Rod: The band was recording “Chasing the Night.” They had worked on it earlier in the day and it got toward the afternoon and Daisy wasn’t needed anymore so she went home.

Daisy: I decided to have some people over to my cottage. Some actress friends and a couple guys from the Strip. We were just going to hang out by the pool, a bit.

Rod: I had told Daisy to come back later. Because we were going to record her and Billy’s vocals on it a few times that night. I should have done a better job setting boundaries of when everyone was working or not working. We didn’t have set hours, really. It was just sort of a free-for-all.

But she was supposed to be at Heider at nine.

Billy: Graham and I were working on some licks. Laying down a few and going back over them, seeing what we liked better.

Artie Snyder: Billy and Graham were fun to work with when it was just the two of them together. They had a language all to themselves, sometimes. But I felt like I understood what they were going for. I did wonder, back then, though … I didn’t know how they could stand it. If I had to work with my brother I’d lose my mind.

Billy: I always felt really lucky that Graham was as good as he was. So talented, always had good ideas. He made it easy. People would often say, “I don’t know how you can work with your brother.” But I never knew how to do it any other way.

Daisy: It got later into the night and somehow Mick Riva shows up. He’d been staying at the Marmont, too. He was in his forties by then, I think. Married however many times, had like five kids. But partied like he was nineteen. He was topping the charts even then. Everybody still loved him.

I’d partied with him a few times. He was always decent to me. But he was a real … There were always a lot of groupies with Mick. He could really get a party out of control.

Rod: Billy and Graham finished up and Graham left around eight or so. So Billy and I decided to go get some dinner. But we got back a few minutes after nine and Daisy wasn’t there.

Daisy: Suddenly, the whole place is packed. Mick’s invited everyone he knows, basically. He’s ordered bottles of liquor from the bar at the hotel, paid for it all.

I lost track of time. Forgot what I was doing. God only knows what I was on. I just remember champagne and cocaine. It was that kind of party. Those are the best parties. Champagne and coke and bikinis around the pool before we realized the drugs were killing us and the sex was coming for us, too.

Billy: We waited an hour before thinking anything of it. I mean, you know, it’s Daisy, and showing up on time is something she does by accident.

Simone: I was in town to do American Bandstand. Daisy and I had plans to meet up. I got to Daisy’s around maybe ten. And it was packed. Mick Riva was there, making out with two girls that couldn’t have been more than sixteen. Daisy’s laying out on a pool chair in a white bikini like she’s tanning, wearing a pair of sunglasses, when it’s pitch black out.

Daisy: I don’t remember anything that happened after Simone showed up.

Rod: Teddy and Artie were going to go home. They weren’t too worried about it. But I felt responsible for her. It didn’t seem like her. To ditch a session.

Simone: I said, “Daisy, I think it’s time to call it a night.” But she barely even heard me. She sat up real fast and looked at me and said, “Have I shown you the caftan Thea Porter’s people sent me?”

And I said, “No.”

And she got up and ran into her cottage. It’s full of people doing God-knows-what. They were barely paying attention to her. We walk into her bedroom and there are two men making out on her bed. It was like her house wasn’t even her own. She walks right past them and opens her closet and pulls out this dress, this caftan. It’s gold and pink and teal and gray. It was so beautiful. I mean, your heart broke looking at it, it was just so beautiful. Velvet and brocade and chiffon and silk.

I said, “That is stunning.”

And she takes off her bathing suit, right there in front of everyone.

And I say, “What are you doing?”

And then she steps into it and twirls around and says, “I feel like a sprite in it. Like I’m a sea nymph.”

And then … I don’t know what to tell you. One minute she was in my sight and the next minute, she’s way out past me, running back out to the pool, and then stepping into the water, one step at a time, in that gorgeous caftan. I could have killed her. That dress was art.

By the time I got to her, she was floating on her back, in the pool alone, all these people watching her. I don’t know who snapped the photo. But it is my favorite picture of her ever, I think. She just looks so much like herself. The way she’s floating, with her arms out to her sides, the dress floating with her. It’s so dark out but the pool is lit so the dress and her body are bright. And then there’s that look on her face, that way she’s smiling right at the camera. Gets me every time.

Rod: I called her at the Marmont about ten times and she wasn’t answering and I said to Billy, “I’m gonna head over there. Just to make sure she’s okay.”

Billy: Daisy loved the work of recording an album. I knew she loved it. I’d seen it. The only way Daisy would pass up an opportunity to record her own song is if she was doped up beyond all recognition.

It hurts to care about someone more than they care about themselves. I can tell that story from both sides.

