Last night’s mist drifts from my eyes as the Today show plays a clip of Daisy Jones & The 6 performing on SNL like a band called Daisy Jones & The 6 WOULD HAVE performed on SNL had they been a REAL band & they were a band I think as REAL as my breath in the series & the book but not in real life & I have to convince myself this isn’t a REAL band only a figment of an author’s imagination as much as I want them to be a REAL band & they didn’t perform on SNL in 1977 or play to 50,000 people at Soldier field & didn’t have two songs in the Top 10 at the same time & that Daisy is played by an actress who is Elvis’s granddaughter & I’m wracking my pre-coffee brain about how could I have missed all this in 1977 when all kid me did was listen to FM radio or hang out in record stores & now I ask if my dad is still waiting for the Metrobus on 82nd Street in his pressed white mailman shirt & if my mom is home vacuuming shag carpeting in our paneled living room &, hell, are they both still alive? I see our behemoth Zenith console tv next to the hi-fi in the living room both spit-shine polished by Pledge but there aren’t any Daisy Jones & the 6 albums or even 8-tracks & it’s because this band doesn’t exist but they’re not fake news or a Russian disinformation campaign in an era where we don’t know who to believe or what’s true or false but I want them to be a REAL band & so do a lot of fans who streamed the show & then I see a tik-tok of the bass player at a rehearsal even though the show has finished filming & WTF are they actually going to tour? I want new music from them & I want to see them live & fans of the show are all over social media saying not to criticize them if they spend too much on tickets to a Daisy Jones show & I feel guilty writing about a band whose existence I’m questioning like a conspiracy theory on the week of another school shooting but mass shootings are too common that much I believe & it’s like I’m back in my time warp watching this on the Internet in the 21st century & I’m sad because they don’t have bands like this anymore & then I realize this band never was & I’m not sure if I ever was either.
Nina Hill