Hi all! I’m still not sure what Tugboat will look like in the new year, but I’m trying out something new with this series, where I’ll write about the ways music and literature inspire each other. To start off, I’m catching up on the Taylor Jenkins Reid sensation with the viral retro romance Daisy Jones & the Six. Spoilers ahead. -AP
I have a hard time with fictional narratives about music, the same way I do with fictional narratives about writing. While I can appreciate the inherent romanticism of creativity, stories like Stuck In Love, Midnight in Paris, and High Fidelity have usually fallen a little flat for me. More often than not, I feel like they slide into hagiography that feels empty, like attempting to describe transcendence — or watching someone gush about art without the communion of actually sharing it with them.
That’s why I came at Daisy Jones and the Six, Taylor Jenkins Reid’s 2019 follow-up to The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, with some caution. I still haven’t read Hugo, but misgivings aside, Daisy Jones seemed like a more approachable alternative. Practically, it had a way shorter library loan waitlist, but it also taps into a longstanding fascination of mine: band breakups and all the juicy lore that goes along with them.
The breakup central to Daisy Jones & the Six, presented in retrospect through fictional interviews gathered by a largely-anonymous author figure, reads at first more Beatles than Fleetwood Mac. Early on in the novel, an uneasy power structure develops in the budding ‘70s rock group The Six, with the brooding and controlling guitarist Billy Dunne at the helm. Meanwhile, It Girl Daisy Jones comes of age on the Sunset Strip, popping pills and searching for someone to take her songwriting chops seriously. When they’re brought together by record execs looking to jumpstart both careers, Daisy Jones & The Six are like liquor and fire, catching quickly in a way that’s dangerous for everyone involved.
Daisy Jones definitely deals in nostalgia. The novel name-drops an array of imagined musical peers and predecessors like The Yardbirds and The Kinks, as well as legendary Nashville venue Exit/In, which opened just seven years before The Six’s rise to the top in 1978. This isn’t unusual for 1970s historical fiction, and especially not for 1970s historical fiction about music — hello, Almost Famous. But Daisy Jones & the Six presents the ugly along with the groovy, with a kernel of darkness even in the story’s high highs. Reid even establishes this as a central theme of Billy Dunne and Daisy Jones’ creative dynamic: while Dunne only wants to write uplifting love songs about his wife, Jones insists on retaining an edge.
Often, however, their story struck me as a little crowded. In addition to Jones, Dunne, and the other five members of the band, we hear from their spouses, their managers, their friends, their producers, their biographers, their roadies, and even their tour accountant. I listened to the audiobook version, which features a full cast of actors to differentiate each perspective, and found myself wondering how all of them must compete for attention on the page. The New York Times review of Daisy Jones & the Six points out that the undiluted recollections limit our access to the characters’ world. I’d go even further. With such a clamor of voices rehashing the same events, it’s hard to zero in on the meaningful threads. Billy’s sobriety journey and his will-they-won’t-they with Daisy understandably take up a lot of real estate, but that sidelines the rest of the band’s struggles with creative dissatisfaction and sexual frustration, making them seem like carbon copies of the leading two even as the novel posits them as distinct and important to the narrative.
To Reid’s credit, Daisy and her bandmates often disagree on the details of their shared experiences, as the writer-character points out in one of a few choice intrusions. Instead, numbers are mixed up and intentions are misinterpreted, and something altogether more interesting than the breakup of a band or a love letter to rock and roll emerges — the fallibility of recollection, and the semiotic conflicts between what we say to each other and what we really mean.
great read! Taught me the word “hagiography” lololol
slay