Daisy Jones & the Six: The cast played full concert before filming
Maureen Lee Lenker www.facebook.com
'Daisy Jones & the Six' showrunner Scott Neustadter had his cast play a full rock concert for Amazon brass to prove they had the musical chops before filming began.
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EW.com
Building a cast that looks like a '70s rock band is one thing — building one that sounds like a '70s rock band is another.

When the creative team behind Daisy Jones & the Six first started out to cast the series, which follows the rise (and fall) of a fictional 1970s rock band, they were optimistic they could find a cast who could not only bring the characters to life, but sing and play instruments like a real band as well.

"We went into it with the Pollyanna-ish version of 'Everyone has to be a musician and an actor and all the things,'" showrunner Scott Neustadter tells EW.

In reality, they landed on a core group of actors — Riley Keough, Sam Claflin, Suki Waterhouse, Josh Whitehouse, Will Harrison, and Sebastian Chacon — with varying degrees of musical experience. Some had played in garage bands, while others had never touched an instrument before. But with the help of a global pandemic, they learned to play believably as a legendary rock band — and proved those newfound musical chops before filming on the series even began.

"Because we had the pandemic, everybody buckled down and learned and was amazing," Neustadter explains. "I don't know what we would've done had we gone when we were supposed to. It would've looked a lot different. We would've had a little more movie magic involved. But in this particular case, they were all really doing all this stuff."

To make sure it wouldn't just be all smoke and mirrors, Neustadter came up with an unconventional test for his cast before they started filming. "A week before we started shooting, my wife [producer Lauren Neustadter] was like, 'They're very comfortable, but they've never performed for a group, for a crowd. And I need to know that they can do that. Because if they can do it, they'll be fine into a camera,'" he recounts. "We wanted to seem as authentic as we could, so we made them do a concert."

Neustadter and the team invited nearly 100 people from Prime Video, particularly department heads and their families, to witness the debut of this version of Daisy Jones and the Six live on stage. "They had a set list and there was no help," he details. "It was them and the instruments and they had to sing and they had to perform and they killed it."

Claflin, who stars as tortured frontman Billy Dunne, describes it as a surreal moment. "It was a strange experience," he says. "It was the first time we were all in costume together, and we were on a stage. And at the last minute, they were like, 'Oh, can you also introduce each song and do some banter between each number?'"

In both the original novel by Taylor Jenkins Reid and the series, much of the plot revolves around the creation of Aurora, the band's hit album (and their only full-length album together). Written and produced by Blake Mills with a starry group of collaborators that includes Phoebe Bridgers, Marcus Mumford, and Jackson Browne, Aurora is very much a real album — and the band had to play it live.

"We played the whole album, no backing tracks," says Whitehouse, who plays jealous bassist Eddie Roundtree, of the concert.

Adds Chacon, who portrays happy-go-lucky drummer Warren Rojas: "It went a long way toward convincing everyone that we're about to embark on this journey and we can play everything. It's not like we're going to be trying to get a close up of some little action. The camera can move around and look at what they want, and everyone's going to be actually doing their thing."

Waterhouse, the force behind keyboardist Karen Sirko, remembers it as more frightening than anything. She has since released an album and performed live as a singer-songwriter in her own right — but playing the concert as Karen was being thrown into the musical deep end. "It was honestly way more nerve-wracking than any show I've ever done," she says. "We were absolutely terrified. I got to my piano and someone hadn't switched on an amp, so there was nothing." (Don't worry, they fixed it).

But Keough, who stars as front-woman Daisy Jones, asserts that it was the reassuring boost that Neustadter hoped it would be. "We got to a place where we were like, 'Wow, I can't believe we can get through the whole set and set and not mess anything up,'" she says. "There was a moment in the beginning where we were thinking we were going to have to fake a lot of these things. The fact that we were able to do it for real — we impressed ourselves."

The concert also served another purpose. They filmed it, and the cast was able to watch themselves and make adjustments as they actually started making the show. "At that point, we didn't even know how to stand," says Claflin. "That really informed us. My movements, everything, were terrible. But considering it was the first time we'd done anything like that, it was quite impressive that we got through it."

It was a long process and a lot of hard work to reach that point.

Despite being the granddaughter of Elvis Presley, Keough told Neustadter that she had no discernible musical talent when they first discussed the project. "Riley was the first person to raise her hand saying, 'I should play this part,'" he recalls. "We sat with her and talked with her, and she was incredible and we loved her as an actress. But she was like, 'I'm not musical. At all. I've only sung in the shower.'"

