. Girls get that.” [Laughs] That was not gonna work on Camila.
WARREN: Chuck was real cool. He would cut right to the heart of something. He sort of looked like he’d never had an interesting thought in his life. But he could surprise you. He turned me on to Status Quo. I still listen to them.
—
On December 1, 1969, the U.S. Selective Service System conducted a lottery to determine the draft order for 1970. Billy and Graham Dunne, both born in December, had unusually high numbers. Warren just missed the cutoff. Pete Loving fell in the middle. But Chuck Williams, born April 24, 1949, was assigned lottery number 2.
GRAHAM: Chuck got called for the draft. I remember sitting at Chuck’s kitchen table, him saying he was going to Vietnam. Billy and I kept thinking of ways he could get out of it. He said he wasn’t a coward. Last time I saw him, we played a bar by Duquesne. I said, “You’ll just come on back to the band when you’re done.”
WARREN: Billy played Chuck’s parts for a while but we’d heard Eddie Loving [Pete’s younger brother] had gotten pretty good at the guitar. We invited him to come audition.
BILLY: Nobody could be Chuck. But then we kept getting more shows and I didn’t want to keep playing rhythm guitar onstage. So we invited Eddie. Figured he could pitch in for a little while.
EDDIE LOVING (rhythm guitar, The Six): I got along well with everybody but I could tell Billy and Graham just wanted me to fit into the mold they had set for me, you know? Play this, do that.
GRAHAM: Few months in, we heard from one of Chuck’s old neighbors.
BILLY: Chuck died in Cambodia. He wasn’t even there six months, I don’t think.
You do sometimes sit and wonder why it wasn’t you, what makes you so special that you get to be safe. The world doesn’t make much sense.
—
At the end of 1970, the Dunne Brothers played a show at the Pint in Baltimore where Rick Marks, lead singer for the Winters, was in attendance. Impressed with their raw sound and taking a liking to Billy, he offered them an opening spot on a few shows on their northeastern tour.
The Dunne Brothers joined the Winters and quickly became influenced by the Winters’ sound and intrigued with their keyboardist, Karen Karen.
KAREN KAREN (keyboardist, The Six): The first time I met the Dunne Brothers, Graham asked me, “What’s your name?”
I said, “Karen.”
And he said, “What’s your last name?”
But I thought he said, “What’s your name?” again, like he didn’t hear me.
So I said, “Karen.”
And he laughed and said, “Karen Karen?”
Everybody called me Karen Karen from then on. My last name is Sirko, for the record. But Karen Karen just stuck.
BILLY: Karen added this extra layer, a lushness, to what the Winters were doing. I started thinking maybe we needed something like that.
GRAHAM: Billy and I were starting to think…maybe we don’t need somebody like Karen. Maybe we need Karen.
KAREN: I left the Winters because I was sick of everyone in the band trying to sleep with me. I wanted to just be a musician.
And I liked Camila. She’d hang out after the shows sometimes, when she came up to visit Billy. I dug that Billy had her around sometimes or was always on the phone with her. It was a better vibe all around.
CAMILA: When they went on tour with the Winters, I’d drive up to any weekend shows they had, and hang out backstage. I’d have spent four hours in the car and I’d get to the venue—usually these places were pretty sketchy with gum all over everything and your shoes sticking to the floor—I’d give my name at the door and they’d show me through to the back and, there I was, a part of it all.
I’d walk in and Graham and Eddie and everybody would yell, “Camila!” And Billy would walk over and put his arm around me. Once Karen started hanging out, too…it just cinched it for me. I felt like, This is where I belong.
GRAHAM: Karen Karen was a great addition to the band. Made everything better. And she was beautiful, too. I mean, in addition to being talented. I always thought she looked a little like Ali MacGraw.
KAREN: When I said that I dug the fact that the boys in the Dunne Brothers weren’t trying to get with me, that doesn’t go for Graham Dunne. But I knew he liked me for my talent just as much as my looks. So it didn’t faze me much. It was sweet, actually. Plus, Graham was a sexy guy. Especially in the seventies.
I never got the whole “Billy is the sex symbol” idea. I mean, he had the dark hair, dark eyes, high cheekbones thing. But I like my men a little less pretty. I like it when they look a little dangerous but are actually very gentle. That’s Graham. Broad shoulders, hairy chest, dusty brown hair. He was handsome but he was still a little rough around the edges.
