2020: #13 – Daisy Jones & The Six (Taylor Jenkins Reid)

Daisy Jones & The Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid
Published by Ballantine Books on March 5, 2019
Genres: hf - 1960s & 1970s
Pages: 355

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.

When the buzz started over this book, I didn’t really think it was for me. But then a few of my friends raved about the audiobook and we decided to make it our audiobook book club pick for April and I dove in.

This is a situation where if I had read the book in text form, it would probably be 4-stars, but the audiobook production really pushes it over to 5-star territory. This is the story of a band called The Six, lead by Billy Dunne, and Daisy Jones, the talented but chaotic young woman who helps push the band to super-stardom. The story covers the beginnings of the band and of Daisy’s career and goes through the break-up of the band a few years later. You get the points of view of Daisy and most of the band, as well as some peripheral characters, so you get to see the same situations from different angles. There’s a lot of drug use and arguments and relationship strife, both romantic and otherwise, but there’s also a lot here about art and making art and how people come together to make something beautiful and successful, sometimes in spite of themselves.

It’s a multi-actor cast, which is helpful and adds a lot of character to the story. By halfway through I could generally tell who was talking just by the voice, but I did tend to get Warren and Graham confused. “Karen” is performed by Judy Greer, which is an absolute treat.

There is just one major problem with the audiobook. I WANT TO HEAR THE MUSIC! I wish this album really existed so I could hear it. But it looks like Amazon is making a series out of this, and I will definitely be watching.

Other reviews:

• “So there were good points and not so good points but as I have written this review and thought about how I feel about the book my ambivalence seems to have turned to negativity i.e. the cons seem to have outweighed the pros. The writing was definitely dull, plot line predictable and it made me not want to read for a week…” — A Little Haze Book Blog
• “For about 80% of the book, I could care less about what the characters were doing. They were just going back and forth about writing songs and doing drugs. I only liked the last 20% of the book because of the adorable twist, it made me smile. But, let’s just say, the only character I really cared about was Julia.” — Bookish Coffee Blog
• “This is a really fun book, heavy on 1970s nostalgia and breezy in style. The format is innovative and is sure to be adapted successfully for television after being picked up by Amazon.” — A Little Blog of Books