As we are gearing up for Daisy Jones & The Six, the cultural obsession that many of us have for the novel by Taylor Jenkins Reid and now the show proves one thing: We're all sort of groupies for fictional rock bands. This isn't a new phenomenon nor is Daisy Jones & The Six the first 70s rock band that has made us fans of a band that doesn't exist. It's a time-honored tradition in fictional stories about the rock bands of the 70s and so let's talk about why we tend to open our hearts to these bands in ways we might not for real ones.
For those who have yet to explore the novel that follows Daisy Jones and her connection with the band the Six, the story tells us of a fictional band (aka Daisy Jones & The Six) and their work on albums like "Aurora" together. They are, admittedly, meant to represent the band Fleetwood Mac and the drama that ensued with the creation of the album Rumours after the break-up of Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham. So the story of Daisy Jones & The Six is about the band meeting together with a journalist years later to talk about it (all separately of course) but fans of the novel and maybe even the show are "groupies" for this band for an obvious reason: They are Fleetwood Mac.
But that idea and obsession isn't exclusive to Daisy Jones & The Six nor is it, as I said before a new thing. It is something we've done time and time again and unpacking why we tend to flock to these fictional bands is sadly easy: It's because we never got to see them in their prime. Whether or not you have seen bands from this era in the modern age or not, they're not the same as they were back then. And so the cultural obsession many young fans have come from that need to see these bands we've loved back when the world was falling in love with them. Think about seeing a band like The Rolling Stones live for the first time, it'd be incredible. And so we cling to these fictional bands to fill that void.
Almost Famous' Stillwater Inspires the Same Kind of Obsession
Looking first at Almost Famous and the fake band Stillwater, the obsession there is similar to that of the band Daisy Jones & The Six. Stillwater was based on five bands that writer Cameron Crowe wrote about as a journalist for Rolling Stone: Poco, The Allman Brothers Band, Led Zeppelin, Eagles, and Lynyrd Skynyrd. And you get that sense from looking at the band and how it functions, with Russell Hammond (Billy Crudup) somehow being the most popular of the band despite not being the lead singer (Russell was the guitarist). So the fact that there are still "groupies" who are huge Stillwater fans still to this day (and made bigger by the Broadway musical adaptation for the film) make sense given the inspiration.
But there still are more we've come to be obsessed with throughout the years. It extends even to The Muppets. The band Dr. Teeth and the Electric Mayhem has a lot of musical inspirations (including the names of the members) but there are groupies for them. We love seeing Animal go to town on the drums or see what Dr. Teeth is going to sing about. They're some of the most beloved characters in the Muppet catalog. And yes, partially because of the music we've come to know and love from the show and movie franchise, but also because the band itself has that quality of a 70s rock band given when they were created (Dr. Teeth was created in 1975 and the band was also created that same year).
Another band that has found its own set of groupies is Barry Jive and the Uptown Five from High Fidelity. And they are really the band that proves this theory to be correct: The source material is praising the expression of music in specific types of music, and so we flock to it. One of the reasons that we're all fans and so obsessed with these fictional bands now in the 21st century is because many of us didn't have the chance to fall in love with the freedom of expression and the drug use of the 70s. We weren't born yet or weren't old enough depending on our ages now.
Nostalgia Plays a Factor Into Our Love of This Music
So seeing these bands bring to life that era in a fictional setting where we can self-insert ourselves into their band dynamic is appealing. So many of us (myself included) would have loved to be Fleetwood Mac fans in the 70s and go to their shows in flowy tops to experience it live. But instead, we can do that with Daisy Jones & The Six. It bleeds into our obsessions like NIGHT OF 1000 STEVIES, the Nicks fan event where fans all dress up like her.
The expression of the 70s is something that still inspired bands today, like Greta Van Fleet. We're seeing a resurgence in the love of this music, in how they could express their own relationships through lyrics, or use their music as a battle cry for social justice issues. But because music has grown to be so vastly different from what bands of the 70s were, we flock to these fictional ones to immerse ourselves in the ideas of what these bands held.
I might never see Stillwater perform (well, I saw the Broadway show so that does technically count) but I can live in their imagined world. If they decided to tour with Daisy Jones & The Six, I'm sure people would make sure the concerts sold out. Our love of their music is both an expression of a time period we never got to experience, but it's also good music that is so easy to enjoy.