| Rock groups -- Fiction. |
| Nineteen seventies -- Fiction. |
| Man-woman relationships -- Fiction. |
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Summary
Summary
A PENGUIN BOOK CLUB PICK
NATIONAL AND NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
WINNER OF THE 2019 GOODREADS CHOICE AWARD FOR HISTORICAL FICTION
A NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS' CHOICE
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY: The Washington Post * Esquire * Glamour * CBC * NPR * Marie Claire * Real Simple * Good Housekeeping * Parade * Shelf Awareness * BookRiot * E! News * Mental Floss * Paste
"I devoured Daisy Jones & The Six in a day, falling head over heels for it. Daisy and the band captured my heart." --Reese Witherspoon (Reese's Book Club x Hello Sunshine pick)
A gripping novel about the whirlwind rise of an iconic 1970s rock group and their beautiful lead singer, revealing the mystery behind their infamous breakup.
Everyone knows Daisy Jones & The Six: The band's album Aurora came to define the rock 'n' roll era of the late seventies, and an entire generation of girls wanted to grow up to be Daisy. But no one knows the reason behind the group's split on the night of their final concert at Chicago Stadium on July 12, 1979 . . . until now.
Daisy is a girl coming of age in L.A. in the late sixties, sneaking into clubs on the Sunset Strip, sleeping with rock stars, and dreaming of singing at the Whisky a Go Go. The sex and drugs are thrilling, but it's the rock 'n' roll she loves most. By the time she's twenty, her voice is getting noticed, and she has the kind of heedless beauty that makes people do crazy things.
Also getting noticed is The Six, a band led by the brooding Billy Dunne. On the eve of their first tour, his girlfriend Camila finds out she's pregnant, and with the pressure of impending fatherhood and fame, Billy goes a little wild on the road.
Daisy and Billy cross paths when a producer realizes that the key to supercharged success is to put the two together. What happens next will become the stuff of legend.
The making of that legend is chronicled in this riveting and unforgettable novel, written as an oral history of one of the biggest bands of the seventies. Taylor Jenkins Reid is a talented writer who takes her work to a new level with Daisy Jones & The Six , brilliantly capturing a place and time in an utterly distinctive voice.
Author Notes
TAYLOR JENKINS REID is the author of The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo , One True Loves , Maybe in Another Life , After I Do , and Forever, Interrupted . She lives in Los Angeles with her husband, their daughter, and their dog.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Reid (The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo) delivers a stunning story of sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll in the 1960s and '70s in this expertly wrought novel. Mimicking the style and substance of a tell-all celebrity memoir, the book is narrated by a character whose identity is a secret until the end. The central figure, free-spirited yet distinctly complicated Daisy Jones, grows up as the daughter of a famous artist and a French model, crashing her 14-year-old underage self into clubs on L.A.'s Sunset Strip and, increasingly, consuming large quantities of both legal and illegal drugs. When she finds her forte in singing and songwriting, Daisy's world changes. Signed to Runner Records, she soon meets labelmate and tortured singer-songwriter Billy Dunne. Billy goes from not wanting Daisy in his band to writing some of their biggest hits with her, and their chemistry is explosive. But Billy nearly ruined his marriage to true love Camila by being unfaithful, drinking, and drugging, and he won't throw away his second chance with her-although he tries to get Daisy into recovery, as he sees her heading down the same dark path that he went down. Add in a colorful cast of backup musicians, all of whom have their own demons (particularly Billy's overshadowed brother, Graham, and his on-again, off-again girlfriend and bandmate, Karen), and Reid creates both story line and character gold. The book's prose is propulsive, original, and often raw. Readers will accept and appreciate why and when the narrator's identity is finally revealed. Reid's gift for creating imperfect characters and taut plots courses throughout this addictive novel. Agent: Theresa Park, Park Literary & Media. (Mar.