“I don’t know if I do dig it. But I dig that you’re tryin'”
– Lester Grimes
This past week, despite being announced for a second season shortly after it premiered, HBO pulled the plug on Vinyl, the Martin Scorsese/Mick Jagger helmed TV show that was every bit as pompous and arrogant as the era of rock’n’roll it pays homage to. The project had been in development since the ’80s, and when things finally started to move forward Terence Winter used his power as show runner to rush through Boardwalk Empire’s deeply flawed final season to help shape the Scorcese/Jagger vision to the small screen.
Everything about it seemed right. Scorsese’s manic vision for New York, set the same year he released Mean Streets, his first feature film. Jagger’s literal lifetime spent living as the definitive rock icon. And Winter as showrunner, who not only helmed Boardwalk Empire through good and bad years after being one of the pillars of The Sopranos writing room. Aside from the irksome way that Boardwalk was pushed out of the way, it seemed like a guaranteed smash hit.
Then came the pilot.
While I noted in my recap of that pilot that the two-hour run-time was a daunting obstacle that was bound to turn off casual viewers (it did), but aside of needing little fat trimmed, I still believe it was daring exhibitionist television. It was angry, sometimes savage, and occasionally bordered on arthouse, while defiantly re-writing the pre-dawn of punk-rock-era New York City.
By the season’s halfway point, the best explanation I was able to piece together was with a conversation with fellow Glide Magazine contributor Danielle Houtkooper during SXSW. I described it as that moment in Mean Streets when the POV suddenly goes Snorricam on Harvey Keitel’s Charlie Cappa while “Rubber Biscuit” plays at full volume. This was Scorsese’s deliberate untidiness, a stylistic change on every conceivable frequency that’s not set-up, explained, or accounted for.
Vinyl was a show constructed entirely for those moments, instead of just scattered throughout Scorsese’s body of work. Even throughout the nine episodes that followed the pilot, with other directors calling the shots, you could see his fingerprints all over every scene.
It was also around this halfway point that the show’s most glaring problem came to surface: it had buried its two best storylines. The story of Jamie (Juno Temple) lying her way into discovering the Nasty Bitz, and the story of Lester Grimes’ (Ato Essandoh) spiteful return to music, but this time as the band’s manager. Either of those two could have been the show’s main character.
One of them should have been. Instead we got Bobby Cannavale as Richie Finestra, a dynamite actor who all but stole Boardwalk’s third season as the big bad Gyp Rosetti, who felt… overexposed here. Even his character’s name was a little too over-the-top in a show that embellished itself with reckless abandon.
Had he been relegated to a supporting role, he could’ve, perhaps, evolved into the adversarial role he needed, instead of a rebranded, drug-addled anti-hero that was too hard to scrape together that much empathy for. Which is more a compliment to Cannavale’s skill as an actor if anything.
Still, some obvious oversights aside, most of the time Vinyl took chances, it paid off immensely. I interviewed Randall Poster, the show’s Music Supervisor, earlier this year, and he spoke at length about working with Scorsese and his layered intricacies that went into crafting the show’s soundtrack. Song’s dotted the show’s episodes like a treasure map, where finding the ‘X’ meant unlocking some kind of self-contained easter egg.
As Fargo showrunner Noah Hawley noted at the ATX TV Fest earlier this month, when Scorsese scores a single minute of film, you can have anywhere between 4 and 5 songs crammed into that time, which makes that minute of film epic in scope. When it came to building songs into the show’s story, Vinyl went as far to the edge as it could without going over. Songs took over scenes, with lookalike actors giving a full lip-sync performance, sometimes on the edge of a scene, sometimes take it over without warning.
It was an unprecedented way to tell a story, which meant it would alienate those that stuck around after a 122 minute pilot that ended with the collapse of a building around a New York Dolls show. The show was at its best when it would spotlight the lesser figures of rock’n’roll lore, like Ian Hart as Zeppelin manager Peter Grant storming into the offices of American Century Records. It would stumble immensely when it would hire actors to play the likes of Robert Plant to Robert Goulet, Alice Cooper to Elvis, almost feeling like it was trapping itself in a timeline it wanted to rewrite on its own terms.
