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Even in a dark, airconditioned room you can feel the heat outside sucking out your energy so all you want to do is shut down and sleep. I’d been noshing on books, reading several halfway then beginning new ones—what’s the rush, I have time—but since staying vertical is a challenge when you’re being parboiled, I decided to attack my tsundoku and read faster.

Today I read Daisy Jones and The Six by Tara Jenkins Reid. It’s a novel about a fictional band making records and touring in the 1970s, when rock was the dominant music form. (I am from the rock era, and I still love the music, but that time had to end. For all its talk of freedom, it was the patriarchy in action.) The novel is written in the form of an oral history, so it’s like reading the transcript of an MTV/VH1 where-are-they-now documentary. It also saves the author from writing “they said”, “she averred”, etc, and it makes reading go a lot faster.

The territory—the rise of an early 70s band—has been covered many times, notably in the movie Almost Famous by Cameron Crowe. As a 14-year-old Rolling Stone journalist, Crowe got to travel with The Allman Brothers (the basis for the band Stillwater in the movie) and everyone. I still quote that movie, specifically the advice from Lester Bangs as played by Philip Seymour Hoffman: “These people are not your friends.” That is sage advice. Because you want them to be doesn’t make it true.

Reading Rolling Stone made me want to be a rock journalist, so in the 90s I interviewed a lot of musicians. (The one who is my friend was already my friend in college: Aye Ubaldo, bassist, who is married in her mind to Billy Bob Thornton.) I learned that alcohol and other substances only magnify what the subject already is, so if they’re dull and inarticulate it makes them duller and more inarticulate. There is no way vomit can be charming.

If you’ve been around bands, you will find the characters in Daisy Jones and The Six not weird and messy enough. The novel has a rom-com premise: impossibly gorgeous and talented drug-addicted female singer-songwriter joins up-and-coming band led by impossibly gorgeous and talented male singer-songwriter who has undergone rehab and loves his wife. Of course they fight all the time, which is the signifier of sexual tension (Why can’t people just hate each other?). So will they? Won’t they? Place your bets.

For all their chaotic behavior—walking fully-dressed into swimming pools, marrying someone they’ve known for 20 minutes—the two leads are familiar and predictable from the Oh, Those Crazy Rockstars school. The secondary characters are more interesting, such as the wise drummer (drummers have to be sane or everything falls apart). The best-written character is the wife, who avoids the Domineering Jealous Bitch Rockstar Wife cliches.

Rating: Recommended for when you’re lying on the floor of a cold, dark room.

I picked up this novel because I just saw the documentary Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice, which Juan has been bugging me to watch. Linda Ronstadt is one of the greatest voices in history, her voice could blow out the back of the room and make all your hair stand on end. She could sing anything, and she did, crossing genres at will (rock, country, pop, R&B, gospel, mariachi, operetta, jazz, standards). It wasn’t “reinvention”—she did it because she wanted to, and there was nothing the record company could do about it. Linda was a pioneer, a woman filling stadiums in a male-dominated business. Her backing band became The Eagles, and her cover of “Desperado” made them. Show business pits women against each other, but she saw them as collaborators, producing sterling work with the likes of Emmylou Harris and Dolly Parton. She spoke out against injustice and lent her voice to progressive causes.

Linda Ronstadt retired from singing after she was diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease, but that hasn’t stopped her from calling out Trump. At the Kennedy Center Honors when the US Secretary of State introduced her with an inept joke about her song, “When Will I Be Loved,” she replied, “Maybe when you stop enabling Donald Trump.” Unlike the cliché damaged female rockstar, she remained sane, strong, and in control of her career. Write a protagonist like Linda Ronstadt.