Rock and Roll Book Club: 'Daisy Jones & the Six' goes behind the music with a fictional rock band
by Jay Gabler
May 08, 2019
Often, the first thing I do after reading a book by a musician is head straight to Wikipedia to get the real story with some amount of objective distance. Seen from the inside, the life of a recording artist just doesn't make a lot of sense. Everybody wants to know how you made magic happen, and the answer is almost always messy — unless you're, say, Hall and Oates.
For her new novel Daisy Jones & the Six, Taylor Jenkins Reid has used the format of an oral history about a fictional band. On the face of it, it's an odd decision: there's no shortage of actual oral histories about actual bands with actual records you probably enjoy, and God knows those books don't lack for drama. So why make one up?
Think about it this way: Reid has written the oral history you want to read, the one where there are heart-rending untold stories about your favorite songs, the one that transforms the way you think about a band. Just because Daisy Jones & the Six aren't actual people doesn't make the story unsatisfying. After all, how real to you are the members of Fleetwood Mac?
Reid took inspiration from several different classic rock artists, but the basic template for Daisy Jones & the Six are Fleetwood Mac...if Lindsey Buckingham was already in the band when Stevie Nicks joined.
Of course, in reality Stevie Nicks would never have joined Fleetwood Mac if she wasn't Buckingham's bandmate and bedmate: the successful blues-rockers didn't think they needed a new female singer-songwriter, they wanted a new male guitarist. Only because Buckingham insisted Nicks was part of the bargain did she come on board, and the rest is history.
On the surface, Daisy Jones & the Six is a precise pastiche of classic rock true stories. There's the creative tension within the band, there's the inevitable slide into drugs, there's the singer who goes missing while expensive studio time ticks away.
Reid, however, has buffed things up a bit. Most obviously, if you're a regular reader of nonfiction rock books, you'll notice a conspicuous lack of beefing with the label, producers, road managers, and engineers. (There is one nice moment where an engineer complains about the fact that the two lead singers insist on recording all their vocals on a shared mic, one of Reid's purest flights of fantasy.)
It's also a book where the characters, particularly the women, say and do things many of their real-life counterparts probably wish they could have said and done. The band's principal singer-songwriter goes wild on their first big tour, but then sobers up and reaches a new rapport with his wife.
The band's underappreciated keyboardist, in the Christine McVie role, wears what she wants to wear and doesn't let a torrid intra-band relationship derail her career. When her lover writes a song about her, the band won't let him use it and he gives it to another artist. Just imagine Lindsey Buckingham leaving "Songbird" on the table out of consideration for his bandmates' feelings.
Daisy Jones herself, the singer-songwriter who permanently joins the Six after recording a successful duet and touring as their opener, is more of a mess...but she's a triumphant mess. She kicks a bad husband to the curb, delivers when she needs to, and says things like, "I had absolutely no interest in being somebody else's muse. I am not a muse. I am the somebody."
Not that things like that didn't happen in the '70s, but essentially Daisy Jones & the Six is a convergence of best-case scenarios, wishful thinking about how things could have been if everyone back then was just a little more self-aware.
In the end, the book is a reflection on creativity and relationships. Reid has said she was interested in exploring the idea of a band where a man and a woman have an intense, complex creative relationship that doesn't just become the story of their romantic relationship.
If Mick Jagger was a woman, would the Rolling Stones leaders still be the Glimmer Twins? In reality, probably not (just as it's taken decades for Nicks and Christine McVie to get their proper due), but an author can dream...and we can dream along with her.
The novel is already slated to become an Amazon TV series co-produced by Reese Witherspoon, so eventually you'll actually be able to hear the music of Daisy Jones & the Six. Until then, the publisher has created a playlist with songs by some of Reid's inspirations.
The Current's Rock and Roll Book Club will be part of the Lit Crawl MN on May 11, in association with the Loft Literary Center's Wordplay festival. Rock star author Steven Hyden will read from his book Twilight of the Gods: A Journey to the End of Classic Rock, and then spin a few of his favorite classic rock LPs, sharing stories about the albums' origins in conversation with host Jay Gabler. This free event will take place at the Bryant-Lake Bowl.