Sam Claflin and Riley Keough in Daisy Jones & the Six. Source: Prime Video.
There’s a lovely moment in Daisy Jones & The Six—Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber’s new TV adaptation of Taylor Jenkins Reid’s bestselling 2019 book—when Daisy Jones (Riley Keough) and Billy Dunne (Sam Claflin) harness their creative and sexual tensions and discover how to bottle rock and roll lightning.
As they lay down a recording of ‘Let Me Down Easy’, the camera weaves in and out of the studio and the booth. The camera swirls around keyboardist Karen Sirko (Suki Waterhouse), guitarist Graham Dunne (Will Harrison), bassist Eddie Roundtree (Josh Whitehouse), and drummer Warren Rojas’ (Sebastian Chacon), capturing their ‘hey, this is really something!’ smiles as they finally get to contribute as more than just glorified session players. Producer Teddy Price (Tom Wright) and his engineer pull mixing channels up and down as the band members find their groove. The isolated stems are a glimpse behind the curtain; a testament to how every great band is only ever the sum of its parts.
It’s a trope straight out of the Behind the Music or Classic Albums playbook, except that for all their vague resemblance to Reid’s muses Fleetwood Mac and The Civil Wars, Daisy Jones & The Six isn’t a real band. But by taking the central conceit of Reid’s book—an oral history of a band that broke up at the height of its fame—and transposing it to something resembling a music documentary, Daisy Jones plays a narrative trick on the viewer: it helps us believe that maybe these songs really did rock the world. (Riley Keough could sell me anything and I’d buy it.) I inhaled the entire season’s worth of screeners in two days and emerged a card-carrying Daisy Jones & The Six superfan.
Left: Daisy Jones & the Six. Source: Instagram. Right: Fleetwood Mac. Source: Billboard Magazine.
This isn’t Almost Famous or even Laurel Canyon; it’s an idea of 1970s rock and roll. (And as Patrick Lenton astutely noted in his review, Daisy Jones has some strangely moralistic opinions about sex and drugs and the aforementioned.) I didn’t come to Daisy Jones expecting the white-knuckle authenticity of Behind the Music: Fleetwood Mac, just the will-they-won’t-they love triangle that the book delivered in spades. But I did end up spending a lot of time listening to the accompanying soundtrack slash fake-real album and thinking deeply about the process of inventing a band for screen.
This isn’t just a matter of my being a stickler for accuracy but rather the eternal quandary of narratives about world-winning songs.
The songs—written and produced by Blake Mills, with input from artists including Phoebe Bridgers, Marcus Mumford and Cass McCombs—are pretty good. Some are even close to great, such as the joyful ‘I Know I’m Not Wrong’-esque title track, ‘Let Me Down Easy’, with its Abraxas-aping keys, and ‘Kill You To Try’, an improbably enjoyable mix of Fleetwood Mac-style arrangements and Claflin’s lost Gallagher brother vocal posturing. The rest of the songs land somewhere closer to ‘vibe’ than verisimilitude; they’re contemporary songs wearing a late-70s Instagram filter. At the eye of this tornado of double denim and silk kimonos is ‘Look At Us Now (Honeycomb)’, the song that Daisy and Billy’s chemistry sends straight to number one.
In episode four, ‘Track 4: I Saw The Light’, we see Daisy drop the plates she’s bussing in excitement as the song plays on the diner radio, and the boys in the band hear a passing motorist blasting ‘Look At Us Now’ on their car stereo. It’s surely a nod to the similar scene in Tom Hanks’ brilliant That Thing You Do!, one of the most ebullient moments in cinema. Yet every time the show told me that ‘Look At Us Now’ was blowing up the charts in 1975, I would be yanked out of the spell by the song itself. (Perhaps Mills and his collaborators were under instruction to pen a contemporary hit, which it turns out they’ve done: Aurora is a literal chart-topper.) If it were ‘Aurora’, or ‘Let Me Down Easy’? Absolutely. But ‘Look At Us Now’ felt like it was holding back; too afraid to lean fully into its position in a period piece.
This isn’t just a matter of my being a stickler for accuracy (although that is also true) but rather the eternal quandary of narratives about world-winning songs. In these stories, we’re asked to believe that the song in question is so powerful it could nearly unite the world (or, in the case of the devastatingly disastrous Bill & Ted Face The Music, literally unite the world), which is a big ask for a single song. For every A Star is Born, there is a Lords of Chaos.
I struggled to settle upon what to call these pieces of music: fake songs? But they’re real songs, written for fake artists! Spoofs or pastiche? Only sometimes! Soundalikes? Again, not always! Whatever they are, we know them when we hear them: songs newly written, often by committee, pretending to shoot from the fingertips of imaginary musicians played by actors who may or may not be actually performing them.
We’re asked to believe that the song in question is so powerful it could nearly unite the world, which is a big ask for a single song.
Since I know next to nothing about the process of writing music, I asked my friend and colleague Casey ‘Keating! The Musical’ Bennetto, who has also written songs for Get Krack!n, what makes a good ‘fake song’.
‘It’s confluence, isn’t it? It’s those moments where a musical movement intersects with an emotional beat,’ he told me. ‘If we talk about great moments in art as being at the intersection of ‘‘surprising’’ and ‘‘inevitable’’, then a longform narrative can often do a great job of mapping out ‘‘inevitable’’, preparing the ground for a character’s destiny. And music, because of the constant tussle of tension and release inside each song and the visceral nature of our response to it, is in a great position to come in sideways and provide some other unexpected spark to a moment. When both halves of that arrangement are well crafted, that’s exactly what happens.’