So Rod and I went over there. We got to her cottage at the Marmont in about fifteen minutes, it wasn’t far. And we started asking where Lola La Cava is—she’s got an alias because of course she does. Finally someone says check the pool.

And when we get there, Daisy is in a pink dress, sitting on the edge of a diving board, surrounded by people, and she’s soaking wet. Her hair was slicked back and this dress was sticking to her.

Rod walked up to her and I didn’t know what he was saying but the moment she saw him, I saw this recognition in her eyes. She had forgotten where she was supposed to be until she saw him. It was exactly what we thought. Blotto. I mean, the only thing that was gonna come before her music was her dope.

As she’s talking to Rod, I see Rod point to me and Daisy’s eye follows his hand in my direction and she was … She looked sad. To see me there. Looking at her.

There was a guy next to me, some guy I would have told you was an old geezer except he was probably only forty. I could smell the whiskey in his glass, that smoky, antiseptic scent. It’s always been the smell for me. The smell of tequila, the smell of beer. Even coke. The smell of any of it. It takes me right back. To those moments when the night is just starting, when you know you’re about to get into trouble. It feels so good, the beginning.

There was that voice again, inside my head, that was telling me I was never going to be able to stay sober for the rest of my life. What is the point of getting sober at all if I know I’ll never kick it forever? I’ll fail one day anyway. Shouldn’t I pack it all in? Quit on myself? Quit on everybody? Spare Camila and my girls the heartbreak later and admit who I really am.

I looked over at Daisy, she was coming up off the diving board. She had a glass in her hand and she dropped it right there on the side of the pool. I watched her step onto the broken glass, not realizing it was under her feet.

Rod: Daisy’s feet starting bleeding.

Simone: There was blood mixing with the pool water on the concrete. And Daisy didn’t even notice. She just kept walking, talking to somebody else.

Daisy: I couldn’t feel the cuts on my feet. I couldn’t feel much of anything, I don’t think.

Simone: In that moment, I thought, She’s going to be the girl bleeding in a beautiful dress until it kills her.

I felt … lost, sad, depressed, sick. I felt really hopeless but also like I didn’t have the luxury of giving up. Like I was going to have to fight for her—fight for her against her—until I lost. Because there was no winning. I didn’t see how I could win the war.

Billy: I couldn’t stay. I couldn’t stay because when I looked at Daisy, wet and bleeding and out of it and half-near falling down, I did not think, Thank God I stopped using.

I thought, She knows how to have fun.

Rod: I was getting Daisy a towel to dry off when I saw Billy turn and leave. I’d driven us there so I wasn’t quite sure where he was going. I tried to catch his eye but he didn’t see me until the last moment, when he went around the corner. He just gave me a nod. And I understood. I was thankful he’d come up with me in the first place.

He knew how to take care of himself and that’s what he was doing.

Billy: I told Rod I was leaving and made sure he was all right to take a cab home because I’d driven us over. He was really supportive. He understood why I needed to leave.

When I got home, I got in bed right next to Camila, so thankful to be there. But I couldn’t sleep. I kept wondering what I’d be doing that very moment if I’d taken the whiskey out of that man’s hand. If I’d poured it down my throat.

Would I be laughing and playing a song for everybody? Would I be skinny-dipping with a whole bunch of strangers? Would I be puking my guts out watching somebody strap up and shoot heroin?

Instead, I was laying in the darkest quiet, listening to my wife snore.

The thing is, I’m a person who survives despite his instincts. My instincts said to run toward the chaos. And my better brain sent me home to my woman.

Daisy: I don’t remember seeing Billy there. I don’t remember seeing Rod. I don’t know how I made it to my bed.

Billy: I knew I wasn’t going to fall asleep that night. So I got up out of bed and I wrote a song.

Rod: Billy comes into the studio the next day. Everybody else is there, ready to get to recording. I’ve even got Daisy there, relatively sober, drinking a coffee.

Daisy: I felt bad. I did not mean to blow off the recording session, obviously.

Why did I hurt myself like that? I can’t explain it. I wish I could. I hated it about myself. I hated it about myself and I kept doing it and then I hated myself more. There are no good answers about this.

Rod: Billy comes in and he shows us all a song he wrote. “Impossible Woman.”

I said, “You wrote this last night?”

He said, “Yeah.”

Billy: Daisy reads it and goes, “Cool.”

Graham: It was clear, from the feeling in the room, that none of us, not even Daisy and Billy, were going to acknowledge it was about Daisy.

Billy: It’s not about Daisy. It’s about when you’re sober, there are things you can’t touch, things you can’t have.

Karen: After Graham and I heard Billy play it for the first time, I said to Graham, “That song is …”

And Graham just goes, “Yup.”

Daisy: It was a great damn song.

