Rolling Stone

Rolling Stone is the magazine through which The Six’s changing public identity becomes visible: first as a band that should include Daisy Jones, and later as a commercially explosive act organized around the apparent feud between Daisy and Billy Dunne. Its coverage does more than report on the group. Access, headlines, photography, and release timing help shape the story audiences encounter, making the magazine both observer and participant in the band’s ascent.

Access and the first feature

In 1976, Rod Reyes arranged for Rolling Stone to send journalist Jonah Berg to see The Six perform in Glasgow and meet the band afterward. Rod had been helping Daisy and deliberately included her in the opportunity, rather than limiting the prospective story to the band without her. The invitation therefore arrived at a consequential moment: Daisy’s place in The Six was still becoming publicly legible, and a major magazine’s account could affirm that she belonged there.

Jonah attended the Glasgow show and then encountered the musicians backstage. He was struck by the contrast between the band’s energetic performance, including guitar-smashing onstage, and the calm, ordinary-seeming atmosphere afterward. That composure surprised him because it differed from his expectations of rock stars. Karen, looking back, described the calm as a performance in its own right: the band’s visible camaraderie did not mean its private relations were uncomplicated.

Jonah’s resulting feature made the case that Daisy was essential to The Six. He saw the combination of Daisy and Billy as the band’s defining creative strength, judging Daisy’s solo work inferior to what The Six accomplished with her and the band’s work without her diminished in turn. His conclusion was direct: Daisy belonged in the group. He gave the piece the headline The Six That Should Be Seven, turning a judgment about the band’s creative identity into a concise public claim.

The cover image reinforced that argument. Rod recalled a photograph of the musicians performing together: Billy and Daisy sharing a microphone, Graham and Karen looking toward one another, the rest of the band playing, and audience members raising lighters in the foreground. For Warren Rhodes, appearing on the cover of Rolling Stone was an achievement that remained thrilling even as the band grew accustomed to success. The feature thus presented the group not merely as a collection of musicians but as a compelling ensemble whose relationships were part of its appeal.

The Aurora cover story

As Aurora approached release in 1978, Rod again sought a major magazine cover timed to reach readers alongside the album. The band wanted Rolling Stone, and Daisy specifically requested Jonah Berg. Rod contacted him, and Jonah arranged to spend time with the musicians during rehearsals. He already felt connected to the group because he believed his earlier story had helped prompt them to make an album together. He arrived expecting a story about the intense collaboration between Daisy and Billy: they shared songwriting credit, and, in his assessment, some of the album’s most gripping songs were written jointly.

The rehearsals offered a contradiction rather than the easy chemistry Jonah expected. Karen observed that, although the distance between Billy and Daisy was subtle at first, the two did not actually speak to each other. When Jonah pressed Billy not to publish a painful secret, Billy redirected him toward a rock-and-roll story by saying that he could not stand Daisy. Jonah took that remark as confirmation of the hostility and offered Billy a choice: provide a different subject or risk having the secret appear. Billy supplied a sharply negative assessment of Daisy, which Jonah used as the basis for a feature about the conflict between them. Jonah’s interest in the story was not simply that the musicians disliked each other; the striking tension was that people who could not get along remained creatively in sync.

Jonah wrote the article in New York in forty-eight hours, an unusually fast process for him. His editor was enthusiastic, and the cover was constructed by combining photographs already taken by the photographer. The resulting composition placed Billy’s profile on one side and Daisy’s on the other, their noses almost touching, with the headline asking whether they were rock and roll’s biggest foes. The arrangement made antagonism instantly readable while keeping their shared prominence in view: the two figures appeared opposed, but joined in a single image and a single band identity.

Promotion, sales, and public meaning

Rod coordinated the magazine story with Aurora’s launch rather than treating it as separate publicity. The band released Turn It Off as the first single, appeared on Midnight Special, and made radio appearances around the country before the album reached stores. The Rolling Stone cover and Aurora arrived in the same week. Turn It Off debuted at number eight on the Billboard charts; Rod later argued that the article was indispensable to the album’s breakthrough, helping move Aurora beyond the status of a successful record toward that of a cultural event. His account presents the cover story as the final force behind the album’s ascent, though it was part of a broader campaign that included broadcasts, radio promotion, and the single itself.

The scale of the response was reflected in the band’s subsequent commercial success. Turn It Off ultimately spent four weeks at the top of the charts, while Aurora sold more than 200,000 units each week. The tour sold out stadiums and added performances in major cities. Rolling Stone’s coverage did not alone produce those outcomes, but its paired portraits and adversarial question gave the public a memorable frame for the group at the moment its audience expanded dramatically. The same publicity that made the conflict legible also drew attention to the partnership at the center of the music.

The cover’s influence extended beyond sales and recognition. Accounts of the image describe its importance to young readers, particularly girls, who saw Daisy as confident and in command of how she presented herself. That response shows how magazine photography could carry meanings not reducible to the article’s headline: the story sold a feud, while Daisy’s image could be received as an assertion of self-possession. Photographer Freddie Mendoza later recalled that he had regarded the assignment as ordinary work, only to find that people continued to ask about the image years afterward. In the band’s history, Rolling Stone therefore occupies two roles at once: it turns private tension into public spectacle, and it supplies a visual platform through which audiences interpret fame, collaboration, and Daisy’s independence.