Neustadter quickly got her on a mic with Mills and the music team, who could immediately sense a raw talent in her voice that was primed for their shaping. From there, they got to work helping her unleash that power.

For Claflin, he'd only sung within the realm of musical theater. "With musical theater, the way that I would learn songs is by listening to the soundtrack," he explains. "And then I would try to copy the person that had sung and recorded it before."

He took the same approach for his Daisy Jones audition, attempting to imitate Elton John singing "Your Song."

"I gave the worst Elton John impression I've ever heard," he says with a laugh. Adds Neustadter: "The music directors were like, 'Does he know anything about this show? What's he doing?'"

They went back to Claflin and asked him to instead give "Come Together" by the Beatles a go, which demonstrated that he could deliver the rock sound they needed. He then spent a year and a half learning to play the guitar.

But he was still hampered by his tendency to learn music by mimicry, trying to replicate the sound of Mills on the temp tracks. "I started trying to mimic him, and they were like, 'Sam, you sound strange,'" he says. " And I was like, 'Okay, well find someone else you want me to sound like, and I'll just do my impression of that person.' That's where we landed. The lead singer of White Denim is a guy called James Petralli, and I am doing my best James."

As for the core musicians of the band, the guys came in with some basic knowledge of their instruments. Harrison, who plays Billy's brother and the Six's guitarist, Graham, has played guitar since he was 10 years old, but never had any formal training. Chacon played the drums growing up, and Whitehouse grew up playing guitar — but had never played bass. Waterhouse had never played the keyboard before joining the show.

For those with some experience, it marked an opportunity to hone their skills. "It was awesome to work on this because there was such focus on technique and learning new things and unlearning bad habits," says Harrison, while Whitehouse adds, "I feel like I've come away from this a much stronger musician."

Not to mention the music that they were being asked to play was far beyond anything they'd ever attempted previously. "It was the most difficult advanced guitar licks and piano pieces that you could have imagined," says Waterhouse. "We did all feel like we were at square one, especially with the question of, how are we going to stylize our performance to actually become this famous rock band?"

The producers also put the entire cast through an intensive band camp where they could both learn their instruments, strengthen their voices, and work on building the bonds of a real band. "They would have this band camp and spend the whole day in [recording studio] Sound City," Neustadter says. "Some of it was instruments, some of it was movement, some of it was just hanging out with the band and being a band and all the inside jokes that come out. The more time they spend together, the more they did seem like a real band."

That period also included some screening or listening sessions of real musicians of the era. "Sometimes we would show footage of rock stars," adds Neustadter. "Here's Janis Joplin, here's Chrissie Hynde, here's a bunch of different reference points and take what you want. But we never said to them, 'This is who it's based on. This is what we were thinking about.' Instead, take a little something from everywhere and infuse it into your performance."

Naturally, the cast all drew from famous musicians of the '70s. Waterhouse, of course, cites Fleetwood Mac keyboardist Christine McVie, while Chacon references Ginger Baker of Cream and jazz drummer Papa Jo Jones. Whitehouse and Harrison say they took a broader approach.

"I was watching performances from the seventies and I was focusing on the stance of a bass player at that time and their physicality," Whitehouse says. "Often, I found they were quite rigid and maybe their jaw was swinging a little bit."

Harrison echoes this, noting, "Blake Mills, who wrote the guitar parts, did a fantastic job of pulling from so many players of that era because he understands that very well. So, it was laid out there for me to pull from as we went through it."

Chacon, in contrast, had distinctive touch-points, envisioning a unique set-up for his drum kit and the use of timbale sticks in his playing. "I had a really specific idea what of what I wanted him to play like," he says. "Which was like this weird set-up with an angle, just trying to make s--- hard for myself for no reason (laughs). I had to unlearn the way that I grew up playing in order to play in this cool, seventies-ish, jazzy way. Honestly, I cannot play the way that I used to play any more. I only play with this silly set-up now, and it's great."

But perhaps harder than learning all the riffs and specificities of their music was learning to play together and blend as a real band. That was also about practice and hours spent getting to know each other's idiosyncrasies as people and musicians.

"We spent months and many, many hours rehearsing and hanging out a lot," Waterhouse says. "That's the best way that you become a band. You hang all the time. You make stupid jokes. You become delirious and silly."

In fact, they became so in sync that they would often jam between scenes, taking advantage of their newfound skills. "There were moments on set where we would have the opportunity to jam or play," Claflin reflects. "And the other cast members got so good at their instruments, it was mesmeric."

Next stop, Saturday Night Live?

Daisy Jones & the Six premieres March 3 on Prime Video.

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