I will admit that Billy knew how to wear a pair of jeans though.
BILLY: Karen was just a great musician. That was all there was to it. I always say I don’t care if you’re a man, woman, white, black, gay, straight, or anything in between—if you play well, you play well. Music is a great equalizer in that way.
KAREN: Men often think they deserve a sticker for treating women like people.
WARREN: That was around the time Billy’s drinking seemed like it was getting a little over the edge. He’d party like the rest of us but when we all went off with the chicks we met, he’d stay up drinking.
But he always seemed fine in the morning, and we were all kind of going crazy out there. Except for maybe Pete. He’d met this girl Jenny in Boston and was always on the phone with her.
GRAHAM: Anything Billy does, he goes hard. He loves hard, he drinks hard. Even the way he spends money, like it’s burning a hole in his pocket. It was part of the reason why, with Camila, I was telling him to take it slow.
BILLY: Camila came out with us sometimes, but a lot of the time she waited at home. She was still living with her parents and I would call her every night from the road.
CAMILA: When he didn’t have a dime to make a call, he’d call collect and when I answered he’d say, “Billy Dunne loves Camila Martinez,” and then hang up before the charge kicked in. [Laughs] My mom always rolled her eyes but I thought it was sweet.
KAREN: A few weeks after I joined the band, I said, “We need a new name.” The Dunne Brothers didn’t make sense anymore.
EDDIE: I’d been saying we needed a new name.
BILLY: We had a following with that name. I didn’t want to change it.
WARREN: We couldn’t decide what to call ourselves. I think somebody suggested the Dipsticks. I wanted us to go by Shaggin’.
EDDIE: Pete said, “You’re never going to get six people to agree on this.”
And I said, “What about The Six?”
KAREN: I got a call from a booker in Philly, where I’m from. And he said that the Winters had pulled out of a festival there, asked if we wanted to play. I said, “Right on, but we aren’t called the Dunne Brothers anymore.”
He said, “Well, what do I put on the flyer?”
I said, “Not sure yet but I’ll get the six of us there.”
And I liked how it sounded, “The Six.”
WARREN: Part of the brilliance of the name was how close it was to “the Sex.” But I don’t think any of us ever talked about that. It was so obvious there was no need to put a finer point on it.
KAREN: I was not thinking about it sounding like anything.
BILLY: “The Sex”? No, that wasn’t a part of it.
GRAHAM: It sounded like sex. That was a big part of it.
BILLY: We played that show in Philly as The Six and then we got an offer to do another show in town. Another in Harrisburg. Another in Allentown. We got asked to play New Year’s Eve at this bar in Hartford.
We weren’t making much money. But I’d spend my last dollar taking Camila out whenever I was home. We’d go to this pizza joint a few blocks from her parents’ place or I’d borrow money from Graham or Warren to take her out somewhere nice. She always told me to cut it out. She’d say, “If I wanted to be with a rich guy, I wouldn’t have given my number to the singer of a wedding band.”
CAMILA: Billy had charisma and I fell for all that. I always did. The smoldering, the brooding. A lot of my girlfriends were looking for guys that could afford a nice ring. But I wanted somebody fascinating.
GRAHAM: Around ’seventy-one, we booked a few shows in New York.
EDDIE: New York was…it was how you knew you were somebody.
GRAHAM: One night, we’re playing a bar over in the Bowery and out on the street, smoking a cigarette, is a guy named Rod Reyes.
ROD REYES (manager, The Six): Billy Dunne was a rock star. You could just see it. He was very cocksure, knew who to play to in the crowd. There was an emotion that he brought to his stuff.
There’s just a quality that some people have. If you took nine guys, plus Mick Jagger, and you put them in a lineup, someone who had never heard of the Rolling Stones before could still point to Jagger and say, “That’s the rock star.”
Billy had that. And the band had a good sound.
BILLY: When Rod came up to us after that show at the Wreckage…that was the watershed moment.
ROD: When I started working with the band, I had some ideas. Some of which were well received and others…not so much.
GRAHAM: Rod told me I needed to cut out half of my solos. Said they were interesting for people that loved technical guitar work but boring for everyone else.
I said, “Why would I play to people who don’t care about good guitar?”
He said, “If you want to be huge, you gotta be for everybody.”
BILLY: Rod told me to stop writing about stuff I didn’t know about. He said, “Don’t reinvent the wheel. Write about your girl.” Hands down, best career advice I ever got.