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Daisy Jones and the Six was the hottest rock band of the seventies; the sexy voice of Daisy Jones and the pleading tones of Billy Dunne were the soundtrack to countless sweltering summer nights. Yet fans had no idea of the chaos behind the curtain. Daisy and Billy, oozing raw attraction on stage, couldn't even look at each other as they walked off. When she wasn't singing or writing songs, wild child Daisy was popping pills. Billy's addiction was alcohol, until he met Camila and discovered a whole new kind of dependence. Graham, Eddie, and Warren loved the rock 'n' roll lifestyle, but Karen and Pete had other things on their minds. Framed as a tell-all biography compiled through interviews and articles, Reid's (The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, 2017) novel so resembles a memoir of a real band and conjures such true-to-life images of the seventies music scene that readers will think they're listening to Fleetwood Mac or Led Zeppelin. Reid is unsurpassed in her ability to create complex characters working through emotions that will make your toes curl. HIGH-DEMAND BACK STORY: Reese Witherspoon's Hello Sunshine is producing a 13-episode series for Amazon. Order accordingly.--Tracy Babiasz Copyright 2018 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
The '70S are back, apparently. Elton John, Cher and Fleetwood Mac are on world tours. Marie Claire magazine recently argued that the 1970s were "the best fashion decade" with a sequin-and-paisley slide show that included Diana Ross, Debbie Harry, John Travolta and the Osmonds (?!). And in the first "Saturday Night Live" episode of 2019, the retro-rock band Greta Van Fleet appeared on stage looking like the tasseled, psychedelic love children of Yoko Ono and David Bowie. On Weekend Update, the joke was that their name was actually Super Blood Wolf Moon. Our love for the '70s, equal parts homage and satire, is inseparable from the bell-bottomed music scene of that decade. Taylor Reid Jenkins has written a stylish and propulsive if sometimes sentimental novel set against that backdrop, in the stadiums, studios and pool houses of late-1970s L.A. Though the back cover suggests that "everyone knows Daisy Jones & The Six," the book is the story of a fake band in a real world. "Daisy Jones & The Six" is a fairly earnest portrait of the '70s, though, a mockumentary without the mocking. It begins as two stories: that of Daisy Jones, the bangle-wearing, hard-partying young singer-songwriter whose beauty is as powerful as her voice, and that of Billy Dunne, the denim-wearing, hard-partying young guitarist and frontman for the rising rock band The Six. Daisy has recorded a semisuccessful solo album of other people's music, but she wants to write her own songs. Although she drifts in and out of the beds of men she meets on the road, her most reliable romance is with the pills rattling in her pockets. Billy has his own brush with the excesses of sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll. Not long after his pregnant wife, Camila, finds him in a compromising position on the tour bus, he comes home and checks into rehab, swearing sobriety and loyalty to his family. Then a prophetic manager plays Cupid, suggesting that Billy and Daisy try a duet on The Six's second album. The band members - Billy, his brother Graham, Karen, Warren, Eddie and Pete - aren't thrilled. They resist the decade's slide into soft rock. But once the duet, "Honeycomb," becomes The Six's biggest hit, the only choice is to invite Daisy to join the band. And sure enough, Daisy and Billy enter a love-hate friendship fraught with a will-they-or-won't-they sexual tension that makes for some of the strongest pages in the book. Even the photographer for the cover of "Aurora," their third album, feels it: "They were angled in, and there was so much ... the negative space between them felt... alive somehow. Electric. There was so much purpose behind the not touching, right?" Romance is Reid's calling card. Her first four books, including "Forever, Interrupted" and "After I Do," are first-person, voice-driven