In April of 1973, the
New York Dolls recorded "Frankenstein," a theatrical number with a
pounding beat, gothic overtones, and the crowd-pleasing opening line,
"Something must've happened / Over Manhattan." When the Dolls
released the song on their self-titled debut album that July, they had to
append the abbreviation "(Orig.)" to the title, because two months
earlier, The Edgar Winter Group had topped the Billboard Hot 100 with a
different "Frankenstein" — a million-copy selling instrumental with a
killer drum solo. Meanwhile, on a hot night in lower Manhattan, a record
executive named Richie Finestra was so electrified by the sound of another
monster rock 'n' roll song that he arose from the rubble of a collapsed
building — like a lumbering, inhuman creature, shocked back to life. The Dolls
are real, but Finestra is fictional. He's the protagonist of Vinyl, the latest
HBO period drama from the Boardwalk Empire team of Martin Scorsese and Terence
Winter. Like Boardwalk, Vinyl weaves the imaginary into the historical, trying
to include as many real people and places as possible. Finestra is the head of
a made-up label, American Century, which has a roster of actual pop stars like
Donny Osmond and England Dan & John Ford Coley.
In Vinyl's two-hour
premiere, a weakening American Century tries to poach Led Zeppelin from
Atlantic Records, in order to make the label more attractive for a buyout by
worldwide conglomerate Polygram. Zeppelin's lead singer, Robert Plant, appears
briefly as a character, as does the band's notoriously volatile manager Peter
Grant. And the pilot is bookended by Richie stumbling into a New York Dolls
gig, where he has an epiphany in the middle of a room-shaking performance of
"Personality Crisis." In other words, this show names names. It doesn't
merely allude to bands like Slade, Suicide, or ABBA; characters talk about them
as though they could walk into the offices of American Century at any moment,
like wacky sitcom neighbors. Vinyl has been in the works for nearly two
decades. It began as Mick Jagger's idea for a film called The Long Play — a
Goodfellas/Casino-esque spin through the music industry from the '60s to the
'90s. In 2007, Variety reported that Jagger, Scorsese, and journalist Rich
Cohen had tapped The Departed screenwriter William Monahan to write the script.
But the deal collapsed, so Scorsese and Jagger brought the project to Winter,
who'd written the Oscar-nominated screenplay for The Wolf of Wall Street in
addition to creating Boardwalk Empire. Winter, a TV veteran who developed his
chops on David Chase's The Sopranos, convinced his partners that this story was
best suited for HBO. Last year, they finally shot a pilot for the newly-named
show, with no guarantee of a series pickup.
The first episode
suffers a bit from that uncertainty about the show's future, as Winter and
co-writer George Mastras (a Breaking Bad alum) focus on world-building at the
expense of storytelling. Perhaps in an effort to convince HBO of the show's
viability, the pilot loads up on characters and potential plotlines, but just
marginally advances few of them. In addition to Richie (played by Emmy-winning
Boardwalk Empire vet Bobby Cannavale), the premiere introduces Olivia Wilde as
his wife Devon, a former downtown scenestress adjusting to a sober domestic life
in Connecticut. Also notable: Juno Temple as Jamie Vine, an American Century
executive assistant with a deskful of hard drugs and a valuable connection to
the younger generation; James Jagger (Mick's son) as Kip Stevens, frontman for
a sloppy proto-punk act called Nasty Bits; Ato Essandoh as Lester Grimes, a
gifted bluesman whom Richie groomed for stardom and then abandoned in the '60s;
and Bo Dietl as Joe Corso, a mob-connected record promoter hired by American
Century to placate angry, unstable radio station chain-owner Frank
"Buck" Rogers (Andrew Dice Clay). Ray Romano, Max Casella, J.C.
MacKenzie, and P.J. Byrne fill out the background as Richie's business
partners.