KAREN: Rod told me to wear low-cut shirts and I said, “Dream on,” and that was about the end of that.
EDDIE: Rod started getting us gigs all over the East Coast. Florida to Canada.
WARREN: Let me tell you the sweet spot for being in rock ’n’ roll. People think it’s when you’re at the top but no. That’s when you’ve got the pressure and the expectations. What’s good is when everybody thinks you’re headed somewhere fast, when you’re all potential. Potential is pure fuckin’ joy.
GRAHAM: The longer we were out on the road, the wilder we all got. And Billy wasn’t exactly…Look, Billy liked attention. Especially from women. But, at least at that point, that’s all it was. Just attention.
BILLY: It was a lot to balance. Loving somebody back home, being out on the road. Girls were coming backstage and I was the one they wanted to meet. I was…I didn’t know what a relationship was supposed to look like.
CAMILA: We’d started to get into fights, Billy and I. I will admit I wanted something impractical, back then. I wanted to date a rock star but I wanted him available at all times. I’d get mad when he couldn’t do exactly what I wanted. I was young. So was he.
Sometimes it would get so bad that we’d stop talking for a few days. And then one of us would call the other and apologize and things would go back the way they were. I loved him and I knew he loved me. It wasn’t easy. But as my mother used to remind me, “You’ve never been interested in easy.”
GRAHAM: This one night, Billy and I were back home and getting in the van to head out to Tennessee or Kentucky or somewhere. Camila came to see us off. And when Rod pulled up in the van, Billy was saying goodbye.
He moved the hair out of Camila’s face and put his lips on her forehead. I remember that he didn’t even really kiss her. He just held his lips there. And I thought, I’ve never cared about anyone like that.
BILLY: I wrote “Señora” for Camila and, let me tell you, people liked that song a lot. Pretty soon, at our best shows, people were getting up out of their seats, starting to dance, singing along.
CAMILA: I didn’t have the heart to tell him that I was technically a “señorita.” I mean, choose your battles. Besides, once I listened to it…“Let me carry you/on my back/the road looks long/and the night looks black/but the two of us are bold explorers/me and my gold señora.”
I loved it. I loved that song.
BILLY: We cut a demo of “Señora” and “When the Sun Shines on You.”
ROD: My real contacts were all out in L.A. by then. I said to the band, I think it was maybe ’seventy-two…I said, “We gotta go out west.”
EDDIE: California was where the cool shit was happening, you know what I mean?
BILLY: I just thought, There’s something inside me that needs to do this.
WARREN: I was ready to go. I said, “Let’s get in the van.”
BILLY: I went to Camila’s parents’ house and I sat her down on the edge of her bed. I said, “Do you want to come with us?”
She said, “What would I do?”
I said, “I don’t know.”
She said, “You want me to just follow you around?”
I said, “I guess.”
She took a moment and then she said, “No, thank you.”
I asked her if we could stay together and she said, “Are you coming back?” And I told her I didn’t know.
And she said, “Then, no.” And she dumped me.
CAMILA: I got mad. That he was leaving. And I blew up at him. I didn’t know how else to handle it.
KAREN: Camila called me, before we left on tour. Told me she’d broken up with Billy. I said, “I thought you loved him.”
And she said, “He didn’t even try to fight me on it!”
I said to her, “If you love him, you should tell him.”
And she said, “He’s the one leaving! It’s on him to fix this.”
CAMILA: Love and pride don’t mix.
BILLY: What could I do? She didn’t want to come with me and I…I couldn’t stay.
GRAHAM: We packed up and said goodbye to Mom. She’d married the mailman by then. I mean, I know his name was Dave but until the day he died, I called him the mailman because that’s what he was. He delivered the mail at her office. He was the mailman.
Anyway, we left Mom with the mailman and got in the van.
KAREN: We gigged everywhere along the way from Pennsylvania to California.
BILLY: Camila made her choice and there was a big part of me that felt like, All right, I’ll be single then. See if she likes that.
GRAHAM: Billy straight up lost his mind on that trip.
ROD: It wasn’t the women I was worried about, with Billy. Although there were a lot of women. But Billy would get so messed up after shows that I’d have to wake him up the next afternoon by slapping him across the face, he was that far gone.
CAMILA: I was sick to my stomach without him. I was…kicking myself. Every day. Waking up in tears. My mom kept telling me to track him down. To take it back. But it felt like it was too late. He’d gone on without me. To make his dreams come true. As he should have.
