A nostalgic trip to late-’70s rock ’n’ roll
Taylor Jenkins Reid used to consider herself more of a Beyoncé or Ariana Grande person, but her playlists grew after she started writing her new novel, Daisy Jones & the Six, a fictional oral history of an iconic 1970s rock band.
The Los Angeles author was initially drawn to the nostalgia and romance of the late ’70s epitomized by Fleetwood Mac’s dreamy blues-styled rock ’n’ roll. “I joke that my daughter is going to think that Rumors came out in 2016 I listened to it so much,” says Reid, who graduated from the band’s best-known album into its B-sides and deep cuts. From there she moved to classic-rock staples like the Eagles and Tom Petty and discovered a deep soul-level love for Bruce Springsteen.
Armed with an appreciation for the era’s sound, Reid began writing about the meteoric rise of a California bluesrock outfit called the Six, led by the charismatic but troubled Billy Dunne and his brother, Graham. The band threatened to self-destruct before it made its name, thanks to Billy’s insatiable need for narcotics and groupies. Billy cleaned up after his wife, Camila, gave birth, but his vices were reignited after the band recorded a hit duet with Daisy Jones, a Los Angeles It Girl and aspiring musician whose enigmatic presence is comparable to the spellbinding subject of the Eagles’ “Witchy Woman.”
Daisy Jones & The Six, which was named Reese Witherspoon’s latest book-club pick, contains all the sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll one would expect, but Reid was careful to avoid clichés.
“We’ve seen the story of a guy who gets a little bit of fame, starts doing drugs, gets more famous, does more and more drugs, pushes people away, gets too high on his own, and ruins it all,” she says. “So let’s do that story real fast, but in like 100 pages. What happens then? What’s the rest of the story?”
Copper-haired Daisy — who falls somewhere between Stevie Nicks and Joni Mitchell — was a fixture of the Sunset Strip scene by the time she turned 15, her reputation as a wild child masking her natural musical talent and crippling drug addiction. Though they seemingly hated each other, her chemistry onstage with Billy was electric. The debate over the nature of their relationship was akin to the fervour following Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper’s steamy Oscars performance.
Although all the band members share their memories, Reid says Daisy is in many ways the book’s main character. “Daisy is this icon, but she’s still a person,” Reid says. “What does it feel like to be seen as a beautiful, glamorous, talented woman and also feel like you’re breaking inside? That really was the most exciting part of telling this story for me.”
Oral histories, which rely on the transcripts of conversations with multiple people to retell a historic event, have become a staple of cultural media, travelling back to the making of popular albums, TV shows and movies. The Beastie Boys chose an oral history for their bestselling new memoir.
Reid never considered telling the story as a straight narrative, and set herself up for the challenge of writing a novel in which the truth is pliable and can shift depending on who is speaking.
“It really was baked into the premise for me,” Reid says. “I wanted to write about music and I felt the best way to do that was by using the medium that I like to read about music in.”
Day one of writing, Reid sat staring at a blank page. As a seasoned author of five previous novels, including 2017’s delightful ode to Old Hollywood, The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, this moment wasn’t unfamiliar. But for the first time, she was intimidated.
“It felt like learning how to write all over. There’s no narrator and there’s no way to convey information that the character who’s talking doesn’t have or doesn’t believe,” she says. “But it offered an opportunity to allow the reader to read between the lines and piece things together themselves.”
Reid took a lot of pleasure in writing the details around her fictional band, imagining its sound, album covers and stage performances. Lyric writing for an iconic album was tougher, but Reid, who bought herself a rhyming dictionary, approached it like she was writing commercial poetry.
“I don’t know what those songs would sound like, but I have vague ideas,” she says. “A lot of them are like, ‘It would sound like this song, matched with this song, and the lyrics have this vibe of this song.’ It’s an amalgamation of a lot of things in my head.”