Daisy Jones and the Six has just aired on Prime Video, and the highly-anticipated series invites viewers to follow the rise and fall of the 1970s rock band, and all the drama and romantic entanglements that came with it. . The show is presented as an oral history, coming 20 years after a pivotal concert that changed the trajectory of the band members forever. But is Daisy Jones and the Six based on a true story?
Sadly, Daisy Jones and the Six weren't actually a real band. Taylor Jenkins Reid invented the band in her 2019 novel, a fictional oral history set in the 1970s music scene. But it feels authentic because it's inspired by some very famous musicians - and their equally famous plays. For example, Reed definitely had Fleetwood Mac in mind when he wrote it. In fact, she mentions them in the book's acknowledgments section, thanking her husband Alex for "hearing the rumors and confronting [her] about Lindsay Buckingham and Christine McVie dispute. "Support!"
Of course, Rumors is widely regarded as one of the best albums of all time, including such timeless classics as "Go Your Own Way" and "The Chain." But like Aurora in Reed's novel and TV series, it's also driven by a lot of behind-the-scenes drama, including Kristen and John McVie's breakup and the impending breakup of Stevie Nicks and Lindsay Buckingham . Nicks told Bustle in 2020: "[Kristen and I] would talk about how we don't let this whole thing implode and break up the band. So we think women are women, and we know that women always, no matter what, we There’s no way this band will be broken up.”
But it wasn't just reading Rumors that inspired Reed. In a Hello Sunshine blog post, the author stated that the band's 1997 reunion concert caught her attention as a teenager. Years later, while revisiting the song on YouTube, Reed said: “I saw later on in the show that Steve was singing ‘Silver Springs’ like a scorned woman, holding the microphone. Like holding a weapon and drilling holes in Lindsay's head with her eyes as she spoke, "Her voice will haunt him," a haunting performance that remains a hit to this day.
Reed also said she revisited her 1997 performance of "Landslide" after deciding to write Daisy Jones' script. "I wanted to write a story about this, about how the lines between real life and performance can become blurred, about how singing can keep old wounds fresh," she wrote.
Of course, while Fleetwood Mac has been included in Reed's book, the audiovisual elements of the adaptation seem to lean more towards comparison - from the album's design to the music itself. (For example, "The Chain" and "Look At Us Now (Honeycomb)" have very similar openings.)
While Fleetwood Mac is the most obvious source of inspiration, it wasn't the only band that powered Daisy Jones and the Six. Following the book's 2019 release, Reed told Bustle that the 2014 breakup of "Civil War" played a role in her creative process. "They were a man and a woman who were very in sync musically but not romantically. At least, that's how it looked from the outside," she explained. "Then they just casually broke up and never talked about why. I was curious and thought, 'Could I make my own version of Civil War?'"
The similarities are obvious here too. Music duo Joy Williams and John Paul White are not romantically involved (despite rumors), but as Williams told WNYC, they are In 2014, I went through a “creative divorce.” The pair had also previously canceled a European tour, citing "internal discord and irreconcilable differences in ambition" - another storyline that certainly echoes that of Daisy Jones.