That’s what’s so nice about ‘Let Me Down Easy’s place in Daisy Jones & The Six. In episode 5, ‘Track 5: Fire’, we see Daisy and Billy collaborate for the first time, on a song that turns out to be ‘Let Me Down Easy’. When they finally head to the studio to record it, we feel the band’s relief and excitement at their dreams beginning to take shape as the song is recorded. ‘Look At Us Now’, on the other hand, comes to us pre-ordained: it’s a song that Billy’s already written. It has no narrative weight other than what the plot tells us about it: that it was the band’s big hit, and it sounds a bit like it was written about the band’s central duo.
While steaming through Daisy Jones, I kept thinking about the ‘fake songs’ that I loved, and so many of them were satirical or at least more directly pastiche-y than the ones on Aurora. There’s Josie & the Pussycats and DuJour’s masterful (and Kenneth ‘Babyface’ Evans produced!) pop banger ‘Backdoor Lover’; Spinal Tap’s silly but head-banging ‘Big Bottom’ (no dumber than most of Def Leppard’s hits, honestly); even the non-Wonders tracks from That Thing You Do! (‘What’s his name?? MR DOWN-TOWWWWN’). I asked Casey why he thinks this is.
Left: DuJour from Josie & the Pussy Cats (2001). Right: Spinal Tap from This is Spinal Tap (1984). Source: Imdb.com.
‘Well with the satiric ones it’s easier to say something genuine, because the humour is taken care of in the framing,’ he says. ‘The earnest ones are a lot like the clown wanting to play Hamlet, or the comic actor being cast in their first serious Oscar-bait film and thinking that they must erase all the aspects of their performance that ever gave an audience pleasure. The only way to get around that is to write a genuinely good and accomplished serious song without any ironic framing, which would then very much invite the question: why aren’t you putting it on your own album?’
That question could also be answered with a simple ‘cast Lady Gaga in your film and get her to write the song’, but every generation only gets its one A Star is Born, and sometimes acting chops win out over bona fide musical talent.
Beyoncé, Aaliyah and Lisa ‘Left Eye’ Lopes all unsuccessfully auditioned for the role of Valerie Brown in Josie & the Pussycats—a role that was eventually played by non-musician Rosario Dawson. ‘Beyoncé was really quiet and shy. Who knew? It was a comedy and Aaliyah was more serious and thoughtful. We wanted someone who could really play the comedy,’ co-director Harry Elfont recently revealed.
(Beyoncé would eventually get her revenge: she was cast in Dreamgirls’ 2006 big screen adaptation as the Diana Ross-inspired Deena, whose initial shyness is crucial to the narrative clash with the arguably more talented Effie—played by Jennifer Hudson—when Deena is catapulted to stardom on the basis of her palatability to white audiences.)
Sometimes acting chops win out over bona fide musical talent.
So Daisy Jones always faced an uphill battle: Reid’s book came with lyrics, but the reader was free to imagine the greatest arrangements ever committed to tape. She told Rolling Stone, ‘One of the guys at Amazon […] was like, ‘‘You have made it out to be the greatest album of the 1970s!’’ And now he has to go figure out a way to make it. I’m just glad it’s not my problem.’ In the end, the show’s creators pitched for the horizon between musical greatness and Oscar-clip acting.
The stars of Daisy Jones & The Six really did perform those songs on the show. They weren’t absolute beginners, either: Waterhouse, Whitehouse, Harrison and Chacon had established musical skills that were levelled up by an 18-month ‘band camp’. (You may also be familiar with Keough’s grandfather’s music.) But whether or not you truly commit to Daisy Jones lives or dies—beyond the weapons-grade URST of Keough and Claflin—on whether you can believe that this band truly was great. And as Teddy tells Billy after inviting Daisy to record ‘Look At Us Now (Honeycomb)’ as a duet, ‘Billy, you wrote a good song, not a great one.’ As we watch Daisy and co. blast rapturous arena and stadium crowds again and again, the applause works its Pavlovian magic, but the song fades when listened to out of context.
Perhaps the secret is not to shoot for the stars in the first place. In That Thing You Do!, The Wonders’ one hit only needs to be good enough to our ears—and have enough echoes of real hits from 1964—to conceivably make it to number seven in the Billboard charts. (It also helps that the song was written by the late, great Adam Schlesinger.) In A Star is Born, ‘Black Eyes’ by Jackson Maine (Bradley Cooper) works so well because it’s exactly the type of formerly-great-artist-stuck-in-a-rut song we might hear on a Friday night cable show ‘where rock and country collide’.
An even more instructive comparison might be Almost Famous’ Stillwater. In the words of the film’s (fake) Lester Bangs, played so memorably by Philip Seymour Hoffman, Stillwater is ‘a mid-level band struggling with their own limitations in the harsh face of stardom’. The act’s big song, ‘Fever Dog’, doesn’t have to be as good as Led Zeppelin or Black Sabbath or even Free, because the point of it all is that Stillwater is doomed. Russell Hammond is too handsome (‘Your looks have become a problem!’), Jeff Bebe thinks they should still be The Jeff Bebe Band, and ‘the out of focus guys’ might be talented—hell, one of them is played by Mark Kozelek—but they don’t really want to be there anymore. They’ve gazed into the harsh face of stardom and realised that they don’t really have what it takes.
Perhaps the secret is not to shoot for the stars in the first place.
Daisy Jones & The Six, as the book and show’s framing makes clear, is also doomed, so perhaps ‘Look At Us Now’ doesn’t have to work, either. The show’s pleasures come less from its music than its skewering of po-faced rock and roll mythologising (costume designer Denise Wingate deserves an Emmy for Eddie’s ‘90s look, a laser-accurate ‘power-tripping bassist’ earring-and-waistcoat nightmare that I howled with laughter at every time he appeared).
And in the end, I guess not liking the big hit single makes me a true fan.
