I haven’t stayed awake to complete a book in a long time. However, I broke that streak while finishing Daisy Jones & The Six.
Written as an oral history of where-are-they-now type of interviews, this book tells the story of the fictional 1970s rock & roll band Daisy Jones & The Six from the band members, family members, and studio personnel who were there. Of course, this means that the accounts of certain events differ.
We hear from Daisy, a girl from in L.A. in the late sixties, whose parents are famous and who enjoys sneaking into clubs on the Sunset Strip, sleeping with rock stars, and dreaming of singing at the Whisky a Go Go. She’s beautiful and musically talented with a husky, gravelly voice that gets her noticed.
We also hear about The Six, a band led by the Billy Dunne. As The Six head out on their first ever tour, Billy’s girlfriend Camila finds herself pregnant. In dealing with the pressures of fatherhood and fame, Billy goes wild on the road. We get to hear firsthand how Daisy and Billy cross paths to become ‘Daisy Jones & The Six’ when a producer realizes that the key to both singers’ success is to put the two together.
As Billy struggles to stay sober and balance his rockstar fame with his responsibilities as a husband and father, Daisy was living out the embodiment of the rock and roll lifestyle with riotous parties and drugs on demand. The true hart of this story is the push and pull of Daisy and Billy’s feelings for each other as they try to capture a number one rock and roll album, achieve that goal, then have the band suffer an abrupt and infamous split at their Chicago tour stop in 1979.
My favorite quotes:
Author’s Note – “The truth often lies, unclaimed, in the middle.”
Daisy – “I am not going to sit around sweating my ass off just so men can feel more comfortable. It’s not my responsibility to not turn them on. It’s their responsibility to not be an asshole.”
Kassner Rating: ♥♥♥♥♥ (5 hearts! I loved it!)
Buy it from Amazon here.
