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Stuck in the Middle: Martin Scorsese on ‘Vinyl,’ his Ode to Rock Music and its Shady Cast of Characters
To see more from the set of Vinyl, check out @vinyl on Instagram. For more music stories, head to @music.
The first episode of Vinyl (@vinyl) starts with a close-up shot of a man in a luxury sedan drinking out of a liquor bottle and blowing cocaine off a rearview mirror. He’s sweating, he’s stressed, he’s on his last leg. If that all sounds like the beginning of a Martin Scorsese movie in the making, that’s because it is: the two-hour pilot, premiering February 14 on HBO, was directed by the man himself.
Vinyl gives viewers an inside look at the life of a New York-based record executive in 1973: a time when Zeppelin ruled the airwaves and the punk scene was just beginning to sprout up in crumbling backrooms and seedy dive bars downtown.
“I was aware that something was happening, and that there was a lot of cross-pollination between the music scene, the art world, avant-garde theatre, the music of Philip Glass and Steve Reich, the downtown filmmakers, Robert Wilson and so on,” Scorsese tells Instagram @music, over email. “SoHo and the Village were still areas of town where people could live on very little. The lofts were workspaces owned or rented very cheaply by artists. Everyone was poor, and it didn’t matter.”
Helping anchor this moment in time is Richie Finestra (a wavy-haired, well-dressed Bobby Cannavale), the founder of American Century records. Scorsese likes to refer to Vinyl’s main character as a man who’s stuck in between his desire to be comfortable and his desire for quality music — in between the family life and the high life. In classic Scorsese fashion, the show’s pilot features Richie doing his best Henry Hill impression, as a man at the top of his game narrating his own downfall. “I always tried to give the audiences what they wanted and in return they made me stinking f—ing rich,” he says. “This is my story, clouded by lost brain cells, self-aggrandizement and maybe a little bulls—.” Starring alongside Richie’s outsized personality are a cast of shady insiders and outlandish rock stars (fictional versions of Robert Plant, David Bowie and Elvis Presley all make appearances).
Initially conceived years ago by Scorsese and Mick Jagger as a feature length film, Vinyl went through several iterations before landing on a TV series with Boardwalk Empire’s Terence Winter as showrunner. For Scorsese, who directed such legendary music documentaries as The Last Waltz and No Direction Home, a fictionalized account inside the world of music had been a long time in the making.
“Sometimes, it can take a long, long time for a good idea to develop. And you just have to be patient,” says Scorsese. “Mick Jagger and I started talking about this project many years ago. And we kept revisiting it, letting it sit and develop in our minds, then coming back to it, for quite a long time until we both felt: OK, this is it.”
Besides nailing the story down, it was also imperative to get the soundtrack right. To help kick things off, Scorsese, along with music supervisor Randall Poster, injected the pilot with a wide range of tunes both of the time period and not: Edgar Winter, Otis Redding, Bo Diddley. But here, what’s “new” is king. That’s where Richie finds himself at the beginning (and end) of the pilot, following his ear into a building where a band called the New York Dolls are playing to a group of glittered, glammed-out teenagers and college kids. Unfortunately, like everything else in Richie’s life, the moment wasn’t meant to last long.
“Richie is like the Phoenix, burned in the purifying fires of rock ‘n’ roll and reborn from his own ashes,” says Scorsese. In that way, the main character of Vinyl is a bit like the music industry itself — always rebranding, always reinventing, always looking for that one final score.
—Instagram @music
by via Instagram Blog
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