novels narrated by women somewhere between heartbroken and madly in love. In her fifth and most recent, "The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo," she began to approach the terrain of "Daisy Jones & The Six," presenting another famous figure - this time a film star - telling her love story to the narrator, a journalist. It's a pleasure, then, to see Reid tweaking her own formula in "Daisy Jones & The Six" while also leaning on her strength, the love story. Narratively speaking, this is easily her most sophisticated and ambitious novel. Which is not to say that all of its risks pay off. Where this book departs from Reid's others - and from most rock novels - is in its unconventional structure. Presented almost entirely as an oral history, the novel reads like the transcript of a particularly juicy episode of VHl's "Behind the Music." In the brief author's note at the beginning, the author - Reid? someone else? who? - explains, "This book serves as the first and only time members of the band have commented on their history together." The mystery author has collected the voices of The Six, Daisy, their manager, music critics and others in a kind of monologue mix tape. And this device works surprisingly well. If we can forget for a minute the question of just who this "as told to" is being told to, it's easy to fall under the musical spell of these voices, which shift fluidly from speaker to speaker as the characters hand off the microphone. Reid has a great ear, both for the way people talk in interviews and for the music they describe, as when Billy is explaining the B-side of "Aurora": '"Young Stars' is tortured but up-tempo, it's a little dangerous but you can dance to it. And then you go right into 'Regret Me,' which is hard and fast and raw. And then come down off it with 'Midnights,' which gets a little sweeter. You lead into 'A Hope Like You.' Slow, and tender and wistful and spartan. ... And then, you know, the sun comes up at the end. You leave on the high note. You go out with a bang. 'Aurora.' Sprawling and lush and percussive." But while it makes for a heady journey through the band's ascent, the script format inherently limits our access to the characters' innermost selves. The camera is locked on a tripod, the interviewees confessing their greatest fears and loves in the same shoulders-up shot for much of the novel. After a while, we long to get closer, to hear what the characters aren't confessing on the record, or to zoom out, to take in more of the decade than its miniature backstage dramas. When only the characters narrate the story, their reminiscences can fall flat. "It is what I have always loved about music," Daisy says. "Not the sounds or the crowds or the good times as much as the words - the emotions, and the stories, the truth - that you can let flow right out of your mouth. Music can dig, you know?" Moments like these are a little cheesy, but maybe that's the point? I felt the same way reading Daisy and Billy's lyrics, which perfectly channel the cringey, soulful, notquite-brilliant but damn-catchy lines of every pop song written in the 1970s. Reid is so good at them that she's written a whole album of lyrics, which is included at the back of the book ("But maybe I should stake my claim / Maybe I should claim my stake / I've heard some hopes are worth the break"). It was these songs that convinced me that Reid could see her subject with some critical distance, that for every pastel Polaroid in the book, there's another moment that is, if not making fun, at least having fun. And here is the ironic thing: It's at that moment that we start to let our guard down. Maybe we download Fleetwood Mac's "Rumours." We can't help singing along. We think: Wow, O.K., it's really good. We start to feel the feelings of Daisy and Billy, and we forget the nagging question about who is telling this story anyway? And when we finally find out, we might cry a few unironic tears. In the end, that's the most surprising gift of "Daisy Jones & The Six" - it's a way to love the rock 'n' roll of the 1970s, without apology, without cynicism, bell-bottoms and all. The novel feels like a particularly juicy episode of VHl's 'Behind the Music.' ELEANOR HENDERSON is the author ofthe novels "Ten Thousand Saints" and "The Twelve-Mile Straight."
