Daisy Jones and The Six

Daisy Jones & The Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid
Fiction
2019 Random House Audio
Read by Jennifer Beals, Benjamin Bratt, Judy Greer, Pablo Schreiber and more
Finished on May 6, 2020
Rating: 4/5 (Very Good)

Publisher's Blurb:

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.

Last year everyone was raving about Daisy Jones & The Six, but it didn't really appeal to me until I started hearing readers talk about the exceptional audio version of the book. I decided to give it a try and have to say it's worthy of all that praise. I found myself taking longer walks just so I could continue listening to this behind-the-scenes story of sex, drugs and rock-n-roll. Reid's oral history includes 21 readers, which combined with an interview style, makes it feel more like listening to a podcast than an audiobook. I had to remind myself that this isn't about a real band and as much as I would like to hear the music mentioned throughout the narrative, I'm out of luck. However, the audiobook includes PDFs of the lyrics to the band's songs; I assume the print edition does as well. While there were quite a few notable passages, I don't plan to buy a copy for a re-read. I think the performance of all the readers (especially those of Judy Greer and Benjamin Bratt) is what held my interest more so than the actual plot. Highly recommend.

“I wanted you to feel immersed in it, and not like you were reading fiction, but like you were there. For me, the best way to do that was to mimic what I would argue is the best medium for stories about rock, which is a rock documentary,” Reid explains. “I wanted it to feel like an episode of Behind the Music, as if you were hearing it from the people directly. That there was no filter. The conclusion I came to was that it had to be an oral history.” (Taylor Jenkins Reid, Rolling Stone)