"Daisy Jones & The Six"

Taylor Jenkins Reid's novel about a seventies rock band is tailor-made for a full-cast recording. The author didn't stint on cliches -- the beautifully tortured talents gonna be tortured, but the reality checks from the supporting characters are the fun bits. An anti-drug novel for sure.

• We love broken, beautiful people. And it doesn’t get much more obviously broken and more classically beautiful than Daisy Jones.
• DAISY: I learned about sex and love the hard way. That men will take what they want and feel no debt, that some people only want one piece of you.
• There’s this peace that comes with knowing you have a person in the world who would do anything for you, that you would do anything for. She was the first time I ever had that.
• while and got out a pen and paper. I wrote some things down. When he woke up, I said, “Your chorus should be more like ‘Big eyes, big soul/big heart, no control/but all she got to give is tiny love.’ ”
• He said, “I’m going to use that in something one day.” And he wrote it down on a napkin and put it in his back pocket. I thought to myself, What the hell makes you think I’m not going to use it in something one day?
• Music is a great equalizer in that way. KAREN: Men often think they deserve a sticker for treating women like people.
• What’s good is when everybody thinks you’re headed somewhere fast, when you’re all potential. Potential is pure fuckin’ joy.
• And when Rich liked it, that was it. It was like the last bit of me that was grounded down to earth just flew off, like someone had pulled the rip cord and I was flying.
• When guys you grew up with are working three jobs. Or they’re lost overseas like we lost Chuck. Of course you don’t deserve it. You have to learn how to reconcile those two things. Having it and not deserving it. Or, you do what I did, and refuse to think about it.
• GRAHAM: Warren had some Christmas lights in his drum kit because he liked to light up his toms. I asked if we could use ’em and he gave me some guff about how he had already packed them up. I said, “Warren, get me your lights now before I tell everyone what an asshole you are.” WARREN: It wasn’t my problem Billy and Camila decided to get married in the middle of the night.
• BILLY: The voice kept saying, If you don’t have a father, how can you be a father? That voice…[pauses] That was the beginning of a bad time. Where I was not myself. Actually, no. I don’t like putting it that way—you’re never not yourself. You’re always you. It’s just, sometimes, who you are…who you are is a shitty person.
• ROD: Let me tell you what it means to manage a rock band. We’re driving all over hell and creation, roadies and crew and the whole nine. And not one person—not one member of that band—asked themselves how we were always stocked up on gas. End of ’seventy-three was the oil crisis, there was a gas shortage. The tour manager and I are bribing gas station attendants like our lives depend on it.
• It didn’t seem right to me that his weakest self got to decide how my life was going to turn out, what my family was going to look like. I got to decide that. And what I wanted was a life—a family, a beautiful marriage, a home—with him. With the man I knew he truly was. And I was going to get it, hell or high water.
• DAISY: It was a big lesson for me when I was young—being given things versus earning them. I was so used to being given things that I didn’t know how important it is for your soul to earn them.
• And it didn’t matter how much of an asshole I thought Billy was. When you can sing like that with someone, there’s a small part of you that feels connected to them. That sort of thing that gets under your skin and doesn’t easily come out. Billy was like a splinter. That’s exactly what he was like.
• KAREN: Graham was always the guy I would talk to about stuff. And that night I found myself wanting to tell him about this great afternoon I’d had. It was like I wanted to talk to him about him.
• BILLY: When someone’s presence gives you energy, when it riles up something in you—the way Daisy did for me—you can turn that energy into lust or love or hate. I felt most comfortable hating her. It was my only choice.
• KAREN: Billy did have a way of making you think you were crazy for even thinking things were unfair when, in fact, they were completely unfair. He wasn’t even aware of the way everyone revolved around him. ROD: The Chosen ones never know they are chosen. They think everyone gets a gold carpet rolled out for them.
• GRAHAM: I thought Eddie’s point was well made. How was our music going to change with Daisy coming in? Especially if she was writing. But, of course, Billy felt like it was just people attacking him. When you have everything, someone else getting a little something feels like they’re stealing from you.
• DAISY: I said, “Good for you for finding some other shit to be addicted to. But it’s not my problem and it’s not the band’s problem and nobody wants to listen to it.” You could see it on his face. That he knew I was right. BILLY: She thought she was brilliant because she’d realized that I’d replaced my addictions. Like I didn’t already know that I clung to my love for my family to keep me sober. That just made me even more mad, that she thought she knew more about me than me.
• DAISY: It made me laugh. That to Billy I needed a reason to want an equal say in the art I created. I said, “Cool, man. Now that you dig it, maybe you can stop being such a dickhead.”
• think I would have made all my own nightmares come true. That’s the kind of guy I am.” DAISY: I said, “It’s like some of us are chasing after our nightmares the way other people chase dreams.” He said, “That’s a song, right there.”
• I don’t know if I would have believed in that type of security before I had it. Before I chose to give it to Billy. And by giving it to Billy, I gave it to myself, too. But saying to someone, “No matter what you do, we’re not over…” I don’t know. Something about that relaxed me.