Despite some misguided moments, Vinyl’s attempt to break the narrative form were nothing short of ambitious, and I’d like to think given time to grow, it might’ve been able to find its main characters and most compelling storylines. Looking back at its now one and only season, even though I didn’t like everything about Vinyl, I dug that it was trying.
6 Responses
As someone who lived and experienced that time period in the music scene in NYC I actually enjoyed Vinyl (for nostalgia purposes) but I do think they picked the wrong time frame and setting to tell their story in.
They chose the pre-punk (pre-Max’s & CBGB era) which might have played out well by the time they got to season 3 but was actually quite boring in the time where they started.
I also think the setting of a club as opposed to a record company might have served them better. The story of the A&R guys could easily be played out in those clubs and a drama about musicians and bands is far more interesting than the drama involving drug addled, swindling and dishonest record companies execs looking to rip off anyone (especially bands) to make money.
If they had set the show in the Max’s and CB’s era where the record companies were starting to lose their power (thanks to Peter Grant and Led Zeppelin who was portrayed in the show) and bands were realizing they could independently publish their own music and have record companies fight to sign them after they were a success.
By that time there were record companies starting up all over the place like Sire, Stiff, Virgin and Road Racer. And they were snapping up all the new music while the old guard companies (mostly owned by two or three companies) ignored those acts at their own peril.
The real drama in the Music Industry happens in the clubs and the rehearsal spaces, not some corporate office where cocaine and alcohol stained suits work.
No one in the industry liked those guys so why would the general public take to them?
Only ones in the record business that had any friends were the A&R guys but the guys that ran the companies were pretty much the devil.
I think they were setting some of that up for the second season, but other subplots, like having a mobster occupy the halls of American Century Records, was moving farther away from what the show needed to be.
I agree that Finestra and everyone inside those A&R boardroom meetings should’ve been pushed to the fringes of the story, and let the conflicts from inside The Nasty Bitz become the focus. That way, Jamie, Lester, and the band could’ve come into their own as protagonists. Not to mention the potential for how they’d be viewed by the burgeoning punk culture, given they were a band with the backing of a major label.
It took Boardwalk Empire almost an entire season to find its stride. Vinyl had that potential, too. But with GoT on its way out, HBO’s dumping all its time and attention into Westworld, which left Vinyl kicked to the curb.
Well I work in TV now so I understand why the writers may have chosen that time period as you are right it would have made for a better build up in later seasons…
Finestra was supposedly based on Marty Thau and Thau has a great story to tell.
But that story starts after he leaves a major record label.
(which in the Vinyl Story would have been before the building collapse in the first episode as Thau managed the Dolls)
If they had let the record company go (out of business) in the pilot and told the Thau Story as Finestra trying to get back into the business and pretty much his big influence in what became of the music scene in NYC, I think they would have had better stories to tell.
And I think they made a mistake of trying to tell the story of the days from big band/label excess (Jagger’s Influence?) as opposed to any real drama in the music business at that time.
other than Zep and Sabbath the music scene wasn’t all that interesting except at the unsigned club level.
The difficulty in TV is the first season is all character setup and they had so many that people may have gotten lost. It didn’t help that there were issues with the showrunner.
Maybe they will retool it or bring back the same idea only with the better storylines that are available if they just look.
I used to hang at Max’s and worked at CB’s and we always used to think that entire music scene was just ripe for a soap opera.
Throw in Pep Lounge and Mudd Club and there are a million interesting stories to tell.
It’s Peter Grant, not Peter Hart, but a decent take on a not so decent show.
The music scene wasn’t all that interesting….yeah, unlike now. Enough of the revisionism- go back and listen to the music of the era again and tell me it wasn’t that interesting. Like this series those guys (you know the ones Richie railed against) were at least ambitious- and unlike Vinyl were far more successful.