Daisy Jones & the Six were the biggest band of the 1970s until suddenly they weren’t, dissolving on stage during a sold-out stadium show and disappearing for 20 years until a documentary filmmaker convinces them to tell the story about how it all went sideways. And that’s where we meet the principals in Daisy Jones & The Six Episode 1, adapted by showrunners and 500 Days of Summer screenwriters Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber from the bestselling 2019 novel by Taylor Jenkins Reid. Singer and songwriter Daisy Jones (Riley Keough), fellow lead singer/songwriter Billy Dunne (Sam Claflin), guitarist Graham Dunne (Will Harrison), drummer Warren Rojas (Sebastian Chacon), bassist Eddie Roundtree (Josh Whitehouse), organist Karen Sirko (Suki Waterhouse), and band photographer/voice of reason Camila Morrone (Camila Dunne). And it’s notable that they’re all interviewed separately, because the general vibe here is prickly. But before we find out why, we’ve got to go all the way back to the beginning.   

In 1961, Daisy is still named Margaret (Lorelei Olivia Mote). She’s also eight years old and singing along with tunes on her Fisher-Price record player as her wealthy parents entertain a swanky crowd in their modernist Los Angeles pad. Margaret’s mother Marlene (Lynn Downey), clutching a half-empty martini, is embarrassed by her precocious daughter. “Don’t you ever shut up?” she scolds. “No one wants to hear your voice!” 

The interesting thing about Daisy, The Rise of Daisy Jones author Jonah Berg (Nick Pupo) tells us in the present, is that she had everything at her disposal. “And yet, she was completely alone.”

Now it’s 1968, and a fourteen-year-old Margaret (Amanda Fix) regularly sidesteps school and her checked-out parents to immerse herself in the kaleidoscopic music scene centered around West Hollywood and the Sunset Strip. She sneaks in the back door of the Whiskey A Go Go. She catches sets by The Doors and Love and The Who. And she finds herself at parties rife with substances and temptation. Looking back, Daisy (Keough) admits she was probably out of control. “But I was writing too,” she tells her interviewer, “and that felt better than drugs.” And when Margaret writes “Daisy Jones” in her lyric journal, a new persona is born.

While Daisy was forging her new musical identity in LA, Billy Dunne (Claflin) was engaging with the freeing nature of rock ‘n’ roll music in Pittsburgh’s blue collar Hazelwood neighborhood. It’s his younger brother Graham (Harrison) who starts a band with high school pals Warren Rojas (Chacon), Eddie Roundtree (Whitehouse), and Chuck Loving (Jack Romano). But it’s Billy, a natural frontman and budding songwriter, who galvanizes them. And by 1970, The Dunne Brothers are banging out Sonics and CCR covers at backyard parties, graduations, and fraternity row beer fests.

One night, their estranged father Hank (Scott Subiono) surfaces drunk at a VFW gig, and Billy loses it. His volatility channeled at the man who abandoned their family, he smashes the guitar Hank gave him and stalks out of the hall as Graham follows up with a haymaker to their deadbeat dad’s jaw. “I can still see the look on Billy’s face,” Graham says in the present. “That was the moment this thing became real.”

When Billy and Camila (Morrone) get together, it’s also real, and she immediately becomes a de facto band member, her camera’s flash bulbs popping and her Canon Auto Zoom Super 8 rolling. (Daisy Jones & the Six regularly represents Camila’s perspective on the action with a film stock visual effect.) Everybody in the neighborhood knew Camila, Eddie says, and it’s clear she was his crush. “Then she met Billy.” And that prickliness in the contemporary interviews surfaces in the past when Billy forces Eddie to switch from guitar to bass once Chuck leaves the band. 

“Put Mick Jagger in a lineup, and a person who’s never heard of the Rolling Stones could still point to Jagger and say ‘That one, he’s the rock star,’” a fantastically-scarfed Rod Reyes (Timothy Olyphant) says in the present. “Billy Dunne had that in spades.” Back in the early 70s, music biz vet Rod and his ‘stache catch the Dunne Brothers on a bill with The Winters, a psych group that features Karen Sirko (Whitehouse) on Hammond B3, and he encourages them to move to Los Angeles, where it’s all happening. (Rod’s totally drunk and high when he offers this encouragement, but still, they’ve got potential.) And Billy, Camila, and the rest of the band pack up Warren’s van and follow their rock ‘n’ roll dreams to the Sunset Strip.

Out in California, Daisy has been writing a ton, and partying more. But when a musician boyfriend cops her lyrics for a song he turns into a radio hit, it’s a wakeup call. “The worst part is I let him take that song from me,” she tells the interviewer. “That is how little I thought of myself at the time. Thank God I met Simone when I did.” That’s singer and eventual disco pioneer Simone Jackson (Nabiyah Be), who quickly bonds with Daisy and encourages her to use her voice. And in the present, Daisy is grateful. “No matter how confident you pretend to be, how much you think you can give, if enough people tell you you’re shit, you believe them.” It’s at a rickety piano in a West Hollywood dive bar where she finally performs in public, and it’s liberating.

The gang from Pittsburgh has arrived on the Sunset Strip, full of euphoria and the vigor of youth. They’re going to be the next big thing, they just know it, even if the songs Billy’s writing are sometimes half-formed, faltering, or ripoffs of David Bowie. They’ve got each other, and the van, and one single music industry connection in the languid form of Rod Reyes, though he doesn’t even know it. And when the group passes Daisy on Sunset, they don’t yet know her, either. But Los Angeles in the 70s is full of hustles and surprises. 

Johnny Loftus is an independent writer and editor living at large in Chicagoland. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, All Music Guide, Pitchfork Media, and Nicki Swift. Follow him on Twitter: @glennganges