SIMONE: Niccolo had a lot of good qualities. He did. He cared about her. He made her feel secure, in his own way. He used to make her laugh. They had inside jokes I never understood. Something about the game Monopoly. I don’t know. But he genuinely made her laugh. And Daisy had such a great smile, and she’d been unhappy for a while.
But he was possessive. And you can’t own anybody, let alone somebody like Daisy.
WARREN: I met Niccolo and I went, Oh, okay, got it. This guy’s a con artist.
EDDIE: I kind of liked Niccolo. He was always real cool with me and Pete.
BILLY: Niccolo came down to the studio to hear us rehearse a lot. There was one day when Daisy and I…we were rehearsing the vocal harmonies and it wasn’t jibing. We had a few moments of downtime and I said to her, “Maybe we need to shift this into a different key.” That was more than I’d said to her in I don’t know how long. But Daisy just said it was fine the way it was. I said, “If you can’t hit the note exactly, we have to change something.” She rolled her eyes at me. And I apologized. Because I didn’t want to make a scene. I said, “Okay, I’m sorry.” I figured it would work itself out.
But she just said, “I don’t need your apologies, all right?”
I said, “I’m just trying to be nice.”
She said, “I’m not interested in your nice.” Then she shivered. And it was cold in the studio and she was wearing basically nothing. She looked cold to me.
And I said, “Daisy, I’m sorry. Let’s just be on good terms, all right? Here, take my shirt.” I had on a T-shirt and then a button-down over it. Or maybe I was wearing a jacket or something. Anyway, I took it off and I put it around her arms.
And she shrugged it off and she said, “I don’t need your fucking jacket.”
DAISY: Billy always knows best. He knows when you’re not singing right. He knows how you should fix it. He knows what you should be wearing. I was so sick of being told by Billy how things were going to go.
BILLY: I was sick and tired of being treated like I was her problem. She was my problem. And all I tried to do was give her my jacket.
DAISY: I didn’t want his coat. What did I want his coat for?
GRAHAM: Daisy was raising her voice a little bit. And the minute she did, Niccolo just came running in.
KAREN: He was over by the couches we had in the corner, next to the cooler of beers. He always wore blazers over his T-shirts.
WARREN: That fucker was drinking all the good beers.
BILLY: He came running in toward me and grabbed me by my shirt. He said, “What’s the problem here?” I knocked his hand away and I could tell, by the look on his face when I did it, that he was trouble.
GRAHAM: I was watching it happen—this fight brewing—and I was thinking, At what point do I step in here?
I’m worried Billy’s gonna clock him.
KAREN: You wouldn’t have thought, at first, that Niccolo was tough. Because he was so smarmy. And he wasn’t muscular or anything. And he was supposedly some prince or what have you. But I watched him puff out his chest a bit and, look, Billy’s a formidable guy. But you just got this sense that Niccolo was a little bit unhinged.
WARREN: There’s a code to two men fighting it out. You don’t punch the nuts. You don’t really kick. You never bite. Niccolo would have bitten. You could just see it.
BILLY: Could I have taken him out? Maybe. But I don’t think he wanted a fight any more than I did.
DAISY: I was not quite sure what to do. I think I just waited, watching it happen.
BILLY: He said, “You stay away from her, okay? You work together and that’s it. You don’t talk to her, you don’t touch her, you don’t even look at her.” I thought that was bullshit. I mean, sure, this guy can try to tell me what to do. But he shouldn’t tell Daisy what to do. I turned and I looked at Daisy and I said, “Is this what you want?”
And she looked away for a moment and then she looked back at me and said, “Yes, that’s what I want.”
DAISY: Oh, the tangled messes I’ve created in my life.
BILLY: I couldn’t believe it. That she would…I had trusted her when all signs said that I shouldn’t. And I was done doing that. Completely done doing that. She was exactly who I’d thought she was. And I felt like I’d been an idiot for thinking otherwise. I put my hands up and I said, “All right, man. You won’t hear a peep from me.”
EDDIE: I couldn’t believe it. Somebody had actually put Billy Dunne in his place.
KAREN: It was that afternoon or maybe the next day that Jonah Berg came by for the first time. I was on pins and needles. I think we all were. Because Billy and Daisy wouldn’t even look at each other. We rehearsed “Young Stars” all afternoon, and even when they were singing together, in harmony, they weren’t looking at each other.
JONAH BERG: I show up and I’m expecting this warm atmosphere. I mean, this is a band that has just finished a great album. One where they are clearly all on the same page, working together seamlessly. Or so I thought. But I walk in, and they are in the middle of a song, and Daisy and Billy are about as far away from each other as two people can be, while still on the same stage. It was, visually, very jarring. You don’t realize how often singers stand close to one another until you see two people facing forward, fifteen feet between the two of them, not even looking at each other.
GRAHAM: I kept thinking, Just get it together while this guy is here.
KAREN: In this instance, I’d say it was on Daisy to fix what had just happened. And she wasn’t gonna do that.
JONAH BERG: But even with this tension in the room, the band sounded great. And the songs they were playing were great. That’s one thing that The Six has always done, and they did it even better when they had Daisy on board. They made music that—it could be the first time you heard a song—but you were tapping your foot along with them. That’s a testament to the work of Warren Rhodes and Pete Loving. Daisy Jones & The Six get a lot of credit for the intrigue of their lyrics—and certainly everyone’s paying attention to Billy and Daisy, as well they should—but that was one hell of a rhythm section.
BILLY: I asked Rod, at some point, if we could reschedule Jonah to another day.
ROD: It was too late to move Jonah. He was already there watching them rehearse.
DAISY: I didn’t see why Billy had to make such a big deal out of it. We could easily have just made nice in front of Jonah Berg.
JONAH BERG: After a few songs, they take a break, they all come say hi to me at various points. I shared a cigarette with Warren outside and I figured he was my best chance at the truth. I said, “Level with me. Something’s up here.”