Desperation, even for the sanest people, causes cloudy, sometimes dangerous judgment. Police officers brandish their weapons before the suspicious can reveal their empty hands, and an abandoned young boy looks to the streets for individual, concrete answers, oblivious to the criminal justice system’s seemingly tight hold on his future. Yet in the first episode of Vinyl, the latest television series by director Martin Scorsese, Rolling Stones frontman Mick Jagger, writer Rich Cohen, and producer Terence Winter (Boardwalk Empire and The Sopranos), desperation stems from obsession, a thirst for a particularly unrefined sound of liberation — that is rock and roll.
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Drugs are plenty, girls and guys are ready, and the mystical, human connection between a concert crowd and a drum beat-guitar riff combo casts a transparent, devious thin shadow over the episode’s beginning. It’s New York City in 1973, and record executive Richie Finestra (Bobby Cannavale) has established one of the music industry’s preeminent labels, American Century Records. Once a multi-million dollar hit factory, the business is now breaking at the seams, looking for a buyer to sustain its livelihood. At a crossroads, Finestra is forced to choose the music or a company facing irrelevance.
Desperate times call for desperate measures, and the executive roams New York, delving into the prominent musical figures of his past and present. There’s Lester Grimes (Ato Essandoh), the loyal blues musician swayed by Finestra’s black music history, “good ear,” and euphemistic promotional promises, early Led Zeppelin, and influential radio personality Frank “Buck” Rogers (Andrew Dice Clay). Each interaction leads to a furtive tug at time and fate, building into an unfortunate existence for Finestra, where virtue and vice are blended rather than recognized. Ultimately for him, there’s a job at hand that even the seediest of characters are required to complete, slowly erasing the true ardor he once possessed for rock’s gritty, emotional, honest qualities.
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Scorsese, Jagger, Cohen, and Winter throw viewers right into Finestra’s despondency. At every turn, something goes amiss — Led Zeppelin uncovers American Century’s sleazy, underhanded record deal with them or “Buck” Rogers refuses to play Donny Osmond’s newest album — ultimately preparing the way for a treacherous fight that ends in Finestra’s immediate, utter self-destruction. The tension is latent until evident, and Bobby Cannavale, who plays Finestra, perfectly provides the character with a balanced air of desperate, good guy who is tired of — but committed to — the scummy sphere of music politics.
Grungy yet glamorous all the same, Vinyl, is based on Mick Jagger’s real life encounters with the era’s musicians, artists, and greasy businessmen. “I knew a lot of those rich, oddball characters,” Jagger told Entertainment Weekly. “I thought it was a good backdrop.” Indeed, it is. Originally intended for the cinema rather than television, Vinyl doesn’t dismiss the lavish yet crudely realistic cinematic storytelling of a Scorsese film. There is unexpected violence, drugs, and steamy, unromantic sex, where music’s underside meets Scorsese’s mafia moral sense. And according to Jagger, this was, in fact, another day in the life of pop music at that time.
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Truthfully, it was a brutal world, and Vinyl isn’t afraid to show it. Yet, Scorsese, as displayed in the documentary George Harrison: Living in the Material World and the nonfiction T.V. series The Blues and American Masters, applies his love for music history to capture the stunning spiritual saga of an art form cultivated by what was then diametrically opposed racial identities. The plot focus on the black character Grimes, combined with Finestra’s enduring fascination with blues music, establishes this transcendental, cross-racial divide quite gracefully. It begins from the first moment Finestra hears Grimes, as he sheds soft tears while listening to the blues musician’s heart-wrenching, soul-searching serenade. From that moment onward, Finestra never spares a cry when he experiences a performance of similar raw, musical aesthete, further demonstrating that rock, although on an ever-evolving time continuum, answers to a riddled, frustrated past.
Vinyl features an ambitious cast — Oliva Wilde, Ray Romano (Everybody Loves Raymond), Paul Ben-Victor (Entourage), and Bobby Cannavale (Boardwalk Empire). Yet, it’s up-and-comer Juno Temple as the aspiring administrative assistant, Jamie Vine, who steals the show. The BAFTA award winning actress cuts Richie Finestra’s pessimism by portraying a zealous employee on the hunt for a future sound. In this way, she parallels Finestra’s earliest years with music promotion, creating a distinction between two differing phases of the executive’s career — one lost in the business and the other doing it for the art form.
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As is to be expected, Vinyl’s soundtrack creates a spot on setting, defining a decade coming into glam and punk rock. Although Scorsese is known for integrating rock music as the basis for many of his films, it’s Jagger who supervises the sonic surroundings in this initial episode. The tunes showcase a journey between origin and transformation.
To those people who didn’t live through the musical epoch reenacted in Vinyl, the show enlightens viewers with harsh truths, suggesting that weakness and blurry reason often obscured the dangerous nature of an over-glamorized world. Acts of sexual assault occurred without rebuke, and life-threatening party drugs, such as cocaine and heroin, clouded the judgments of musicians and concert-goers alike. Yet at the surface of it all, there was a special, liberating sound that forgave the transgressions of its worshippers. (Or so it seemed.) For Finestra, this is where he hopelessly sits.
Vinyl premiered this past February 14, 2016 on HBO.