Kirkus Review
What ever happened to Daisy Jones and The Six, the iconic 1970s rock band that topped the charts and sold out stadiums? It's always been a mystery why the musicians suddenly disbanded.Reid (The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, 2017, etc.) takes an unusual approach to dissecting the breakup of the fictional rock band by offering a narrative composed solely of transcribed interviews. At the center of the documentary-style novel is the relationship between lead singer Billy Dunne, recovering addict and aspiring family man, and sexy bad girl Daisy Jones, whose soulful voice and complex lyrics turn out to have been the missing ingredient The Six needed. When Daisy joins the band, the group catapults to fame, but not without cost. She refuses to simply fall in line and let Billy make the artistic decisions. In doing this, not only does she infuriate the band leader, she also sets an example for other members who are only too happy to start voicing their own demands. Over time the tension between Billy and Daisy grows increasingly more complicated, threatening to take its toll on Billy's home life. He is fiercely loyal to his wife, Camila, while also being fully cognizant of his weaknessesa torturous combination for Billy. Other band members have their own embroilments, and Daisy's bestie, disco diva Simone Jackson, enhances the cast, but the crux of the story is about how the addition of Daisy to The Six forever changes the chemistry of the band, for better and worse. There is great buildup around answering the big question of what happened at their final concert together, though the revelation is a letdown. Further, the documentary-style writing detracts from the storytelling; it often feels gimmicky, as though the author is trying too hard for a fresh and clever approach. This is a shame because her past novels, traditionally told, have been far more engaging.Despite some drawbacks, an insightful story that will appeal to readers nostalgic for the 1970s. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Daisy Jones was the "it girl" of the 1970s rock-and-roll scene, gifted but unpolished. She couldn't finish a single song on her own and behaved as though she loved the lifestyle more than the music, making her as dangerous as she was beautiful. Billy Dunne was the dynamic frontman of the Six, a struggling addict who was desperate to prove himself to his wife and kids. They were talented apart and explosive together. While delivering intricate and impassioned story lines for all band members, this novel centers on how the partnership, chemistry, hostility, and love shared by Daisy and Billy shot the group straight to the top of charts, until their strained relationship ultimately ended the band. Told decades later through pieced-together interviews, the story is filtered through nostalgia. The narrative's presentation and the emotional, raw way the characters recall their glory days will make readers question if the band is really fictional. VERDICT This latest from Reid (The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo) is for music lovers, romance fans, and anyone who wants to feel invincible with youth, intoxicated by music, and a powerful longing for days gone by. [See Prepub Alert, 10/1/18; also check out the Spotify playlist and forthcoming -Amazon Video web-based miniseries.-Ed.]-Heidi Uphoff, Albuquerque, NM © Copyright 2019. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
The Groupie Daisy Jones, 1965-1972 Daisy Jones was born in 1951 and grew up in the Hollywood Hills of Los Angeles, California. The daughter of Frank Jones, the well-known British painter, and Jeanne LeFevre, a French model, Daisy started to make a name for herself in the late sixties as a young teenager on the Sunset Strip. Elaine Chang (biographer, author of Daisy Jones: Wild Flower): Here is what is so captivating about Daisy Jones even before she was "Daisy Jones." You've got a rich white girl, growing up in L.A. She's gorgeous--even as a child. She has these stunning big blue eyes--dark, cobalt blue. One of my favorite anecdotes about her is that in the eighties a colored-contact company actually created a shade called Daisy Blue. She's got copper-red hair that is thick and wavy and . . . takes up so much space. And then her cheekbones almost seem swollen, that's how defined they are. And she's got an incredible voice that she doesn't cultivate, never takes a lesson. She's born with all the money in the world, access to whatever she wants--artists, drugs, clubs--anything and everything at her disposal. But she has no one. No siblings, no extended family in Los Angeles. Two parents who are so into their own world that they are all but indifferent to her existence. Although, they never shy away from making her pose for their artist friends. That's why there are so many paintings and photos of Daisy as a child--the artists that came into that home saw Daisy Jones, saw how gorgeous she was, and wanted to capture her. It's telling that there is no Frank Jones piece of Daisy. Her father is too busy with his male nudes to pay much attention to his daughter. And in general, Daisy spends her childhood rather alone. But she's actually a very