Since dropping its first three episodes on March 3 on Prime Video, Daisy Jones & the Six has become a hit for Amazon’s streaming network. But are the events chronicled in the series — about the eponymous Daisy (played by Riley Keough, Elvis Presley‘s granddaughter, who apparently dropped an Easter egg to her legendary grandpops) and her band’s rise to extreme fame in the 1970s — based on a true story? Yes and no.
Taylor Jenkins Reid is one of the producers of the Amazon series, and also the author of the 2019 novel of the same name on which the series is based. And while Daisy Jones and her band members are fictional characters, Reid based the band on the very real Fleetwood Mac.
As Collider reports, Reid was inspired to write the book after seeing the band perform live in the 1990s. While the band was originally formed in 1967, Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks didn’t join until 1974 — and it is their relationship that was of most interest to the author. Prior to joining Fleetwood Mac, Buckingham and Nicks performed together as a folk duo (Buckingham Nicks) and released one album in 1973. In addition, the duo were romantic partners from 1969 to 1976, yet continued performing together for decades afterward. Reid wrote about the inspiration behind the book for Hello Sunshine, Reese Witherspoon’s book club:
Two years ago, when I decided I wanted to write a book about rock ‘n’ roll, I kept coming back to that moment when Lindsey watched Stevie sing ‘Landslide.’ How it looked so much like two people in love.
And yet, we’ll never truly know what lived between them. I wanted to write a story about that, about how the lines between real life and performance can get blurred, about how singing about old wounds might keep them fresh.
Of course, Reid’s Daisy is only loosely based on Nicks and what she could learn about the one-time couple from extensive research. She looked to other singing duos to flesh out some of the other details, though could never shake that specific image of Buckingham and Nicks performing “Landslide” from her head.
“Even after copious amounts of research about Fleetwood Mac and a host of other duos and bands, I’m still taken with that moment between them,” Reid wrote. “I can’t help but marvel at the idea that, despite everything they’d been through, Stevie and Lindsey still loved each other then. Or how, despite what it looked like to us all, they no longer did.”
(Via Collider)