Daisy Jones and the Six Review

I was searching for my next summer read for some time and after a couple false starts Daisy Jones fell into my lap. 

The novel is, in essence, a rock doc; it reads like a VH1 Classic special reflecting on the beginnings, successes, trials, and tribulations of a rock n’ roll band during the course of the seventies. Taylor Jenkins Reid is clever in her transcriptions of interviews with various band members, rock critics, and friends of the group, the Six; there are, of course, no pictures of anyone, but you can envision the wrinkling, balding rock stars sitting in chairs reflecting on their heyday, making wisecracks, laughing about wild sexploits and tour bus shenanigans.

Anyone who has seen the film Almost Famous would feel right at home going through this book. The handsome frontman is akin to the controlling Jason Lee character of the film. 

It is also interesting to note that, in addition to the band The Six, Daisy Jones, and all other characters connected to them, any mentioned contemporaries—other musicians, celebrities, royalty—are all also completely fictional. But yet, anyone with a heavy foundation of seventies knowledge can more or less infer who their real-life equivalent probably is. 

The culmination of the Six’s success with the album Aurora calls back to Fleetwood Mac’s Rumors and Tusk. At the same time, Taylor Jenkins Reid is careful not to draw too many comparisons to actual figures. There are romantic dramas and entanglements, there’s coke, there’s creative disputes—all the gory deets we love to hear about from these times—but Reid makes it all specific to the Six. 

This book was plenty fun and harps on a bunch of seventies rock tropes, but in a fresh way. If you’re looking for a sharp, amusing, sometimes devastating look back on a legendary rock band that should have been, find this. If you’re into this era as much as I am, then you definitely should. It’s a prime example of a book idea I wished I’d come up with before Reid. 

An A-plus, for me.