gregarious, outgoing kid--Daisy would often ask to get her hair cut just because she loved her hairdresser, she would ask neighbors if she could walk their dogs, there was even a family joke about the time Daisy tried to bake a birthday cake for the mailman. So this is a girl that desperately wants to connect. But there's no one in her life who is truly interested in who she is, especially not her parents. And it really breaks her. But it is also how she grows up to become an icon. We love broken, beautiful people. And it doesn't get much more obviously broken and more classically beautiful than Daisy Jones. So it makes sense that Daisy starts to find herself on the Sunset Strip. This glamorous, seedy place. Daisy Jones (singer, Daisy Jones & The Six): I could walk down to the Strip from my house. I was about fourteen, sick of being stuck in the house, just looking for something to do. I wasn't old enough to get into any of the bars and clubs but I went anyway. I remember bumming a cigarette off of a roadie for the Byrds when I was pretty young. I learned quickly that people thought you were older if you didn't wear your bra. And sometimes I'd wear a bandanna headband like the cool girls had on. I wanted to fit in with the groupies on the sidewalk, with their joints and their flasks and all of that. So I bummed a cigarette from this roadie outside the Whisky a Go Go one night--the first time I'd ever had one and I tried to pretend I did it all the time. I held the cough in my throat and what have you--and I was flirting with him the best I could. I'm embarrassed to think about it now, how clumsy I probably was. But eventually, some guy comes up to the roadie and says, "We gotta get inside and set up the amps." And he turns to me and says, "You coming?" And that's how I snuck into the Whisky for the first time. I stayed out that night until three or four in the morning. I'd never done anything like that before. But suddenly it was like I existed. I was a part of something. I went from zero to sixty that night. I was drinking and smoking anything anybody would give me. When I got home, I walked in through the front door, drunk and stoned, and crashed in my bed. I'm pretty sure my parents never even noticed I was gone. I got up, went out the next night, did the same thing. Eventually, the bouncers on the Strip recognized me and let me in wherever I was going. The Whisky, London Fog, the Riot House. No one cared how young I was. Greg McGuinness (former concierge, the Continental Hyatt House): Ah, man, I don't know how long Daisy was hanging around the Hyatt House before I noticed her. But I remember the first time I saw her. I was on the phone and in walks this crazy tall, crazy skinny girl with these bangs. And the biggest, roundest blue eyes you ever saw in your life, man. She also had this smile. Huge smile. She came in on the arm of some guy. I don't remember who. A lot of the girls around the Strip back then, I mean, they were young, but they tried to seem older. Daisy just was, though. Didn't seem like she was trying to be anything. Except herself. After that, I noticed she was at the hotel a lot. She was always laughing. There was nothing jaded about her, 'least when I knew her. It was like watching Bambi learn how to walk. She was real naïve and real vulnerable but you could tell there was something about her. I was nervous for her, tell you the truth. There were so many men in the scene that were . . . into young girls. Thirty-something rock stars sleeping with teenagers. Not saying it was okay, just saying that's how it was. How old was Lori Mattix when she was with Jimmy Page? Fourteen? And Iggy Pop and Sable Starr? He sang about it, man. He was bragging about it. When it came to Daisy--I mean, the singers, the guitarists, the roadies--everybody was looking at her. Whenever I saw her, though, I'd try to make sure she was doing all right. I kept tabs on her here and there. I really liked her. She was just cooler than anything else happening around her. Daisy: I learned about sex and love the hard way. That men will take what they want and feel no debt, that some people only want one piece of you. I do think there were girls--the Plaster Casters, some of the GTOs--maybe they weren't being taken advantage of, I don't know. But it was a bad scene for me, at first. I lost my virginity to somebody that . . . it doesn't matter who it was. He was older, he was a drummer. We were in the lobby of the Riot House and he invited me upstairs to do some lines. He said I was the girl of his dreams. I was drawn to him mainly because he was drawn to me. I wanted someone to single me out as something special. I was just so desperate to hold someone's interest. Before I knew it, we were on his bed. And he asked me if I knew what I was doing and I said yes even though the answer was no. But everyone always talked about free love and how sex was a good thing. If you were cool, if you were hip, you liked sex. I stared at the ceiling the whole time, waiting for him to be done. I knew I was supposed to be moving around but I stayed perfectly still, scared to move. All you could hear in the room was the sound of our clothes rubbing up against the bedspread. I had no idea what I was doing