Daisy Jones & The Six: A Guide to the '70s Music Scene That Inspired the Show

You don’t have to wear a suede vest to watch Daisy Jones & the Six, but it couldn’t hurt. Prime Video’s limited series is steeped in the 1970s, and ’70s music in particular. It makes so many references that viewers who weren’t alive then (or haven’t lost an afternoon watching YouTube clips of Midnight Special) might feel lost. And even someone who owns a first-edition vinyl of Tapestry might want a refresher on the various scenes that were overlapping at the time.

The guide below can help newbies and fans alike get ready for the show’s March 3 premiere.

What is Daisy Jones & the Six about?

Based on the novel by Taylor Jenkins Reid, Daisy Jones & The Six follows the brief, brilliant career of the fictional title band. Using a mix of flashbacks to the 1970s and Behind the Music-style interviews with characters in the 1990s, the show covers their early days, their explosive success, and the problems that kept threatening to tear them apart. At the center of it all, singer-songwriters Daisy Jones (Riley Keough) and Billy Dunne (Sam Claflin) love and hate each other with equal passion. Their relationship generates the band’s best music and biggest disasters.

Is the band supposed to be Fleetwood Mac? Is Daisy Jones Steve Nicks?

A little bit yes and a little bit no. Reid has said that Fleetwood Mac inspired her novel, and there are clear parallels. Steve Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham joined the group after it had existed for several years, and after they arrived, the band became world famous. That also kicked off decades of in-fighting. Meanwhile, Buckingham and Nicks had a tumultuous romance that famously resulted in songs like “Silver Springs.” In the series, Daisy and Billy have a similarly volatile relationship. They’re attracted to each other and they fight all the time, but they still find a way to write songs together. Those are clear echoes of the Buckingham-Nicks drama.

There’s more: Christine McVie joined Fleetwood Mac as a keyboardist after she’d spent years in other bands, and that’s basically how Karen Sirko (Suki Waterhouse) joins The Six. McVie spent nearly a decade married to Fleetwood Mac member John McVie, and they continued working together for decades after their divorce. There are echoes of that in Karen’s complicated relationship with Billy’s brother Graham (Will Harrison).

Is there music in the show? Does it sound like Fleetwood Mac?

There’s music all over the series. The soundtrack is bursting with vintage ’70s hits, but more importantly, there are multiple songs performed by the cast. The songs were written specifically for Daisy Jones & the Six, but they have the gently rocking vibe of classic tunes by Fleetwood Mac and the Eagles. That’s a realistic choice, because with the exception of Heart’s Ann and Nancy Wilson, the most famous women in 1970s rock made soft rock or folk music. Since Daisy Jones & The Six are selling out stadiums by the end of their tour, it makes sense that they’re in that lane.

Plus, soft rock was huge in the ’70s, and like the characters in the show, many of the musicians who made it were based in California. That scene was notorious for its mix of gentle music and heavy substance abuse, which haunts both Billy and Daisy in different ways.

How does disco factor into the series?

It’s hard to talk about ’70s music without mentioning disco, and that’s why Daisy’s friend Simone (Nabiyah Be) is so crucial to the story. While Daisy Jones & The Six are perfecting their rock sound, Simone heads to New York, which was an epicenter of dance music in the ’70s. That’s where she connects with the queer and Black communities that brought disco to life, and it’s where she finds a production team that helps her record some early disco anthems.

There are several parallels between Simone and Donna Summer. She might not have been a guardian angel for someone like Stevie Nicks, but Summer experimented with several genres before ultimately pushing dance music into groundbreaking new directions. In fact, Summer’s 1977 song “I Feel Love” is considered one of the most influential records ever made, since its use of synthesizers laid the foundation for all the electronic dance music that followed.

What other ’70s legends are referenced in the show?

Daisy Jones & The Six references many other ’70s superstars. Teddy Price (Tom Wright), who produces the band, recalls Quincy Jones, who was one of the few Black producers of the early rock era to make hit records with rock, pop, and R&B artists alike. Billy’s wife Camila (Camila Morrone) is also a photographer, which connects her to famous female rock photographers like Annie Liebowitz.

Meanwhile, early episodes of the show heavily feature The Sunset Strip, a famous collection of clubs and bars in Los Angeles that became the birthplace for many rock, heavy metal, and hair metal bands. When Daisy Jones & the Six perform at venues like Whisky a Go Go, they’re a fictional band stepping into a real part of rock history.

Daisy Jones & The Six premieres March 3 on Prime Video. Join the discussion about the show in our forums.

Mark Blankenship has been writing about arts and culture for twenty years, with bylines in The New York Times, Variety, Vulture, Fortune, and many others. You can hear him on the pop music podcast Mark and Sarah Talk About Songs.