And he hung up the phone and that was the end of it.
CAMILA: In the middle of the night one night, I heard Billy get up and pick up the phone. I was pretty sure he was talking to Teddy. I wasn’t sure.
I heard him say, “Daisy’s gotta go.”
And I knew. I mean, of course I knew.
GRAHAM: I just thought he was freaking out because he wasn’t the star of the album anymore. I mean, I knew things between Billy and Daisy were dicey. But back then I thought music was just about music.
But music is never about music. If it was, we’d be writing songs about guitars. But we don’t. We write songs about women.
Women will crush you, you know? I suppose everybody hurts everybody, but women always seem to get back up, you ever notice that? Women are always still standing.
ROD: Daisy wasn’t scheduled to be in that day.
KAREN: We were sweetening “Young Stars.” I was in the lounge when I saw Daisy come in. You could tell she was whacked out.
DAISY: I was drunk. In my defense, it was five o’clock. Or close to it. Isn’t that the international drinking time? No, I know. I’m aware it was absurd. Give me a little credit. I know how crazy I am.
BILLY: I was in the control booth, listening to Eddie’s overdubs, trying to get him to slow his stuff down a little when Daisy whips open the door and says she needs to talk to me.
DAISY: He tries to pretend he has no idea why I want to talk to him.
BILLY: So I say okay and I step out into the kitchen with her. She hands me a napkin and the back of a bill or something. And she’s scrawled all over it in black smudges.
DAISY: Eyeliner pencil smears easily.
BILLY: I said, “What is this?”
She said, “This is our new song.”
I looked at it again and I couldn’t figure out what I was looking at.
She says, “It starts on the paper and then goes over to the napkin.”
DAISY: He reads it one time and then he says, “We’re not recording this.”
And I say, “Why not?”
We are talking by a window and it’s open and Billy leans over and he shuts the window. Just like, slams it shut. And then he says, “Because.”
BILLY: When you write a song that may or may not be about someone, you can be pretty sure they aren’t going to ask. Because no one wants to sound like a jerk who thinks everything is about them.
DAISY: I said, “Give me one good reason why we shouldn’t record this song.”
He started talking and I interrupted him.
I said, “I’ll give you five good reasons we should.”
BILLY: She put up her fist and then started counting her fingers off.
“One, you know it’s good. Two, you were just saying the other day we need something hard, something less romantic. This is that. Three, we need at least one more song. Did you want to write another one together? Because I’ll tell you right now, I sure don’t feel like writing together. Four, it’s written to the melody of that blues shuffle you’ve been working on so it’s already on its way to a finished song. And lastly, five. I relooked at the track list. This album is about tension. If you want it to have movement, thematically, you need something to break. So here you go. It’s all broken now.”
DAISY: I had rehearsed my speech on the way over.
BILLY: It was hard to make a case against it but I still tried.
DAISY: I said, “There’s no reason not to record this song. Unless, there’s something else bothering you?”
BILLY: I said, “There’s nothing bothering me, but I just say no.”
DAISY: “You aren’t the boss of the band, Billy.”
BILLY: I said, “We write together, and I’m not writing that with you.” Daisy grabbed the papers and stomped out of the room and I thought that was that.
DAISY: I pulled everybody in the lounge. Everybody that was there.
KAREN: Daisy literally dragged me by the sleeve.
WARREN: I’m standing at the back door with a joint in my hand and I feel Daisy’s hand on my shoulder and she’s pulling me back into the studio.
EDDIE: Pete was in the booth with Teddy. I’d been in the john. When I came out, Pete had come out, too. To see what was going on.
GRAHAM: Pete and I were sitting in the lounge, working on something when suddenly, everyone’s standing in front of us.
DAISY: I said, “I’m going to sing you all a song.”
BILLY: I found them all in the lounge. I was thinking, What the fuck is going on?
DAISY: I said, “And then we’re going to vote on whether it should get recorded and put on the album.”
BILLY: I was so angry it was like I surpassed hot and went cold. Just frozen there, stunned. I could feel the blood drain out of me, like someone pulled the stop on a tub.
DAISY: I just went for it. Nothing accompanying me, just singing the song the way I heard it in my head. “When you look in the mirror/take stock of your soul/and when you hear my voice, remember/you ruined me whole.”
KAREN: Her voice was guttural. Part of it was that she was clearly drunk or buzzed or something. And her voice was scratchy. But the combination of the two. It was an angry song. And she was angry singing it.
EDDIE: It was rock ’n’ roll! It was rage, man. She thrashed. When I tell people what it’s like to make a rock album, I tell them about that day. I tell them about standing there in front of the hottest chick you’ve ever seen in your life, while she’s singing her guts out, and everybody’s feeling like she’s about to lose her goddamn mind. In the best way possible.
WARREN: You know when she had me? When I knew that song was fucking great? When she said, “When you think of me, I hope it ruins rock ’n’ roll.”
BILLY: When she finished, everyone was dead quiet. And I thought, Okay, good. They don’t like it.
DAISY: I said, “Who thinks the song should be on the album, raise your hand?” And Karen’s hand went straight up.
KAREN: I wanted to play on that song. I wanted to rock out onstage with a song like that.
EDDIE: It’s a scorned-woman song but it was a great one. I put my hand straight up. And Pete did, too. I think he liked that it really felt like dangerous stuff, you know? So much of what we were doing on that album sounded so soft.
WARREN: I said, “Put me down as a yes,” and then I put my joint back to my lips and went back to the parking lot.
GRAHAM: We wouldn’t have been voting if Billy liked the song, right? My instinct was to back him up. But it was also a great song.