CAMILA: You’re asking me if I knew he was going to be unfaithful as if that’s a thing that you know or you don’t know. Like it’s black and white. But it’s not. You suspect, then you sort of un-suspect. Then you suspect again. Then you tell yourself you’re crazy. Then you ask yourself whether fidelity is really something you value above all else.
Let me put it this way: I’ve seen a lot of marriages where everyone is faithful and no one is happy.
BILLY: At the end of the call, Camila said she had to go and I said, “All right,” and then I remember she said, “Okay, honey, we love you.”
And I said, “We?”
And she said, “Me and the baby.”
And that just…I think I hung up the phone before I could even say goodbye.
KAREN: Camila had become my friend. I hated Billy for putting me in a position to either tell Camila what he’d done or lie to her.
BILLY: Drinking, drugging, sleeping around, it’s all the same thing.
You have these lines you won’t cross. But then you cross them. And suddenly you possess the very dangerous information that you can break the rule and the world won’t instantly come to an end.
You’ve taken a big, black, bold line and you’ve made it a little bit gray. And now every time you cross it again, it just gets grayer and grayer until one day you look around and you think, There was a line here once, I think.
GRAHAM: It got to be a rhythm: get to town, sound check, play, party, get on the bus. And the better we started playing, the more we partied. Hotels, girls, drugs. Over and over. Hotels, girls, drugs. For all of us. But especially Billy.
WARREN: We had a rule back then; we each had five matchsticks. That’s how we’d invite people back to the party after. If they had a matchstick, they were in. We could give them out to any girl in the crowd we saw. Obviously, we tried to steer clear of weirdos.
ROD: Let me tell you what it means to manage a rock band. We’re driving all over hell and creation, roadies and crew and the whole nine. And not one person—not one member of that band—asked themselves how we were always stocked up on gas.
End of ’seventy-three was the oil crisis, there was a gas shortage. The tour manager and I are bribing gas station attendants like our lives depend on it. I’m switching out license plates.
And no one even notices because they’re all sleeping around and drunk and high.
KAREN: Billy turned into someone I didn’t recognize on that tour. He’d pass out in the bus with a girl under his arm, invite girls with us from one city to another.
EDDIE: I mean, Billy had one of the roadies deliver tequila and quaaludes to him at all hours of the night.
KAREN: The album was doing pretty well and our tour got extended. I was talking to Camila about it and she said, “Karen, should I come join you guys?”
I couldn’t get the words out of my mouth fast enough. I said, “No, stay there.”
WARREN: Let me sum up that early tour for you: I was getting laid, Graham was getting high, Eddie was getting drunk, Karen was getting fed up, Pete was getting on the phone to his girl back home, and Billy was all five, at once.
EDDIE: I was backstage after the Ottawa show, having a few beers with the Midnight Dawn guys. Graham was with me. Karen, too. Pete was waiting for his girl Jenny. She was driving up from Boston. I hadn’t met her by that point. Because Pete was always really private. His high school girlfriend never met our parents! So I was excited to finally meet Jenny, see what all this fuss was about.
And then in she walks, tall as hell, long blond hair, wearing this tiny little dress and these super-tall shoes, legs up to her neck, and I thought, No wonder Pete’s obsessed with this girl.
And then right behind her, I see Camila.
CAMILA: I wanted to surprise him. I missed him. I was bored. I was…getting nervous. I mean, I had gotten married, I was six months pregnant, and I was spending the majority of my time alone in a massive old house in Topanga Canyon. There were a lot of reasons I went.
But, yes, one of the reasons was to see if things were okay. To see what he was up to. Of course it was.
KAREN: I had told her not to come. But she didn’t listen to me. She came to surprise Billy.
She was just starting to show. Maybe five months pregnant? Something like that. She had on this big maxidress. Her hair pulled back.
GRAHAM: I spotted Camila and I thought, Oh, no. But I kind of strolled on out the door. Once I was out of view, I booked it. I figured Billy was either on the bus or at the hotel. I wasn’t sure which but I had to take a chance. I ran the two blocks to the hotel.
I should have chosen the bus.
KAREN: She found him on the bus. Part of me wished I could have stopped her and part of me was glad it was going to be all out in the open.
EDDIE: I wasn’t there but I heard she walked in on him getting, well…I don’t know how else to say it…oral sex, I guess I should say. From a groupie.
BILLY: It was like I’d been playing with fire but somehow I was genuinely surprised when I burnt myself.
I remember Camila’s face. It was…she wasn’t mad or hurt so much as truly shocked. She was just frozen, taking it in with no reaction. She stared at me as I scrambled to get myself presentable.
The girl I was with just ran out—like she didn’t want to be in the middle of anything.
When the door of the bus shut, I looked at Camila and I said, “I’m sorry.” That was the first thing I said, really the only thing I said. That’s when Camila finally seemed to process exactly what had happened, what was happening.
CAMILA: I believe what I said was, and you know, earmuffs, but I believe what I said was “Who the fuck do you think you are, cheating on me? You think there’s a woman alive who is better than what you have?”
WARREN: I was outside talking to some of the crew guys and I caught the tail end of it. I could see a bit through the windshield. It looked to me like she hit him. I think she had a bag with her and I think she slugged him with the bag. And then the two of them left the bus.
CAMILA: I made him take a shower before I would say another word to him.
BILLY: I wanted her to leave me. [Pauses] I’ve thought a lot about it and…that’s what I’d been up to. I’d been hoping she’d cut me loose.
That night Camila and I were sitting in my hotel room after I got out of the shower. And I could feel myself sobering up and I didn’t like it. I pulled out a bump and I remember Camila looked at me and she said, “What are you trying to do?”
She didn’t say it in an exasperated way. She was really asking me. What was I trying to do? I didn’t know how to answer her. I just shrugged and I remember how stupid I felt, shrugging at a time like that, with a woman like that. This woman carrying my child. And I was shrugging like a ten-year-old boy.