Vinyl (2016).

As far back as any of us can remember, this guys has always been associated with just two things, gangsters, and rock music.  I mean do the math here for yourself a minute.  What's the one film Martin Scorsese is most famous for?  For most of us there's just one answer, right?  It's Goodfellas.  In the end, it all comes down to Joe Pesci giving the kind of performance that carves a place for itself in the annals of Oscar nominations.  Even the die-hard fans of that film will admit it kind of stops being fun once Harry from Home Alone taken out of the equation.  That's what folks tend to remember the most.  Now ask yourself another question.  What's the second most important thing about Goodfellas, or just about any other Scorsese flick for that matter?  The correct answer answer is the soundtrack, and why shouldn't it be?  I mean here's a guy who clearly has a love for the music he grew up with, and for some reason he likes to plaster just about every picture he's ever made with what I can only describe as a kind of sonic wallpaper.  For me, to watch a Martin Scorsese movie is like getting a free education in the history of Rock and Roll and the Blues.  It's like the guy can't get enough of the stuff so he has to share it with us every time he yells "Action" on the set.  Say what you like about the punk from Little Italy, the guy knows what he likes, and remains dedicated to it.  When's the last time you ever heard of anyone doing that these days?

It's like Alex Godfrey describes it in the pages of an old article for VICE.com.  "Scorsese doesn’t just use music as a device. It isn’t an afterthought, something to merely manipulate audiences, to heighten emotions—it forms the very fabric of his films, an inseparable part of his process. Music has shaped him, and his work wouldn’t exist without it. “When I was young, popular music formed the soundtrack of my life,” he once wrote. Rock and roll would blare out of the jukeboxes and radios in the Lower East Side bars he grew up around, and he found it intoxicating. When he saw violence on the streets, there was always music coming from somewhere, seemingly orchestrating it. In the late 1950s, the teenaged Scorsese discovered the blues, becoming obsessed with Leadbelly and going to see Bo Diddley at the Brooklyn Paramount. When you listen to the blues, he wrote in the notes accompanying his 2003 documentary series on the genre, ‘you go right to the heart of what it is to be human, the condition of being human.’  

What Godfrey has to say about the director's relationship to the music scene is worth repeating at length, here, because it sort of explains why a guy like him would be willing to take on a task like the (extremely) limited-run TV series under discussion here.  Godfrey continues: "(It's) natural that as soon as (Scorsese)  started to make films, he began marrying action to music, using the bands that had inspired him. In the 1960s he was heavily into girl groups, queuing the songs into his screenplays. You couldn’t walk down the streets of Little Italy in 1963 without The Ronettes’ “Be My Baby” blasting out of those bars at 3 AM, he said, which is why, when Keitel wakes from a nightmare at the beginning of Mean Streets, those “Be My Baby” drums pound as his head hits the pillow again. That whole film, in fact, said the director in the book Scorsese On Scorsese, was about “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” and “Be My Baby.”

"By this he’s referring to not just the soundtrack, but to how music intrinsically influences his films. He listens to music while writing his screenplays, coming up with ideas and images based on what he’s hearing. His relationship with The Rolling Stones—both as fan and collaborator—has been exceptionally fruitful. He listened to them compulsively during the 1960s and ’70s: They tonally “fuelled” Mean Streets, Raging Bull, Goodfellas, and Casino, their songs inspiring him to transfer his own life experiences to film.

"More specifically, Scorsese designs scenes around music. Witness the perfect sorrow of the Goodfellas world falling apart as we find wiseguy corpses in cars, garbage trucks and meat freezers, and we hear the piano outro from Derek And The Dominoes’ “Layla”—Scorsese had the song playing right there on the set, choreographing the action in time. Every shot of Bringing Out the Dead, his 1999 study of a frenzied paramedic, was designed to music, while the nocturnal blues of Van Morrison’s “TB Sheets”—about a young girl dying of tuberculosi—inspired the entire feel of the film, which was both set and shot at night. 

