Page 7 of Daisy Jones & The Six

EDDIE:I’d been saying we needed a new name.

BILLY:We had a following with that name. I didn’t want to change it.

WARREN:We couldn’t decide what to call ourselves. I think somebody suggested the Dipsticks. I wanted us to go by Shaggin’.

EDDIE:Pete said, “You’re never going to get six people to agree on this.”

And I said, “What about The Six?”

KAREN:I got a call from a booker in Philly, where I’m from. And he said that the Winters had pulled out of a festival there, asked if we wanted to play. I said, “Right on, but we aren’t called the Dunne Brothers anymore.”

He said, “Well, what do I put on the flyer?”

I said, “Not sure yet but I’ll get the six of us there.”

And I liked how it sounded, “The Six.”

WARREN:Part of the brilliance of the name was how close it was to “the Sex.” But I don’t think any of us ever talked about that. It was so obvious there was no need to put a finer point on it.

KAREN:I was not thinking about it sounding like anything.

BILLY:“The Sex”? No, that wasn’t a part of it.

GRAHAM:It sounded like sex. That was a big part of it.

BILLY:We played that show in Philly as The Six and then we got an offer to do another show in town. Another in Harrisburg. Another in Allentown. We got asked to play New Year’s Eve at this bar in Hartford.

We weren’t making much money. But I’d spend my last dollar taking Camila out whenever I was home. We’d go to this pizza joint a few blocks from her parents’ place or I’d borrow money from Graham or Warren to take her out somewhere nice. She always told me to cut it out. She’d say, “If I wanted to be with a rich guy, I wouldn’t have given my number to the singer of a wedding band.”

CAMILA:Billy had charisma and I fell for all that. I always did. The smoldering, the brooding. A lot of my girlfriends were looking for guys that could afford a nice ring. But I wanted somebodyfascinating.

GRAHAM:Around ’seventy-one, we booked a few shows in New York.

EDDIE:New York was…it was how you knew you were somebody.

GRAHAM:One night, we’re playing a bar over in the Bowery and out on the street, smoking a cigarette, is a guy named Rod Reyes.

RODREYES(manager, The Six):Billy Dunne was a rock star. You could just see it. He was very cocksure, knew who to play to in the crowd. There was an emotion that he brought to his stuff.

There’s just a quality that some people have. If you took nine guys, plus Mick Jagger, and you put them in a lineup, someone who had never heard of the Rolling Stones before could still point to Jagger and say, “That’s the rock star.”

Billy had that. And the band had a good sound.

BILLY:When Rod came up to us after that show at the Wreckage…that was the watershed moment.

ROD:When I started working with the band, I had some ideas. Some of which were well received and others…not so much.

GRAHAM:Rod told me I needed to cut out half of my solos. Said they were interesting for people that loved technical guitar work but boring for everyone else.

I said, “Why would I play to people who don’t care about good guitar?”

He said, “If you want to be huge, you gotta be for everybody.”

BILLY:Rod told me to stop writing about stuff I didn’t know about. He said, “Don’t reinvent the wheel. Write about your girl.” Hands down, best career advice I ever got.

KAREN:Rod told me to wear low-cut shirts and I said, “Dream on,” and that was about the end of that.

EDDIE:Rod started getting us gigs all over the East Coast. Florida to Canada.

---