or why I was doing things I knew I didn't want to be doing. But I've had a lot of therapy in my life now. And I mean a lot of therapy. And I see it now. I see myself clearly now. I wanted to be around these men--these stars--because I didn't know how else to be important. And I figured I had to please them if I wanted to stay. When he was done, he got up. And I pulled my dress down. And he said, "If you want to go back down to your friends, that's all right." I didn't really have any friends. But I knew he meant I needed to leave. So I did. He never talked to me again. Simone Jackson (disco star): I remember seeing Daisy on the dance floor one night at the Whisky. Everybody saw her. Your eye went right to her. If the rest of the world was silver, Daisy was gold. Daisy: Simone became my best friend. Simone: I brought Daisy out with me everywhere. I never had a sister. I remember . . . It was the Sunset Strip riot, when all of us went down to Pandora's and protested the curfew and the cops. Daisy and I went out, protested, met up with some actors and went over to Barney's Beanery to keep partying. After that, we went back to somebody's place. Daisy passed out on this guy's patio. We didn't go home until the next afternoon. She was maybe fifteen. I was probably nineteen. I just kept thinking, Doesn't anybody care about this girl but me? And, by the way, we were all on speed back then, even Daisy as young as she was. But if you wanted to stay skinny and be up all night, you were taking something. Mostly bennies or black beauties. Daisy: Diet pills were an easy choice. It didn't even feel like a choice. It didn't even feel like we were getting high, at first. Coke, too. If it was around, you took a bump. People didn't even consider it an addiction. It wasn't like that. Simone: My producer bought me a place in Laurel Canyon. He wanted to sleep with me. I told him no and he bought it for me anyway. I had Daisy move in. We ended up sharing a bed for six months. So I can tell you firsthand that that girl never slept. I'd be trying to fall asleep at four in the morning and Daisy would want the light on so she could read. Daisy: I had pretty bad insomnia for a long time, even when I was a kid. I'd be up at eleven o'clock, saying I wasn't tired, and my parents would always yell at me to "just go to sleep." So in the middle of the night I was always looking for quiet things to do. My mom had these romance novels hanging around so I would read those. It would be two in the morning and my parents would be having a party downstairs and I'd be sitting on my bed with my lamp on, reading Doctor Zhivago or Peyton Place. And then it just became habit. I would read anything that was around. I wasn't picky. Thrillers, detective novels, sci-fi. Around the time I moved in with Simone, I found a box of history biographies on the side of the road one day, up in Beachwood Canyon. I tore through those in no time. Simone: I'll tell you, she's the entire reason I started wearing a sleeping mask. [Laughs] But then I kept doing it because I looked chic. Daisy: I was living with Simone for two weeks before I went home to get more clothes. My dad said, "Did you break the coffeemaker this morning?" I said, "Dad, I don't even live here." Simone: I told her the one condition of living with me was that she had to go to school. Daisy: High school was not easy for me. I knew that to get an A, you had to do what you were told. But I also knew that a lot of what we were being told was bullshit. I remember one time I was assigned an essay on how Columbus discovered America and so I wrote a paper about how Columbus did not discover America. Because he didn't. But then I got an F. I said to my teacher, "But I'm right." And she said, "But you didn't follow the assignment." Simone: She was so bright and her teachers didn't seem to really recognize that. Daisy: People always say I didn't graduate high school but I did. When I walked across the stage to get my diploma, Simone was cheering for me. She was so proud of me. And I started to feel proud of myself, too. That night, I took the diploma out of its case and I folded it up and I used it, like a bookmark, in my copy of Valley of the Dolls. Simone: When my first album flopped, my record label dropped me. My producer kicked us out of that place. I got a job waiting tables and moved in with my cousin in Leimert Park. Daisy had to move back in with her parents. Daisy: I just packed up my stuff from Simone's and drove it right back to my parents' place. When I walked in the front door, my mom was on the phone, smoking a cigarette. I said, "Hey, I'm back." She said, "We got a new couch," and then just kept on talking on the phone. Simone: Daisy got all of her beauty from her mother. Jeanne was gorgeous. I remember I met her a few times back then. Big eyes, very full lips. There was a sensuality to her. People used to always tell Daisy she looked just like her mother. They did look similar but I knew better than to tell Daisy that. I think one time I said to Daisy, "Your mom is beautiful." Daisy said to me, "Yeah, beautiful and nothing else." Excerpted from Daisy Jones & the Six: A Novel by Taylor Jenkins Reid All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.