‘Daisy Jones & the Six’ and the ’70s
For all its failures, the Amazon series successfully evokes the beauty of a floating world.
I initially found it quite difficult to write about Amazon’s new series Daisy Jones & the Six, the tale of a 1970s rock band that rises to fame and falls apart just as fast. Nonetheless, I felt a certain urge to do so, perhaps because I am a musician myself, and the music of the 1970s—especially the likes of Derek and the Dominos and Bruce Springsteen—has long inspired me.
The difficulty was compounded by the fact that, in many ways, the series is not particularly good. It was much better when it was called The Fleetwood Mac Story and took place in real life. Indeed, it is so obviously based on Fleetwood Mac’s legendary personal and professional upheavals—inter-band affairs, breakups, drug problems, general traumas, and so on—that when “Gold Dust Woman” comes on the soundtrack in the final episode, I could only think, “Well, they finally came out and said it.”
There is also the general artistic poverty of the series. There is nothing inherently wrong with docudramas, but Daisy Jones & the Six has very serious aesthetic shortcomings. Its fictionalized version of Fleetwood Mac is led by tortured artist Billy Dunne (Sam Claflin), who lacks anything resembling Lindsay Buckingham’s charisma. The manic pixie singer-songwriter Daisy Jones (Riley Keough) who joins Dunne’s band, turns it upside down, and sends it soaring into the platinum album stratosphere, cannot even begin to approach the feral eroticism and mystic unattainability of Stevie Nicks.
The Christine McVie stand-in, keyboardist Karen Sirko (Suki Waterhouse), is at least played with some verve and, at times, touching vulnerability, but she remains trapped in the predictable storyline of love lost to ambition and artistic devotion. The other members of the band are so bland as to be instantly forgettable, though the actors do an excellent job of miming their performances.
Stepping out of the Fleetwood Mac paradigm, the supporting characters are just as cliched, if somewhat more compelling. Producer Teddy Price (Tom Wright), becomes interested in both the Six and Daisy through some absurd coincidences, but Wright plays the character with such understated energy that one can’t help being charmed. This man, one thinks, at least loves music, and would indeed have thrown Daisy into Billy’s mix if he thought a spark might ensue.
Less edifying is Billy’s long-suffering wife Camila Alvarez (Camila Morrone). Morrone is heartbreakingly beautiful, but her character is a retrograde version of the stereotypical rock wife, dedicated more or less entirely to her husband’s career. This is rendered ridiculous by the fact that her husband appears to have no discernible talent whatsoever.
Indeed, this is the series’ fatal weakness. In the book it was based on, the Six’s music had to be imagined, and so it could be great. In the series, the songs and performances are out there for all to see, and the results are not pretty.
In another attempt to emulate Fleetwood Mac, the Six’s music is mostly warmed-over California soft rock with folk elements, and usually sounds like a generic prescription of the Eagles backing Linda Ronstadt. Claflin and Keough reportedly sang their own vocals, and neither can sing particularly well. Their swaggering attempts at rock theatrics also fall disturbingly flat, which is surprising in Keough’s case, given that she has the nepo baby advantage of being Elvis Presley’s granddaughter.
The Six, put simply, don’t sound good enough. You know instinctively that this band wouldn’t have made it, even in the drugged and deranged 1970s.
Despite all of this, however, something in me liked Daisy Jones & the Six, and it kept me coming back to the end of the series—which does give us a few genuinely misty-eyed moments. Something about the series succeeds. Not entirely, but it is there.
Perhaps it is that Daisy Jones & the Six, despite its shortcomings, does manage to capture a certain atmosphere, a sense of the time in which it is set. It manages to evoke the fraught, terminal beauty of the LA music scene of the 1970s, a floating world of drugs, sex, success, money, art, and sometimes desperate sincerity rendered tragic by the exigencies of life at the top.
Many great talents wandered through this floating world, and many did not return from it. No doubt it was quite corrupt and decadent in its own way. But Daisy Jones & the Six captures a romantic but believable vision of it that gives us a momentary sense of how it produced so much great music despite the terrible toll it took on the artists themselves.
Certainly, it is a somewhat sanitized vision. There is a fair amount of drugs and drink, but not much sex, and the characters are far more conscientious than any of their real-life counterparts would have been. This is particularly evident in Camila and Billy’s storyline, given that after an initial lapse he remains faithful to her throughout, despite endless speculation on whether he will eventually fuck Daisy (he doesn’t). In the real 1970s, of course, this would have been too ridiculous a scenario to contemplate. The drugs and groupies would have been more than enough to sate Billy’s needs, emotional or otherwise, and he would have kicked Camila to the curb at the nearest rest stop and gone on his merry way.
Still, watching the series reminded me of a certain sensation I get when I listen to Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs, which was not recorded in LA, but nonetheless perfectly captures the “vibe” of the times. It is a sensation of bright sunlight, warm evenings, bell bottoms, beautiful women with long braided black hair and summer dresses, men in jeans and open-collared shirts, guitars with worn necks leaning against amplifiers and then pulled out for a virtuoso to play us The Greatest Guitar Solo of All Time—sometimes successfully—and a general sense of blurry vagueness, a world in which it is always summer and one will always be young.
This is pure fantasy, of course. In reality, much of what went on in those post-Summer of Love years was sordid and avaricious. But if the records it produced tell us anything, it is that, at least for brief moments, the floating world was there, it had a sound, and if we wish, we can return to it with our turntables and headphones.
Daisy Jones & the Six, at least in its best moments, gives us this gift of return. It sends us back to that floating world where, as Fitzgerald put it, “We beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” As Camila says at the end of the series, “Give Daisy Jones a call.” Perhaps we shall.