Warren: Didn’t care then, barely care now.

Karen: “Dancing barefoot in the snow/cold can’t touch her, high or low.” That’s Daisy Jones.

Billy: I decided to write a song about a woman that felt like sand through your fingers, like you could never really catch her. As an allegory for the things I couldn’t have, couldn’t do.

Daisy: I said, “This song is for us to sing?”

Billy said, “No, I think you should give it a shot on your own. I wrote it for your register.”

I said, “It seems more obvious that a man would be singing this about a woman.”

Billy said, “It’s more interesting if a woman is singing it. It gives it a haunting kind of quality.”

I said, “All right, I’ll take a stab at it.”

I took some time with it while everybody was lining out their parts. A few days later, I went in. I listened as everybody laid their tracks down. Just trying to find a way into it.

When it was my turn to get in there, I gave it my best. I tried to make it feel a little sad, maybe. Like I missed this woman. I was thinking, Maybe this woman is my mother, maybe this woman is my lost sister, maybe there is something I need from this woman. You know?

I thought, It’s wistful, it’s ethereal. That kind of a thing. But I was doing take after take and I could tell it wasn’t working.

And I kept looking to everybody, thinking, Somebody get me out of this mess. I’m flailing over here. And I didn’t know what to do. And I started getting angry.

Karen: Daisy has absolutely no formal training. She does not know the names of chords, she does not know various vocal techniques. If what Daisy does naturally doesn’t work, then you have to take Daisy off the song.

Daisy: I’m just hoping somebody saves me from myself. I say I want to take five. Teddy suggests I go for a walk, clear my head. I walk around the block. But I’m only making it worse because I just keep thinking I can’t do it and Of course I can’t do it and all that. And I finally just give up. I get in my car and I drive away. I couldn’t deal with it, so I left.

Billy: I wrote the song for her. I mean I wrote it for her to sing. So that made me mad. Her giving up like that.

Obviously, I understood why she was frustrated. I mean, Daisy is shockingly talented. Like it will shock you, to be near it. Her talent. But she didn’t know how to control it. She couldn’t call on it, you know? She just had to hope it would be there.

But giving up wasn’t cool. Especially not after trying for, you know, a couple of hours, tops. That’s the problem with people who don’t have to work for things. They don’t know how to work for things.

Daisy: That night, somebody knocks on my door. I was with Simone making dinner. I open the door and there’s Billy Dunne.

Billy: I went there with the express purpose of getting her to sing the damn song. Did I want to go back to the Chateau Marmont? No, I did not. But that’s what I had to do, so I did it.

Daisy: He sits me down and Simone is in the kitchen making Harvey Wallbangers and she offers Billy one.

Billy: And immediately Daisy blocks me and says, “No!” As if I was going to take the drink from Simone’s hand.

Daisy: I was embarrassed that Simone has offered it to him because I knew he already felt like I was a scummy boozehound drug addict. And if Billy thought I was going to knock him off the wagon, I was going to do everything in my power to make sure that wasn’t true.

Billy: It … surprised me. She had actually been listening to me.

Daisy: Billy said to me, “You have to sing this song.” I told him that I just didn’t have the right voice for it. We talked back and forth for a while, about what the song meant and whether there was a way into it for me and finally Billy just said that it was about me. That he had written it about me. That I’m the impossible woman. “She’s blues dressed up like rock ’n’ roll/untouchable, she’ll never fold.” That was me. And something kind of clicked in my head.

Billy: I absolutely never told Daisy the song was about her. I wouldn’t have done that because the song wasn’t about her.

Daisy: That felt like a breaking point into it. But I still said to him that I wasn’t sure I was the right sound.

Billy: I told her that the song needed a raw energy. It needed to feel like it crackled under the needle. It needed to feel electric. Like she was singing to save her life.

Daisy: That’s not my voice.

Billy: I said, “You need to go into the studio tomorrow and try again. Promise me that you will try again.” And she agreed.

Daisy: So I go in there the next morning and they had cleared out the place. The rest of the band wasn’t there. It was just Billy, Teddy, Rod, and Artie at the boards. I walked in and I just … I knew this was going to be different.

Rod: I went out to smoke a cigarette as Billy pulled Daisy into the booth and started giving her a pep talk.

Billy: I knew how the song was supposed to sound and I just kept trying to think of how to explain it to her. What I realized, eventually, was that Daisy’s all about effortlessness. And this had to be a song that sounded like it hurt to sing, like it was taking all the effort in her body. I wanted Daisy to feel, after she was done singing it, that she had run a marathon.

Daisy: There is a grit to my voice but it’s not a deep-in-your-gut kind of grit. And that’s what Billy wanted.