WARREN: When we got to L.A., Rod hooked us up with a few rooms at the Hyatt House.
GREG MCGUINNESS (former concierge, the Continental Hyatt House): Ah, man, I’d love to tell you that I remember The Six coming in and staying with us. But I don’t. There was so much going on, so many bands back then. It was hard to keep track, I remember meeting Billy Dunne and Warren Rhodes later, but back then, no.
WARREN: Rod called in his favors. We started playing bigger gigs.
EDDIE: L.A. was a trip. Everywhere you looked, you were surrounded by people who loved playing music, who liked to party. I thought, Why the hell didn’t we come here sooner? The girls were gorgeous. The drugs were cheap.
BILLY: We played a few shows around Hollywood. At the Whisky, the Roxy, P.J.’s. I had just written a new song called “Farther from You.” It was all about how much I missed Camila, how far I felt from her.
When we hit the Strip, that felt like we were really coming into our own.
GRAHAM: All of us started to dress a bit better. You really had to step up your game in L.A. I started wearing my shirts unbuttoned halfway down my chest. I thought I was sexy as hell.
BILLY: That was about when I got really into…what is it that people call it now? A Canadian tuxedo? I was wearing a denim shirt with my jeans, pretty much every day.
KAREN: I felt like I couldn’t focus on playing if I dressed in miniskirts and boots and all that. I mean, I liked that look, but I wore high-waisted jeans and turtlenecks most of the time.
GRAHAM: Karen was so fucking sexy in those turtlenecks.
ROD: Once they were starting to get some good attention, I set up a show for them at the Troubadour.
GRAHAM: “Farther from You” was a great song. And you could tell Billy felt it. Billy couldn’t fake anything. When he was in pain or when he was joyful, you could feel it.
That show at the Troubadour that night, as we were playing, I looked over at Karen and she was in it, you know? And then I looked at Billy, and he’s singing his heart out and I thought, This is our best show yet.
ROD: I saw Teddy Price standing in the back, listening. I hadn’t met him before but I knew he was a producer with Runner Records. We had a few friends in common. After the show, he came up and found me, said, “My assistant heard you guys at P.J.’s. I told him I would come listen.”
BILLY: We get offstage and Rod comes up to me with this real tall, fat guy in a suit and he says, “Billy, I want you to meet Teddy Price.”
First thing Teddy says is—and you have to remember he had this real thick upper-crust British accent—“You’ve got a hell of a talent for writing about that girl.”
KAREN: Watching Billy, it felt a little bit like watching a dog find a master. He wanted to please him, wanted the record deal. You could feel it dripping off him.
WARREN: Teddy Price was ugly as sin. A face only a mother could love. [Laughs] I’m just messing around. He was ugly, though. I liked that he didn’t seem to care.
KAREN: That’s the glory of being a man. An ugly face isn’t the end of you.
BILLY: I shook Teddy’s hand and he asked me if I had any more songs like the ones he’d heard. I said, “Yes, sir.”
He said, “Where do you see this band in five years? Ten years?”
And I said, “We’ll be the biggest band in the world.”
WARREN: I signed my first pair of tits that night. This girl comes up to me and unbuttons her shirt and says, “Sign me.” So I signed her. Let me tell you, that’s a memory you have for a lifetime.
—
The following week, Teddy visited the band at a rehearsal space in the San Fernando Valley and listened to the seven songs they had prepared. Shortly after, they were invited to the Runner Records offices, introduced to CEO Rich Palentino, and offered a recording and publishing deal. Teddy Price, personally, would be producing their album.
GRAHAM: We signed the deal around four in the afternoon and I remember walking out onto Sunset Boulevard, the six of us, the sun hitting us right in the eyes and just feeling like Los Angeles had opened its arms and said, “Come on in, baby.”
I saw a T-shirt a few years ago that said, “I Got My Shades on Cuz My Future’s So Bright,” and I thought the little shit that was wearing it doesn’t know what he’s talking about. He never stood on Sunset Boulevard, sun blinding his eyes, with his five best friends and a record contract in his back pocket.
BILLY: That night, everybody was out partying over at the Rainbow and I walked away, walked down the street to a pay phone. Imagine achieving your wildest dream and feeling empty inside. It didn’t mean anything unless I could share it with Camila. So I called her.