"One of Scorsese’s most deft uses of rock music is Goodfellas‘ hedonistic cocaine sequence, a wired journey through Henry Hill’s increasingly frazzled brain which does its best to make us feel the same. It’s hard to watch it without feeling like you’re suffering a mild heart attack: the camera’s in a hurry, the cuts are quick, and the dizzying, ever-changing soundtrack makes for seizure-inducing viewing. Harry Nilsson’s “Jump into the Fire” kicks in as the first line is snorted, and the pace picks up as Henry unravels: Mick Jagger’s “Memo from Turner,” The Who’s “Magic Bus,” The Rolling Stones’ “Monkey Man,” George Harrison’s “What Is Life,” and Muddy Waters’ “Mannish Boy” all come and go in fits and starts like a schizophrenic jukebox. Pure uncut ADHD cinema (web)".  So just in case you're one of those faces in the aisles who wonders why you're eardrums are getting blasted by Chuck Berry or Martha and the Vandellas non-stop for an hour or two every time you go to see this guy's films, there's at least the start of a much longer answer.  As you might guess, with a dedication to the Rock, Rhythm-and-Blues, along with associated styles like Punk, it's not so much out of character as it was only a matter of time before the same guy who directed Michael Jackson's Bad music video would consider turning his attention to to a project based solely around the music he grew up loving as a young fan.

That's like part one of where the whole origin of the Vinyl series begins.  The second half comes of in the form of Mick Jagger.  According to a Deadline article by Anthony D'Alessandro, "The roots of HBO‘s Vinyl goes all the way back to 1996 as a potential feature film in what was a marriage between both Rolling Stones frontman Mick Jagger and Oscar-winning filmmaker Martin Scorsese’s mutual appreciation of each other. For Scorsese, The Rolling Stones was the “inspiration for all the scenes in my films from Mean Streets to Raging Bull to even The Wolf of Wall Street. Even though I didn’t see the Rolling Stones perform until 1970, their songs were everything I imagined in my head,” said the Oscar-winning director (web)".  The veracity of these statements appears to be born out by the contents of another item in the Guardian from way back in the year 2000.  It's there the world first learned that "Martin Scorsese is planning to collaborate on a film script with Rolling Stones frontman Mick Jagger. The picture - known variously as The Long Play and Snap - will be a satirical tale of life in the music business and will be produced by Jagger's own UK-based production company, Jagged...Jagger will write The Long Play (aka Snap) with both Scorsese and experienced scriptman Rich Cohen. He admits that the film's story is heavily autobiographical. "It's a comedy," Jagger has explained "about the perils of being at the top of your game in the rock'n'roll world and the pitfalls you encounter." The ageing rocker is rumoured to be keen to woo Jude Law to play his alter-ego (web)".

Things turned out a bit different, of course, and the explanation for how what started out as a stand-alone cinematic film became a short lived TV series is given by fellow showrunner Terence Winter to the New York Times.  "Mr. Winter, an Emmy Award-winning producer of “The Sopranos” and show runner of “Boardwalk Empire,” was among the screenwriters who worked on “The Long Play.” But in 2008, he said, “The world economy dropped out, and suddenly the phone stopped ringing.” “The studio was like, ‘Eh, this is maybe not the time to do a three-hour epic period piece,’” said Mr. Winter, who also wrote “The Wolf of Wall Street” for Mr. Scorsese. Taking a page from “Boardwalk Empire,” HBO’s costly Prohibition-era gangster drama (which ran five seasons and drew about two million to three million viewers an episode), Mr. Winter reshaped the rock project as a cable-TV pilot (web)".  The final result of all this long process of development resulted in Vinyl, a late stage analog TV show focusing on a specific period in the evolution of Rock, R-&-B-Hip-Hop, and of the music world in general.  The question going into all this remain a simple one.  Just how good of a story is this thing?