• And Daisy didn’t actually have confidence. She was always good. Confidence is being okay being bad, not being okay being good. I said, “If you sing this song in a way where you sound good the entire time, you’ve lost.”
• DAISY: We worked on “Young Stars” in fits and starts. We’d have it and then lose it and pick it up days later. I think it was Billy who suggested the line “We only look like young stars/because you can’t see old scars.” That worked for me. We finally built around that.
• I really liked “Write a list of things you’ll regret/I’d be on top smoking a cigarette.” I loved that line.
• But knowing you’re good can only take you so far. At some point, you need someone else to see it, too. Appreciation from people you admire changes how you see yourself. And Billy saw me the way I wanted to be seen. There is nothing more powerful than that. I really believe that. Everybody wants somebody to hold up the right mirror.
• Which is what we all want from art, isn’t it? When someone pins down something that feels like it lives inside us? Takes a piece of your heart out and shows it to you?
• I never understood people putting their real emotions into something they know they have to play on tour over and over and over again.
• It…it feels good to make Daisy smile. It’s…[pauses] I don’t know. I don’t know what I’m saying. DAISY: I like a lot about you. BILLY: She was dangerous. And I knew that. But I don’t think I could recognize that the safer she felt to me, the more dangerous she was.
• We are talking about probably the first man in my life who really saw me, who ever really understood me, who had so much in common with me…and he still didn’t love me. When you find that rare person who really knows who you are and they still don’t love you…
• And then, you know what I realized? It wasn’t very important. How I felt about Daisy. History is what you did, not what you almost did, not what you thought about doing. And I was proud of what I did.
• Songs are about how it felt, not the facts. Self-expression is about what it feels to live, not whether you had the right to claim any emotion at any time. Did I have a right to be mad at him? Did he do anything wrong? Who cares! Who cares? I hurt. So I wrote about it.
• wanted the crowds and cheering and the groupies and the drugs. Also, something they don’t tell you when you buy a houseboat…it’s very easy to get cabin fever. That’s really meant to be more of a weekend thing.
• You know, I think a lot of how I defined myself was in relation to him. I always—my whole life until around that point—I always felt like Billy Dunne’s little brother. And that was when it occurred to me that he probably never defined himself as Graham Dunne’s older brother.
• You need one person who, when the shit hits the fan, grabs your stuff, throws it in a suitcase, and gets you away from the Italian prince. SIMONE: I dragged her ass home.
• you had to make sure Billy and Daisy both had the exact same thing. That rider was twice as long as it needed to be because one of them would get mad if the other had something they didn’t. I’d call Rod and I’d say, “There is no way they need two Ping-Pong tables.”
• I had on a tiny dress and I was cold and I took a blanket and wrapped it around myself and I saw Billy see me. And he laughed. BILLY: Some people will never stop being themselves. And you think it drives you crazy but it is the very thing you will think about when they are gone. When you don’t have them in your life anymore.
• It is Camila, for me. Always. Passion is…it’s fire. And fire is great, man. But we’re made of water. Water is how we keep living. Water is what we need to survive. My family was my water. I picked water. I’ll pick water every time. And I wanted Daisy to find her water. Because I couldn’t be it.
• DAISY: I’d chased this life with all of my heart. I wanted so badly to express myself and be heard and bring solace to other people with my own words. But it became a hell I’d created myself, a cage I’d built and locked myself in. I came to hate that I’d put my heart and my pain into my music because it meant that I couldn’t ever leave it behind. And I had to keep singing it to him, night after night after night, and I could no longer hide how I felt or what being next to him was doing to me.
• And I said, “I think I’m pretending to be conflicted so that everybody feels better.” She said, “I don’t need to feel better. You don’t need to pretend anything for me.” So I stopped.
• And I looked at her, just before we started singing, and I think—I really do think this—I think I thought she was the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen in my life. In that way that you appreciate things more acutely…I mean…you appreciate people more acutely when they are fleeting, right? And I think I knew she was fleeting. I think I knew she was leaving.
• Those lyrics. That small gesture. For one moment, Daisy didn’t remind me that I might fail. She sang the song like she knew I’d succeed. Daisy did that. Daisy. I didn’t know how much I needed it until she gave it to me. And it should have just made me feel better but it hurt, too. Because if I was the man I wanted to be—if I could give Camila the life I’d promised her—well, I mean…there was loss in that, too.
• You wrote a beautiful song about wanting something you know you’ll never have and wanting to have it anyway. I care about you because when I see you, I see an incredible writer—who suffers from the very thing that the man I love suffers from. The two of you think you’re lost souls, but you’re what everybody is looking for.”
• BILLY: I pulled out my wallet and I showed the man the photos I had of my daughters. And as I did, he took my glass from in front of me and put it on the bar on the other side of him. He said, “Gorgeous girls.” I said, “Thank you.” And he said, “Makes you want to live to fight another day, doesn’t it?” ... He said, “Don’t mention it.” And then he picked up my twenty and handed it back to me and said, “Just let me buy it, all right? So I can know I did something for somebody once.”