‘Daisy Jones & The Six’ by Taylor Jenkins Reid  (2020) – 351 pages

“Billy: Karen was just a great musician. That was all there was to it. I don’t care if you’re a man, woman, white, black, gay, straight, or anything in between – if you play well, you play well. Music is a great equalizer.”

The golden age of rock and roll was the late 1960s and the 1970s. Back then the music was everywhere with new young bands forming constantly and plenty of live venues in every town and city where these acts could grow and develop musically. There was excitement from the ground up, and all the record companies had to do was sign the best of these young acts. How times have changed.

Now it all seems so calculated, totally driven by a few record industry executives who pretty much manipulate their artists. The originality, the creativity, the excitement, the enthusiasm seem to have disappeared. The music now is over-produced and too calculated to quickly sell records rather than to produce anything original, creative, or lasting.

‘Daisy Jones & The Six’ is about one of those bands that formed in the late 1960s and achieved huge success in the 1970s traveling throughout the United States, Europe, and even Japan. The entire novel is written as an oral history with each member of the band as well as the producers, agents, etc. interviewed, and their words are written down verbatim.

Starting out, the band is The Six with Billy Dunne as its lead vocalist and band leader. Circumstances lead to Daisy Jones joining the band as the co-vocalist, and then the band rises to stratospheric heights and a number one album, Aurora.

The author Taylor Jenkins Reid says she was influenced by the real band Fleetwood Mac in writing her novel. In actual fact, the story of Fleetwood Mac and its members is even more wild and improbable than ‘Daisy Jones & The Six’.

‘Daisy Jones & The Six’ uses just about every cliché for a rock band in the Seventies that you ever heard of, but that doesn’t mean the novel doesn’t work. It is all about the drinking, the drugging, the sleeping around, occasionally interrupted by musical interludes.

“Eddie: L.A. Was a trip. Everywhere you looked, you were surrounded by people who loved playing music, who liked to party. The girls were gorgeous. The drugs were cheap.”

We have Billy, the intense talented lead singer and defacto band leader who falls into heavy partying with groupies and drugs who is saved by a beautiful caring woman.

“Warren: And then it always ended with Billy going back to his hotel room and the rest of us staying out partying until we found somebody to screw.”

Then Daisy Jones joins the band.

She is the free-spirited female singer who lives on Sunset Strip and parties constantly taking more pills, uppers and downers, than she can keep track of, who has no musical training, but who has a beautiful angelic voice and a natural instinct for singing songs.

There is the Rolling Stone article with the headline “Daisy Jones & The Six: Are Billy Dunne and Daisy Jones Rock ‘n’ Roll’s Biggest Foes?”.

Try singing a love duet with someone you hate. It is the mutual disdain that Billy and Daisy have for each other that put their album Aurora over the top in sales, not the quality of the music.

The lyrics to the songs are rather dopey like most rock songs.

Perhaps for the TV series that will be based on this novel, it is a good thing that the novel is rather cliched and formulaic.

Will the TV series be a success? It depends on if the music and the performers are as inspired as some of the performers and much of the music of the 1970s were.

Grade:    B