“Stunning” . . .”Explosive” . . . “All-consuming” . . . “Addictively voyeuristic.”
The praise on the back jacket of Daisy Jones and the Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid was captivating, if not a little high in amperage. And having been a book editor for many years, I know that hardcover jacket blurbs are somewhat like asking your best friends—the ones with similar taste — to weigh in.
But after some heavier hearted reading (see last month’s column), I was ready for something light and transportive “into the magic of the seventies music scene in a way I’ll never forget,” as Reese Witherspoon raved. Witherspoon is also the executive producer of the adaptation of the book for Amazon Prime Video.
As an 80’s teenager, I loved 70’s music, all the good and occasionally the embarrassing. The Eagles, CSNY, Fleetwood Mac, Bread, Blondie. So a story that goes behind the scenes of how a 1970’s band sparks, lights, and combusts? I was ready to do some time travel.
The oral history format is intriguing, especially for a novel. Told through spliced together interviews decades after the band had sung its last song, the story unfolds via many perspectives: two unequally talented brothers who start the band; musicians who join, jam, and whine from the edges; a particularly tenacious wife; and many of the enablers it takes to move a band from zero to sixty—agents, producers, reviewers, mixers, fixers, players. They all contribute their memories (sometimes amusingly contradictory) of the band’s rise from a mid-western wedding and bar band to the hippie hills and corporate recording studios of L.A. to the roar of stadiums filled with fans, with plenty of cracks in between.
Most if not all of this rise is thanks to Daisy Jones, a California girl who has pockets full of pills, a head full of songs, and the kind of voice and looks to stun everyone around her. Of course, she’s both magic and poison for the charismatic lead singer, Billy, and much of the story/interviews center on the songs they write and sing together and the sparks that fly around them.
I’d love to say that those sparks felt as if they were coming from a bonfire, or at least a mesmerizing campfire, but they often felt as manufactured as a gas hearth that you turn on and off with a flick of a switch. Was it too many storytellers? The predictable 70’s soft-rock themes of “drugs and sex and love and denial” that Billy also uses to describe their album? That Daisy and Billy appeared tailor-made for an Amazon Prime series? In their denim and lace, Billy and Daisy looked like 70’s rock stars, but the struggles and emotions that went along with their appearance felt more contrived than true.
In the middle of picking up and putting down this book, I went to hear some live music at a place that had been around long before the 70’s, Nutshell Hall in Lake Huntington, NY. A mix of country, honky-tonk, and Americana played by Brewster & the Jons, followed by Cliff Westfall, rocked the high-school gymnasium-sized hall, got people up dancing, and buzzed through my body. I had no idea what the lives of these musicians were like but hearing them strum and pluck guitars and vibrate the air with their voices made me wonder if a book about a real band member would reveal what I was missing—sparks that came from an internal flame.
When I got home, I scoured internet lists of ‘best rock memoirs’. Girl in a Band by singer and bass player Kim Gordon immediately caught my eye. The band of the title, Sonic Youth, overlapped timewise with remnants of 70’s rock, but its raw, rough-edged sound paid tribute to punk and No Wave, and Gordon’s singing was less lyrical than powerful. However, her memoir contained the behind-the-scenes and what’s-in-my-head descriptions I was looking for and her story had some intriguing similarities to Daisy Jones’s fictitious one. Gordon was a southern California girl of the same era and class. She wrote many of Sonic Youth’s lyrics, often with her founding bandmate/boyfriend/husband Thurston Moore. And just as Daisy Jones and the Six draws you in with the promise that you’ll see a band break up, Girl in a Band begins with Gordon playing her last concert with her soon-to-be ex; it takes decades and most of the book to get back to that point, but you know you’ll see the broken shards at the end.
That’s pretty much where the similarities swerve into different territories. Kim Gordon left California for New York around the time the fictitious Daisy Jones was singing to packed stadiums. Instead of passing out in hotel suites, Gordon was couch-surfing around Manhattan. And she worked in bookstores, galleries, and copy shops to fund a more constructive addiction, making art and eventually music. “From the beginning, music for me was visceral,” Gordon explains. “When it was going well, it was almost ecstatic experience.” It’s hard to capture that experience in words, but Gordon does capture her muse, New York City, gritty, graffitied, and with music, art, and possibility around every shadowy corner. Best of all, while Kim Gordon eventually lived the life of a girl in a band, it was anything but predictable.
These two books were written to do two very different things. Depending on the reader, one book’s praise may fit another one better. Sometimes the best part of a book is that it leads you to one you would have never read otherwise and may appreciate more. In that spirit, I’ll leave you with a few ‘girl in a band’ bios/memoirs I and others have appreciated: Just Kids by Patti Smith, Rat Girl by Kristen Hersh, Lady Sings the Blues by Billie Holiday and William Duffy, Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon and the Journey of a Generation by Sheila Weller.
Originally published in the Sullivan County Democrat, 4/11/23
Reading In the Catskills 
This is a fantastic article –I love it, thank you.