My heart was beating so fast as the phone rang. I put my fingers to my pulse and it was throbbing. But when Camila answered, it was like laying down in bed after a long day. I felt so much better, just hearing her voice. I said, “I miss you. I don’t think I can live without you.”
She said, “I miss you, too.”
I said, “What are we doing this for? We’re supposed to be together.”
And she said, “Yeah, I know.”
We were both quiet on the line and I said, “If I had a record contract, would you marry me?”
She said, “What?”
CAMILA: I was just so excited for him if it was true. He’d worked so hard for it.
BILLY: I said it again. “If I had a record contract, would you marry me?”
She said, “You got a record contract?”
That’s when I knew, right then. That Camila was my soul mate. She cared more about the record contract than anything else. I said, “You didn’t answer my question.”
She said, “Did you get a record contract, yes or no?”
I said, “Will you marry me, yes or no?”
She didn’t say anything for a while, and then she said, “Yes.”
And then I said, “Yes.”
She started screaming, so excited. I said, “Come on out here, honey. Let’s get hitched.”
Determined to make a name for herself outside of the Sunset Strip, Daisy Jones started writing her own songs. Armed only with a pen and paper—and no musical training whatsoever—Daisy created a songbook that soon grew to include rough sketches of over a hundred songs.
One night during the summer of ’72, Daisy attended a Mi Vida show at the Ash Grove. She was dating Mi Vida front man Jim Blades at the time. Toward the end of the set, Jim invited Daisy onto the stage to do a cover of “Son of a Preacher Man” with the band.
SIMONE: Daisy had grown her hair out really long by then, gotten rid of her bangs. She always wore hoop earrings and she never wore shoes. She was just very cool.
That night at the Ash Grove, she and I were sitting in the back and Jim tried to get her to go up there and she kept saying no. But he kept at it most of the night and eventually, Daisy got on that stage.
DAISY: It was a surreal feeling. All of those people looking at me, expecting something to happen.
SIMONE: When she started singing with Jim, she was kind of timid about it, which surprised me. But I could feel her getting more and more into it as the song went on. And then somewhere around the second chorus she just let it rip. She was smiling. She was happy up there. And people couldn’t take their eyes off of her. By the time they got toward the end, Jim had stopped singing and just let her go. She brought the house down.
JIM BLADES (lead singer of Mi Vida): Daisy had this incredible voice. It was gritty but never scratchy. You’d have thought she had rocks in her throat that the sound had to travel over. It made everything she sang complex and interesting and kind of unpredictable. I’ve never had much of a voice myself. You don’t have to have a great voice to be a singer if your songs are good enough. But Daisy had the whole thing going, man.
She was always singing from deep in her belly. It takes people years to learn something like that and Daisy just did it naturally, did it singing in the car next to you, or folding the laundry. I was always trying to get her to sing with me and she always said no until that night at the Ash Grove.
I think she finally agreed to sing in public because of how bad she wanted to be a songwriter. I told her, “The biggest thing your songs have going for them is that you might sing them.” Her biggest asset was that people couldn’t take their eyes off her. I told her to use that.
DAISY: I felt like Jim was basically saying that nobody cared what I was singing about as long as they could get a good look at me. Jim always made me mad.
JIM: If memory serves, Daisy threw her lipstick at me. But when she calmed down, she asked me where she should try to play some gigs.
DAISY: I wanted to get my songs heard. So I started singing a bit around L.A. I’d sing a few of my songs, do some stuff with Simone.
GREG MCGUINNESS: You know, Daisy was dating everybody.
Like, ah, man, when that fight broke out between Tick Yune and Larry Hapman outside Licorice Pizza and Tick busted Larry’s eyebrow open? That was crazy stuff. I was there. I’d been buying my Dark Side of the Moon LP. So when was that? Late ’seventy-two? Maybe early ’seventy-three? I looked outside and Tick’s got Larry in a headlock. People said they were fighting over Daisy.
Plus, I’d heard Dick Poller and Frankie Bates had both tried to get her to record a demo and she’d turned them down.
DAISY: Suddenly, there were so many people trying to convince me to do a demo. All these guys wanted to be my manager. But I knew what that meant. L.A. is full of men just waiting for some naïve girl to believe their bullshit.
Hank Allen was the least smarmy. He was the one that I could tolerate the most.
By that point, I had moved out of my parents’ house and into the Chateau Marmont. I’d rented a cottage in the back. And Hank was at my door all the time, leaving messages. He was the only one not just talking about me but also about my songs.