Billy: I said something like “Sing it so hard, so loud, that you can’t control where your voice goes. Let your voice crack. Lose control of it.”

I gave her permission to sound bad. Think of how you sing when you’re singing to the radio at full volume. When you can’t hear yourself, you’re not afraid to really belt it out because you won’t have to cringe when your voice breaks or you veer off-key. Daisy needed that kind of freedom. That takes a crapload of confidence. And Daisy didn’t actually have confidence. She was always good. Confidence is being okay being bad, not being okay being good.

I said, “If you sing this song in a way where you sound good the entire time, you’ve lost.”

Daisy: He said, “This song isn’t meant to be pretty. Don’t sing it like it is.”

Rod: I came back in and Billy’s got Daisy in the booth with the lights dimmed, a Vicks inhaler, a steaming mug of tea next to her, a pile of lozenges and some tissues, a huge pitcher of water, I don’t know, you name it, it was in there with her.

And then Daisy sat down in a chair and Billy got right back up, jumped out of the control room, went into the booth with her again. He took the chair away, raised the mike. He said, “You need to stand up and sing so hard your knees buckle.”

Daisy looked terrified.

Daisy: He wanted me to shed every inhibition I had. Billy was saying that he wanted me to be willing to fail spectacularly in front of him—and Teddy and Artie. But I knew there was no moving past my own ego stone sober.

I said, “Can we get some wine in here?”

Billy said, “You don’t need it.”

I said, “No, you don’t need it.”

Billy: Rod goes right in there with a bottle of brandy.

Rod: I’m not about to take away the easy stuff and have her running that much faster for the hard stuff.

Daisy: I took a few swigs and I looked at Billy through the window and I said, into the mike, “All right, you want it to sound a little ugly, right?” He nodded. And I said, “And no one’s gonna judge me if I end up sounding like a screeching cat?”

And I’ll never forget, Billy leaned onto the button, and said, “If you were a cat, your screech would bring every cat running to you.” And I liked that. The idea that just by being me, I was doing all right.

So I opened up my mouth and I breathed in deep and then I went for it.

Billy: None of us told Daisy this and I … I hesitate in even saying it now but … her first two takes were god-awful. I mean, wow. I was starting to regret what I’d told her. But we just kept encouraging her.

When someone is out on a ledge like that, especially when you’re the one that coaxed them out there in the first place, you don’t dare do anything to unbalance them.

So I said, “Great, great.” And then eventually after, I think, the third take, I said, “Go one octave deeper.”

Rod: It was either Daisy’s fourth or fifth take. I think maybe fifth. And it was fucking magic. I mean, magic. I don’t use that word lightly. But it felt like you were witnessing something that only happened a few times in a lifetime. She just wailed. The record that you hear, that was Daisy’s fifth take, start to finish.

Billy: She started so assured in the first verse, not quiet, necessarily, but even. Leveled. “Impossible woman/let her hold you/let her ease your soul.”

And she let that simmer a little bit, grew in intensity in this really subtle way through the next, you know, “Sand through fingers/wild horse, but she’s just a colt.” And on “colt” is where you really felt her start to amp up.

She went through another verse and then the first time she sang the chorus, I could see it in her eyes, she was looking right at me, and you could feel it building in her chest, “She’ll have you running/in the wrong direction/have you coming/for the wrong obsessions/oh, she’s gunning/for your redemption/have you headed/back to confession.” And it was when she repeated “confession,” then she really just let it fly.

Her voice breaks, in the middle of the word, it cracks just a little. And then she goes through most of the verses again. When she gets to the chorus a second time, she just unleashes her voice on it. It’s rocky and gritty and breathy and there’s so much emotion in it. It’s like she’s pleading.

And then she closes in on the end. “Walk away from the impossible/you’ll never touch her/never ease your soul.” Then she added a couplet. And it was great. It was perfect. She sang, “You’re one more impossible man/running from her/clutching what you stole.”

She sang the entire song with such a heartbreaking lament. She made that song so much more than what I’d given her.

Daisy: I opened my eyes after that take and I barely remembered doing it. I just remember thinking, I did it.

I remember realizing I had even more power in me than I had originally thought. That I had more to give, more depth and range, than even I knew about myself.

Rod: She was looking right at Billy the whole time she sang. And he was staring at her, nodding along with her. When she finished the song, Teddy started clapping. And the look on her face, the delight she felt, it was like watching a kid on Christmas. Truly. She was so proud of herself.

She pulled the headphones off and threw them down and ran out of the booth and—I kid you not—ran directly into Billy’s arms. He picked her up, just off the floor, and kind of swung her back and forth for a moment. And I could have sworn to you he smelled her hair before he put her back down.