That cast is terrific,
though they barely get a chance to make lasting impressions. The female
characters are particularly ill-served: Devon comes off as a standard-issue
hectoring buzzkill, while Jamie seems to view sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll as
a means to an end, not as pleasurable activities in and of themselves. The
richest supporting player so far is Lester, even if his primary function is to
represent the compromises our hero made on the way to the top. Trim away most
of the side characters, and Vinyl's premiere tells a simple story. An ambitious
music aficionado works his way up the industry ladder by selling out his taste
and principles, and then, in 1973, finds himself on the verge of becoming a
multi-millionaire. The episode then closes with a bit of magical realism, as
Richie takes in a New York Dolls show that literally tears the roof off,
leaving him flat on the ground and covered in debris. What happens next should
be clear: He'll scrap the Polygram deal, then try to reinvent American Century
as a home for the exciting new sounds of his city. But Winter and Mastras don't
tack on any kind of cliffhanger scene that says this directly, the way most TV
creators would.
Some may take issue
with that, but Vinyl's pilot is a stunner anyway — and the gutsiness of that
ending is a big reason why. At times, this first episode resembles David
Chase's Not Fade Away, in that it's a rambling hodgepodge made meaningful by a
thrillingly poetic final scene. The closing sequence doesn't come out of
nowhere, though. Throughout these two hours, Scorsese, Winter, and Co.
punctuate the action with a kind of Greek Chorus of musical interludes. Some
are diegetic. Some are more fantastical — like when an actress impersonating
Ruth Brown sings "Mama He Treats Your Daughter Mean" in the middle of
American Century's Brill Building offices. Scorsese packs as much style as he
can into the production, despite working with a fraction of his usual budget
and schedule. Cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto (who shot The Wolf of Wall Street,
as well as Brokeback Mountain, 8 Mile, 25th Hour, and Scorsese's upcoming Silence)
keeps the frame moving, often to magnificent effect. The pilot is filled with
memorable images, from gender-bending New York Dolls fans stepping over the
camera to a jarring push-in on Lester when a mob goon crushes his windpipe.
Scorsese also takes advantage of the extended length of this episode, lingering
over the musical sequences, and letting the office scenes play out to capture
the collegial rhythms of master schmoozers.
More importantly, the
pitch of the pilot — the "here's a bunch of stuff we could do" of it
all — reveals just how well Winter and his team grasp this era. It's not just
the hairstyles, clothes, and graffiti-covered New York streets that Vinyl gets
right. It introduces dozens of key details: The influence of the mob on the music
business; the rebirth of payola in the form of "promotion"; the first
flowerings of punk and disco in low-rent New York neighborhoods; the takeover
of rock 'n' roll by corporate media conglomerates; and so on. It remains to be
seen how well Winter can put all these pieces together. Boardwalk Empire, as
enjoyable and artful as it was, sometimes felt like an assortment of
well-crafted parts in search of a machine. But it's encouraging to see that
Vinyl already has a point of view, and not one as reductive as "corporate
rock sucks." This first episode is as much about Richie realizing that he
needs a position of power to spread the gospel of rock 'n' roll as it is about
how each contractual concession leads to another. The show seems set to explore
a big question: Can a bunch of businessmen reinvent themselves as idealists?
And then there's the
other big question: What is "good music?" A lot of scenes in the
premiere have characters tossing the names of their favorite musicians back and
forth, and it times, it seems like Vinyl's writers are trying to establish how
much they know. But there's more to it than that. Those lists are like mantras,
repeated as an act of spiritual centering. When Richie describes seeing
Blackboard Jungle for the first time, or talks about borrowing his mother's
broom and pretending to be Bo Diddley, he's reminding himself why he's in this
business. Some of the episode's best moments occur while Richie stands
stock-still, hearing and seeing something that other people can't. He does it
when he hears ABBA's first single. ("Three bars and I can tell they'll be
filling football stadiums," he says to his skeptical staff.) He does it
when he stands in the wings of an arena, watching Led Zeppelin cover Eddie
Cochran's "Something Else." And he does it when the Dolls launch into
"Personality Crisis." Whenever this happens, it's like he's hearing
pop and rock for the first time. He's trying to understand why he's stirred.
Vinyl intends to document a time when rock 'n' roll became sickly and cynical.
But it's also about the visionaries who want to demolish the beast and salvage
its best pieces — stitching back together the body, the brain, and the heart.
