Page 62 of Daisy Jones & The Six

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.

DAISY:Everybody has their hands up but Graham and Billy. And then Graham put his up, too.

I looked at Billy in the back. I said, “Six against one.” He nodded at me, at everybody, and he walked away.

EDDIE:We recorded it without him.

ROD:It was time to think about how we were going to market this album. So I set the band up with a photographer friend of mine, Freddie Mendoza. Real talented guy. I played him a couple of the early tracks from the album just to give him a sense of what we were going for. He said, “I see it in the desert mountains.”

KAREN:For some reason I remember Billy saying he wanted to shoot the cover with us on a boat.

BILLY:I’d thought we should do a shot of the sunrise. We’d already decided the album should be calledAurora,I think.

DAISY:Billy had decided the album should be calledAuroraand nobody could really argue with him. But it was not lost on me. That this album I worked my ass off on was named after Camila.

WARREN:I thought we should shoot the cover on my boat. I thought that would be cool.

FREDDIEMENDOZA(photographer):I was told to get a picture of the whole band with Billy and Daisy as the focus. Really no different than any other band photo shoot, right? You have to be keenly aware of who you’re featuring and how to make it seem natural.

ROD:Freddie wanted a desert vibe. Billy said it was fine. So that was that.

GRAHAM:We all had to be at this spot in the Santa Monica Mountains at the crack of dawn.

WARREN:Pete was something like an hour late.

BILLY:I looked at us all, as we were standing around waiting for the photographer to set up the shot, and I sort of stepped outside of myself a bit. I tried to see us as others would see us.

I mean, Graham was always a good-looking guy. Bigger than me, stronger than me. He’d grown a little rounder over the years we’d been living high on the hog but it looked good on him. And Eddie and Pete were gangly guys but they dressed well. And Warren had that mean ’stache that was cool back then. Karen was gorgeous in an understated way. And then there was Daisy.

KAREN:We’re all gathering up there and we all pretty much just have on jeans and a T-shirt. That’s what Rod said, “Just wear what you’d normally wear.” And then Daisy comes in and she’s wearing cutoffs and a white tank top with no bra on. And she’s got her big hoop earrings, the bangles up her arms. Her shirt was thin, and white, and you could see her nipples clear as day. And she knew that. And suddenly it was crystal clear to me:This cover is gonna be about Daisy’s chest.

DAISY:I’m not apologizing for shit having to do with that album cover. I dress how I want to dress. I wear what I feel comfortable in. How other people feel about it is not my problem. I said that to Rod. I said that to Billy before. I had a lot of talks about it with Karen.[Laughs]She and I have agreed to disagree.

KAREN:If we want to be taken seriously as musicians, why are we using our bodies?

DAISY:If I want to walk around topless, that’s my business. Let me tell you, when you’re my age, you’re gonna be glad you took a picture of them then, too.

GRAHAM:Billy and Daisy hadn’t really spoken, that I could see, since “Regret Me.”

BILLY:There was nothing to say.

DAISY:He owed me an apology.

FREDDIEMENDOZA:Billy had this denim-on-denim look, right? And then Daisy had on a shirt that was barely a shirt. And I knew that was the photo. His denim and her tank top.

I put the band along the road, against the guard-rail that stood between the pavement and the steep drop-off of the canyon. There was a huge, looming mountain, a hundred feet behind them. And the sun was coming up.

Between the seven of them standing there, all in their various poses, I could tell we were getting something great. I mean, it was just so much Americana in one photo, right? You got the road, and the dust and dirt. You’ve got this band on a cliff—half of them scruffy, half of them beautiful. You’ve got the desert and forest of the Santa Monica Mountains, with just a little bit of trees cropping up in the pale tan ground. And you’ve got the sun, shining down on all of it.

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