I said, “All right, if you want to manage me, you can manage me.”
SIMONE: When I met Daisy, I was the older, wiser, cooler one. But by the early seventies, Daisy was it.
I remember I was in her room at the Marmont one time and I’m looking in her closet and I see all these Halston wraps and jumpsuits. I said, “When did you get all these Halstons?”
She said, “Oh, they sent them over.”
I said, “Who did?”
She said, “Somebody at Halston.”
This was a girl that hadn’t ever released a single piece of work. No album, no single. But she was in the magazines in photos with rock stars. Everybody loved her.
I took some of those Halstons though.
DAISY: I went over to Larrabee Sound to record the demo Hank wanted me to record. I think it was a Jackson Browne song. Hank wanted me to sing the song really sweet and I wasn’t feeling it. I sang it the way I wanted to. A little bit rough, a little bit breathy. Hank said, “Can we please just do one take where you sing it smooth, maybe a key higher?”
I grabbed my purse and said, “Nope.” And I left.
SIMONE: She got signed to Runner Records right after that.
DAISY: I didn’t care about anything but songwriting. The singing was okay but I didn’t want to be some puppet up there, singing other people’s words. I wanted to do my own thing. I wanted to sing my own stuff.
SIMONE: Daisy doesn’t value anything that comes easy to her. Money, looks, even her voice. She wanted people to listen to her.
DAISY: I signed the deal with Runner Records. But I didn’t read the contract.
I didn’t want to read contracts and pay attention to who I was supposed to pay what money to and what was expected of me. I wanted to write songs and get high.
SIMONE: They scheduled her for a kickoff meeting and I went over to her place and we put together the perfect outfit, went through her songbook to get it just right. When she left to go over there that morning, she was walking on air.
But however many hours later, she showed up at my place and I could tell something was wrong. I said, “What’s going on?” She just shook her head and walked right past me. She went into my kitchen, grabbed the bottle of champagne we’d bought to celebrate, popped it open, and walked into my bathroom. I followed her in there and she was running herself a bath. She stripped off her clothes and got in the tub. Took a swig right from the bottle.
I said, “Talk to me. What happened?”
She said, “They don’t care about me.” I guess, at the meeting, they had handed her a list of songs they expected her to do and it was stuff from the catalog. “Leaving on a Jet Plane” kind of stuff.
I said, “What about your own songs?”
She said, “They don’t like my songs.”
DAISY: They read through my entire book and couldn’t find one song in there—not one song—they thought I should record.
I said, “What about this one? And this one? And this one?”
I was at that conference table with Rich Palentino and I was flipping through that book, panicked. I was thinking they must not have read them. They just kept saying the songs weren’t ready yet. That I wasn’t ready to be a songwriter.
SIMONE: She got drunk in the tub and all I could do was just make sure that when she passed out, I pulled her out and put her in bed. Which is what I did.
DAISY: I got up the next morning and went back to my own place. Tried to put it out of my mind by laying by the pool. When that didn’t work, I smoked a few cigarettes, did a few lines in my cottage. Hank came over and tried to calm me down.
I said, “Get me out of this.” And he kept telling me I didn’t want to get out of it.
I said, “Yes, I do!”
He said, “No, you don’t.”
I got so mad I ran out of my own place faster than Hank could catch me. I drove right over to Runner Records. I was in the parking lot before I realized I was still in a bikini top and jeans. I went right into Rich Palentino’s office and ripped up the contract. Rich just laughed and said, “Hank called and said you might do that. Honey, that’s not how contracts work.”
SIMONE: Daisy was Carole King, she was Laura Nyro. Hell, she could have been Joni Mitchell. And they wanted her to be Olivia Newton-John.
DAISY: I went back to the Marmont. I’d been crying; I had mascara running down my face. Hank was waiting for me, sitting on my stoop. He said, “Why don’t you sleep it off?”
I said, “I can’t sleep. I’ve had too much coke and too many dexies.”
He said he had something for me. I thought he was going to hand me a quaalude, like that was going to do anything. But he gave me a Seconal. I was out like a light and I woke up feeling so much better. No hangover. Nothing. For the first time in my life, I was sleeping like a baby.
From then on, it was dexies to get through the day, reds to get through the night. Champagne to wash it all down.
The good life, right? Except the good life never made for a good life. But I’m getting ahead of myself.