And he said, “Nothing’s up.” Just kind of shrugged his shoulders like he had no idea what I was talking about. And I trusted him. I believed that nothing out of the ordinary had happened, that this was just the way they worked together. Billy and Daisy just truly didn’t get along. And probably never really had.
BILLY: I think it was that night that Jonah wanted to take us all out for a beer but I had told Camila I’d be home to help her get the kids in the bath, so I asked Jonah if he could do the next night and it didn’t seem to be a problem for him.
EDDIE: We’re all supposed to be putting this band first, and Billy blows off the first night we’re supposed to be hanging out with Rolling Stone for the cover.
DAISY: I figured it was good news Billy was going home. I could take the first swing at the interview without worrying about him being around.
JONAH BERG: I appreciated that Daisy made herself available to me. So often, you go into a situation and you have certain band members that won’t really talk to you. Daisy made it easy to get a story.
ROD: Daisy didn’t want to go home. You know when you’re with someone and it’s clear they want to just keep hanging out, keep partying all night, keep working all night, keep doing whatever it is all night, because they don’t want to go and face whatever they have waiting for them at home?
That was Daisy when she was married to Niccolo.
JONAH BERG: We all go out that night, everybody but Billy. First, we head out to this Bad Breakers show over on the Strip. And it seems really obvious to me that Karen and Graham must be sleeping together. And I say to them, I said, “Are you two an item?” And Graham says yes and Karen says no.
GRAHAM: I didn’t understand. I just didn’t understand Karen.
KAREN: Graham and I could never last, it was never…I just needed it to exist in a vacuum, where real life didn’t matter, where the future didn’t matter, where all that mattered was, you know, how we felt that day.
JONAH BERG: Warren seemed busy hitting on every woman he could find. And Eddie Loving was talking my ear off, talking about tuning or something. Pete was off with some girl he was seeing. So I decided to focus on Daisy. She was who I wanted to get the most from anyway.
Now, I will say this: A lot of people were getting high on whatever they could get their hands on back then. That wasn’t anything new. And even as a journalist, there wasn’t much you couldn’t allude to in the pages of a magazine, certainly one like Rolling Stone. You could imply all sorts of stuff about what everybody was getting up to. But there were some people who didn’t seem like they were snorting things for fun. There were some people out there who were getting high because they couldn’t hold it together without it. And it was my personal opinion, that the drug habits of those people were sort of…off-limits. A lot of people in my position felt differently. A lot of them behaved differently, wrote differently.
I certainly got into a few situations over the years where I felt pressured—or was pressured, I should say—to out those people in the interest of selling magazines. So I tended to not even write down what I observed, or tell a single person what I saw, if I thought somebody I was interviewing had a serious drug problem. It was a very “see no evil” sort of thing. For me.
When I’m with Daisy that night, we are hanging out in the back of the crowd. And I look over and Daisy is rubbing her gums. And at first I thought it was coke but I realize she was snorting amphetamines. She did not seem like a recreational user, I guess is what I’m saying. And there seemed a significant difference in the Daisy I met on tour the year before and this Daisy now. She was more frenetic, less eloquent. Sadder, maybe. No, that’s not it. Less joyful.
She said to me, “Do you want to go outside?” I nodded and we went into the parking lot and we sat on the hood of my car. And Daisy said, “All right, Jonah. Let’s do this. Ask your questions.”
And I said, “If you don’t want to go on the record now, because you’re…not in the right state of mind, you need to say so.”
And she said, “No, let’s talk.”
I had given her an explicit out. And she turned it down. That’s all I felt obligated to do. So I said, “What’s going on between you and Billy?”
Then it all just started pouring out of her.
DAISY: I shouldn’t have said what I said. And then Billy shouldn’t have gone and done what he did.
BILLY: I come into the rehearsal space the next day and everybody’s there and they are all talking and messing around and Jonah says, “When should we set aside some time to talk?”
And I say, “Let me see when Daisy’s free.”
And he says, “Well, I want to get some time just the two of us, if you’re good with that.” That’s when I started to get worried. Just the way he said it…I sort of had this feeling like, What did she do? I looked over at her and she was up at the mike, talking to somebody. And she had on tiny shorts again in this cold studio. And I just thought, Put some fucking pants on. That’s what I was thinking. You’re cold. Stop dressing like it’s gonna be hot in here. You know that it’s cold in here every day. But of course she was hot, she was sweating bullets from all the drugs in her body. I knew that.
DAISY: I think that if I had gone up to Jonah that day, after talking to him that night, and tried to take it all back, he might have let me. And I considered it. I really did.
JONAH BERG: I absolutely would not have agreed to let Daisy rescind her comments. People have asked it before. I’ve always said no. That’s why I’m very clear at the beginning, when I start recording. I make sure people understand what they are doing when they talk to me.
I gave Daisy plenty of outs. She moved forward. At that point, the question of integrity shifts from being my problem to her problem.
BILLY: So we rehearse for the morning and Daisy and I just can’t get the harmony right in the last verse of the song but I don’t want to get into a fight with her in front of Jonah. I also don’t want to be performing this poorly in front of him either. The last thing I want is an article that says that we don’t have what it takes live. So when we break, I ask Graham to talk to her and he agrees. And Daisy and I, for at least the rest of that session, just sort of communicated through Graham.
GRAHAM: I mean, how was I supposed to keep track of their bullshit? Who’s not talking to who when and for what goddamn reason? I’ve got my own problems. I’ve got my own heart cracking, man. I’m in love with a woman that I am starting to think doesn’t love me and I’m not telling a single soul about it and you don’t see me asking for intermediaries to save me from my own brand of crap, do you?
BILLY: After we call it a day, I go out with Jonah and I’m sitting there, banging the 57 on a bottle of ketchup, when he says, “Daisy says you spent your first tour cheating on your wife and dealing with alcoholism and drug addiction, possibly a heroin addiction. She says you’re in recovery now but that you missed the birth of your first daughter because you were in rehab.”