Vinyl: When Rock and Roll ruled the world

The Binge
Jessica Zafra

FOR MANY YEARS, rock was the dominant musical genre. We worshipped at the altar of Elvis, The Beatles, Bowie, Kurt Cobain. We heard its myths: how the bluesman Robert Johnson made a deal with the devil, how Keith Moon drove a car into the swimming pool, how Axl met Slash. We recited the litany of deaths by plane crash, by drug overdose, by choking during a drug overdose. Rock was the music of youth and rebellion, a giant middle finger to the complacent bourgeoisie. We reveled at its decadence, its excess, the sex-and-drugs lifestyle that ensured an early death. “Hope I die before I get old.” “Live fast, die young, leave a beautiful corpse.”

We studiously ignored the reality that music was controlled, packaged, and sold to us by corporations. We knew that much of the music had been stolen from black creators. We chose to believe that the music was untainted by filthy lucre and independent of capitalist interests. And we wrote overwrought prose like the sentences you just read.

Vinyl, the new series from HBO, arrives with credits approved by the rock pantheon: its executive producers are Mick Jagger, Martin Scorsese and Terence Winter (Boardwalk Empire). It stars Bobby Cannavale as Richie Finestra (as in “window,” so he’d better not jump out of one), whose record company American Century has made him very rich, so rich that he can hoover up coke all day. This story, he tells us in voice-over, is “clouded by lost brain cells, self-aggrandizement, and maybe a little bullshit.” That’s the truth; it’s up to you whether you believe the rest.

The company is going down, down, down — its competitors are calling it “American Cemetery.” A lifeline has appeared: the German company PolyGram has offered to buy American Century, whose roster includes Grand Funk Railroad, Edgar Winter, and of greatest interest to the Germans, Led Zeppelin. And then Richie has one of those epiphanies that happen when you snort a ton of cocaine, drink a lot of booze, and get no sleep. Rock and roll!

Thus we know the target audience for this show: people who know who Led Zeppelin is, and see them as intrinsically fascinating, not as a bunch of old guys singing “Stairway To Heaven.” Middle-aged viewers and young outsiders. On one hand rock is no longer dominant, on the other hand, rock belongs to the young rebels once again.

The two-hour premiere is actually the newest film by Martin Scorsese, and it feels a lot like Goodfellas. A grisly murder is committed, a body is stuffed in the trunk and driven to the suburbs, and when the trunk is slammed you expect someone to look at the camera and say, “As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to have a record label.” Then the murder is mostly forgotten and we’re back in the music business in 1973.

What can we say about the Scorsese style that has not been said before? It’s all there: the restless camera, the rhythm of childhood asthma and cocaine, the all-consuming intensity. It can give you a bit of a headache, and the first time I saw the premiere I did not know what to make of it. It looks fantastic, the dialogue is hilarious and the attention to detail is insane, but why? What for? Then it occurred to me that it doesn’t have to mean anything. Do we look to “Jumping Jack Flash” for the meaning of life? No. We’re here for the feeling of being alive. Rock and roll!

The feverish Cannavale is the perfect protagonist for Vinyl, coming across as one-third sweetheart and two-thirds self-promoting asshat. He’s labored and endured countless indignities to get to where he is — “You think you work hard? Try scraping Chubby Checker’s vomit off the inside of a toilet bowl” — and now that he’s in danger of losing everything, he tries to recover his younger self. He’s looking for the hungry young man who truly cared about the music, but is he still there?

Vinyl drowns the viewer in details of the business. You think a song gets radio airplay just because it’s good? Meet the head of marketing, Zak Yankovich, who elicits a few “I know that guy” until you recognize Ray Romano, beloved star of Everybody Loves Raymond. Zak takes charge of payola, which in 1973 took the form of $5,000 and a gram of coke. Meanwhile, head of sales Skip Fontaine (J.C. MacKenzie) knows how to take a truckload of unsold records and somehow turn it into a profit.

Secretary Jamie (Juno Temple) wants to be in A&R so she snags a demo from a fledgling punk band named Nasty Bitz (whose lead singer Kip is played by James Jagger in a nice bit of nepotism) and pitches them to Richie. They end up working with the A&R guy Julie, played by Max Casella (Doogie Howser’s best friend), who forces them to cover The Kinks. “You’re flat,” Julie tells the guitarist. “I’m not a singer,” the guitarist protests. “I got news for you, you’re not a guitarist, either.” Stadium rock vs punk, white financiers vs black musicians (Ato Essandoh plays a blues singer whose career is literally strangled) — the conflict between commercial interests and pure artistry is the glue that holds Vinyl together, though like any rock musician worth his axe it threatens to fly apart at any second.

A parade of rock and pop legends walks through Vinyl, from Robert Plant and Led Zep’s famously bad-tempered manager to Alice Cooper, Lou Reed, and Karen Carpenter. It’s thrilling to see these icons appear — their very names sound like magical incantations — but disappointment quickly follows. Of course the actors who play them pale in comparison to the originals, like cover versions played in hotel lounges by entertainers in white jackets. John Cameron Mitchell, though, does a good Andy Warhol in the scenes with Finestra’s wife Devon (Olivia Wilde), a former Factory girl turned Connecticut housewife.

Rock is about myth-building, and while the show seems intent on tearing down some of these myths, it can’t help but build them up. At Richie’s birthday party, Devon tells the guests that she and her husband were so in love, they stayed in bed instead of going to Woodstock. Richie’s credibility takes another hit. But then he wanders into the Mercer Arts Center in downtown Manhattan during the infamous New York Dolls concert in which those punk pioneers played so loud, they brought the building down. It really happened.

After the series premiere, directorial duties are taken over by Allen Coulter, Mark Romanek and others, but Scorsese’s fingerprints are all over Vinyl. It’s a testament to the influence of the master that his brash hyperreal style no longer seems original — every aspiring filmmaker has had a crack at it. Vinyl has no overwhelming reason to exist: it recreates a period and a milieu that is overdocumented. Fine, it’s shallow. It is a much-retold tale full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. But man, those were fun times.

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