Vinyl is as prestigious as prestige television gets. Jagger and his son James (who acts as the frontman of the punk band Nasty Bits on the show) helped co-write a track, while country’s man of the moment Sturgill Simpson contributes the messy rocker, “Sugar Daddy”, which serves as the series’ theme (listen to “Sugar Daddy” below). Any Lester Bangs piece would give you a better sense of the vibrant chaos of that world, but you can’t fault the creators for wanting to give viewers a time machine, especially now that you’re likely to find cheaper rents on the Upper East Side than in the East Village. Sex, drugs, rock, and rolling cameras.
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So does the show: Scorsese directs the two-hour pilot, which would probably be apparent even if his name wasn’t listed in the credits.
At one point, Led Zeppelin’s beastly, control freak manager Peter Grant creates a major ruckus – as he was known to do – when it appears Finestra and his company have screwed the band on royalty rates.
Cannavale’s co-star Wilde, a new mother herself, tells Headlines & Global News it was the guys’ clothes that gave her a personal satisfaction along with those caftans. Ato Essandoh makes the strongest impression, playing one of Richie’s former talents who, following career-ending tragedy, is working his way back into the game, hungry and vengeful.
Frank “Buck” Rogers, the powerful owner of a chain of radio stations, is threatening to boycott American Century’s entire roster after one of the label’s artists fails to show at a swanky private dinner he hosted for some of his top advertisers. But it feels empty; the concert, depicted as magnetically drawing Richie, from snorting cocaine in his auto, and a swath of kids from lower Manhattan, doesn’t have the intimacy and power of any iteration of rock “n” roll, whether that’s Elvis Presley or the New York Dolls. I felt like, ‘Oh, we’re good now’. He’s kind of dead inside. Winter serves as showrunner. “On paper, he’s got this ideal life, but there’s just nothing there”.
Vinyl often feels like the former show, if only because of Cannavale’s voracious performance. That filmmaking energy is particularly evident in the first episode, which is directed by Scorsese and, in a way, works as a self-standing Scorsese film. Like Nucky, Finestra is a charismatic addict at the center of a complicated, crooked empire where everyone is financially reliant on him. This might be one forbidden to him.
Winter describes Richie as an amalgamation of number of different record executives he researched. Vinyl arrives in a world where rock and roll has already become legend, legend has become commodity, and legend-making has therefore become a capitalist imperative. Bangs shows up as a peripheral character in “Almost Famous“, but I don’t think he’s ever really gotten the pop culture attention he deserves. “He’s like ‘I’m anointed”. “So I… got really involved in record companies and how they worked and who was good, who was bad”.
The show hums with coked-up energy.
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Director-producer Martin Scorsese does an fantastic job re-creating the anarchic spirit of the time, with drugged out fans and sexually available groupies littering the steps up to the main stage. The first half-hour of the pilot is actually the weakest part of the first five episodes. Richie is thinking about selling American Century to Polygram at a time when the industry, possibly about to crumble (literally; you’ll see) into cultural irrelevance in the years before MTV, is filled with sellouts. But once it settles into its groove, it stays in the pocket. Cannavale is excellent in the lead. These include Olivia Wilde as Richie’s wife, late of the Warhol scene, and Juno Temple as an ambitious assistant coming up against the era’s institutional sexism, which is noted and triple-underscored, as if in self-defense: “That’s just how it was”. Every facial expression is loaded with ambivalence – she loves Richie, but she’s unhappy in the life he’s forced her into. It’s a transaction that will allow Richie and his partners, including Zak Yankovich (Ray Romano), to walk away with millions. It’s through her that the industry’s sexism is examined. This is something that’s very natural to me – and very close to my heart. “We’re still talking about women’s rights and reproductive rights”, Winter says. The choice to set the show in 1973 is no accident. The first episode (a two-hour special, no less) is being simulcast on February 15th at 2am on Sky Atlantic, but if you can’t manage to stay up to watch, it’s going to be repeated that night at 9pm.
