‘Daisy Jones and The Six’: You're So Vain

Sometimes a fun technique just isn’t enough to carry a story.

It’s like they Googled ‘generic hippie white girl’ and slapped the first result on the cover.

The history of literature is riddled with popular successes that have faded almost completely from the consciousness¹. It’s always a mistake to confuse big sales numbers with literary merit, because very often the books that sell like hotcakes aren’t very durable, in terms of cultural memory². Of course, sometimes the opposite is true and a book both sells kajillions of copies and inspires thousands of term papers fifty or a hundred years later. Just as there are books that everyone aggressively ignored when first published that slowly become beloved parts of the canon. The point is there’s no rule: Sales and short-term cultural impact mean nothing³.

Daisy Jones and The Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid was a huge hit, selling scads of copies and getting lots of press and earning itself an adaptation on Amazon Prime. It’s easy to see why: The “behind the music”-style concept explores the rapid rise and passionate implosion of a mega-selling rock band in the late 1970s, obviously inspired by Fleetwood Mac and all the drama surrounding Rumours⁴. It’s written as a transcript of one of those band documentaries, with all the surviving principles telling the story in round-robin style, often contradicting each other. There’s sex! There’s drugs! There’s unrequited love⁵! And Reid is a capable if uninspiring prose writer. What could possibly go wrong?

As it turns out, plenty. The book is entertaining enough for a quick read, sure, but it has two major problems. One, an over-reliance on its format to produce interest, and two, the classic problem of implying genius⁶.

I Wanna Rock and Roll All Night and Party Every Day

I blame these motherfuckers.

The basic story of Daisy Jones and The Six will be familiar to anyone who has ever watched a rock band documentary or Behind the Music⁷. Billy and Graham Dunne form a band called The Six and hit some early success on the back of Billy’s songwriting. Billy freaks out and marries his pregnant girlfriend before heading out on the road for their first major tour and proceeds to do every drug and groupie that he comes across, heads into rehab, and emerges dedicated to his family and sobriety⁸. The Six start work on the follow-up album (as some members become involved with each other, others start to grouse about their role) and the band collaborates with up-and-coming It Girl Daisy Jones on a song in order to get some synergistic buzz going. Daisy is an emotional mess on a wide variety of drugs, she and Billy initially hate each other then can’t stop looking at each other.

There’s a lot of drama here, of course, but none of it is particularly new or original; stories of rock stars imploding and addicts fighting temptation are common enough. What dresses it up is the technique, of course: The limitation of everything being told in interview, with a silent (until the end) and unnamed (until the end) interviewer invisibly editing everything together⁹. The trick to figuring out if a story using a big, bold technique is also an interesting story is simple enough: Imagine it was just a regular old novel told in regular old prose. If you’re bored thinking about that, the book is all flash and and no fire.

And that’s Daisy Jones and The Six, because nothing else about the book is remarkable. The characters barely rise above single traits: Addict, angry, horny, angry addict—you get the idea. They speak in expository pronouncements that are supposed to land with weighty drama but really just sound like a bunch of folks who are deep into their second round of cocaine on Friday night that’s actually Saturday morning¹⁰. The plot is pure soap opera—a love affair, two people who can’t trust themselves around each other, bickering band members, an addict struggling not to take that first drink.

None of that is a problem, really—the book is entertaining enough on a superficial level. It’s just that the flashy trick of it obscures its mediocrity. You can read Daisy Jones and The Six on the beach and have a good time, especially if you actually remember the late 1970s when Stevie Nicks was doing so much cocaine she hovered three inches off the stage at every performance¹¹. But in the end its just a pretty tired story dressed up in a flashy frock.

And then there are the lyrics.

Choppin’ Broccoli

We also blame Reese. For many things, but mainly this book.

Look, the lyrics to a lot of songs are pretty silly when you just let them lie on the page without any sort of context or texture. I scrolled through a recent argument online about modern rap lyrics being bad and someone posted the lyrics to The Beatles’ I Want You (She’s So Heavy):

I want you

I want you so bad

I want you

I want you so bad

It's driving me mad, it's driving me mad

Yeah, that hardly seems like the words to a classic song¹². Of course, songs have a lot more than words: There’s the music, the melody, the style, the rhythm, the singing—there’s a lot going on. So I will stipulate that it’s not Reid’s fault that the lyrics she supplies—lyrics to supposedly massive hit songs that become part of the cultural zeitgeist—don’t read that way. It’s not her fault—there are plenty of songs I absolutely love and get emotional over that sound pretty stupid if you just write out the lyrics. I mean, I own AC/DC albums¹³.

But just because it’s not the author’s fault that it’s impossible to convey artistic greatness without looking dumb doesn’t mean she isn’t to blame, because it’s our job to know these things. Telling the reader a song was a massive hit and that an emotionally-charged performance on Saturday Night Live drove the country insane in the Summer of 1979 and then dropping lame lyrics just undermines the illusion you’re spinning. I mean, stuff like

I believe you can break me

But I’m saved for the one who saved me

We only look like young stars

Because you can’t see old scars

Sounds like something I wrote in my Freshman Year notebook, not a hit song that defined a generation¹⁴. Again, it’s not because the lyrics are bad, necessarily—it’s just that after carefully crafting the sense that Daisy Jones and The Six were writing and recording world-beating songs, the lyrics you print are almost guaranteed to disappoint and confuse. Not many writers could overcome this challenge, in all fairness—it’s a problem any time you attempt to convey artistic genius on the page.

In the end, if you come for the mildly soapy drama and the whiff of nostalgia for a time when a bunch of drugged-up white folks could dominate the cultural firmament, Daisy Jones and The Six is a perfectly cromulent novel. Or three or four writerly tricks standing on each other’s shoulders, wearing a trenchcoat.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to dig out my old college notebook with all those lyrics I wrote and burn it. Immediately.

Next week: The Gray Man and the triumph of the generic.

1. Favorite example of this is “Brewster’s Millions,” a hit 1902 novel that has been made into a film seven damn times that literally no one remembers. Professional goals: Set.

2. Or so I tell myself when reviewing my royalty statements late at night with a glass of Scotch <bursts into tears>.

3. Except, of course, the piles of cash that gets dumped on your front lawn every day when your book is a runaway hit and gets adapted into a film or seven <bursts into tears>.

4. Fleetwood Mac has exactly two good songs: “Landslide” and “The Chain.” Fight me.

5. Is anyone actually titillated by sex and drugs any more? I mean, I too went to college.

6. I have been implying my own genius in these newsletters for months now, and no one has noticed. You bastards.

7. Or, possibly, this Simpsons clip.

8. Thus adding Daisy Jones and The Six to the long list of fictions that treat “rehab” as a magic bean that effortlessly resets an addict.

9. To be fair to Reid, it did not occur to me to wonder who was asking all the interview questions, so the reveal at the end of the story was a mild surprise for me. Of course, The Jeff Somers Rule of Plot Twists states that if you’re relying on my general air of stupidity to make your plot twist work, you are doing it wrong.

10. The experience of reading this book is often eerily similar to being the only sober person at a party listening to the ridiculous shit everyone else is saying.

11. Certainly Nicks herself does not.

12. This is how I imagine all songs are actually written.

13. Every AC/DC fan has that moment when they’re rockin’ out to something like Let Me Put My Love Into You and they make the mistake of actually thinking about the lyrics, and the next day you wake up and your hair is white and you’re contemplating a condo in Florida.

14. That’s a lie. My Freshman year notebook was filled with Iron Maiden lyrics and self-loathing.