Page 11 of Daisy Jones & The Six

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.

GREGMCGUINNESS: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 myDark Side of the MoonLP.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 tolistento 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.

---