I’ve always said that in some ways, being in a band must be kind of like being in a family. But in a band, there’s an additional pressure: the band doesn’t exist without the say so of everyone present. Sure, the name can be the same, but you know how it is: The Rolling Stones in many ways become a different group altogether, even just by switching out a second guitarist.
And so, Daisy Jones & the Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid (Penguin, 2019) asks the question: What happens when the goals of the band and the goals of your family overlap, or are different altogether? Against a backdrop of the 1970s rock scene, Daisy Jones, Billy Dunne and the rest of their fictional Six try to come to terms with sex and drugs and rock ‘n’ roll, and all the excesses associated with that era.
The format of the book is one of intercut interviews with the principals involved: band members, family, managers, agents and so on, somewhat similar to Please Kill Me, the historical account of the punk scene by Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain written in 1996. This story, however, is fictional; and yet in Daisy Jones & the Six, Reid has fashioned a compelling account of the decade, name dropping real places (Sound City Studios, the Continental Hyatt House) with obviously fictional ones (a hotel outside of Chicago).
It’s so well done, you might ask yourself if you don’t have this album in your collection somewhere.
In the end, one comes to the conclusion that perhaps this book isn’t explicitly about rock ‘n’ roll at all, or even implicitly about family. Maybe it’s more about love, and who you love and how you choose to love them. In which case, Taylor Jenkins Reid’s Daisy Jones & the Six becomes more than just a fictional rewriting of the age, but something more universal, and not fictional at all.
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