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)".
The Plot.It all starts out just the way the New York Times article quoted above describes things. "When we meet Richie Finestra, the protagonist of the new HBO drama “Vinyl,” his situation is dire. It’s 1973, and this beleaguered record-label executive, played by Bobby Cannavale, has lost faith in the music industry, squandered his sobriety and gotten himself in serious trouble. Yet when he seems to have hit bottom, Richie glimpses new inspiration not far from the shabby downtown Manhattan intersection where he has gone to buy cocaine: a raucous rock concert at the Mercer Arts Center, being played by an up-and-coming band called New York Dolls (ibid)". As we follow along with Richie as he listens in on the music, the more it seems as if he's starting to have some kind of epiphany, or at least he might be close to such a moment. If that's the case, then it begs the question what's he been after this whole time? What kind of crisis has he found himself in, and what is it about this chance encounter with the beginnings of the then nascent Punk Rock sound that might lead him to a possible moment of enlightenment? Or is all this just the drugs kicking in? These are all the question that Scorsese sets up in the viewers mind as he he showcases Richie's unspoken inner thoughts.
Instead, the director allows the camera to participate in a game of momentary shared perception. We follow Richie's line of sight as his gaze darts about the concert room, all of which is then succeeded with shots of both the New York Dolls, interspersed with the effects their music has on the crowd. One possible implication of this scene is that Richie's experiencing what it's like to be swept up as part of a crowd into the flow of good music. If so, then maybe it we're starting off near the end of things. Maybe this will be the moment when the protagonist begins to see a glimpse of light in his darkest hour, and it all comes through the power of music. Maybe that'll be all the motivation Richie needs to pick himself up and start over. Then we jump back in time by about five days earlier. We now see Richie in the kind of suit which somehow manages to be smart tailored while also looking somehow care worn at the same time. It's a look that matches its owner. When we next see our hero, Richie is busy having to finalize the buyout of his record label, American Century, as it gets swallowed up by the international company, Polygram. It's while this is all going on that we here Richie's inner monologue for the very first time.
"When I started in this business, Rock and Roll was defined like this. (Three engineers recording four members of a band) on a single track. Now? It's changed so much, it's not even recognizable as the thing people used to be so afraid of. Now that's...not a judgment. I mean, I always tried to give the audience what they wanted, and in return, they made me ridiculous stinkin' fuckin' rich. Now, you might want to hate me for that, but before you do, remember this you jealous prick. I earned my right to be hated. I started at the bottom, workin' every club in New York. I mopped floors, swabbed ash trays, hauled kegs. You think you work hard? Try scrubbing Chubby Checkers' vomit off the inside of a toilet stall! By the time it's the early 60s, I get to start my own record company. Then I built that company into a record label. And then that label, ate up all the other people's labels. Devoured them. I had a golden ear, a silver tongue, and a pair of brass balls. But the problem became my nose, and everything I put up it. Add to that a couple of disastrous artist signings, and by 1972, the label was bleeding. Fucking hemorrhaging money! But, fuck it! That's what partners are for. Zak Yankovich (Ray Romano), my right hand man, and head of payola...I mean..."promotions". (Cut to a shot of "Zakovich" delivering one of the company's records, along with an envelope of the white stuff).
(He takes it to a local DJ where Chicago's Saturday in the Park is blaring over the sound system. Zak hands over the "good powder" and together he and the DJ "roll up" some of it for themselves, even using what might be one of Chicago's own records to snort the stuff. Richie's commentary over this scene is telling) "Hyman Wiess invented the "Hundred Dollar Handshake" back in the 50s. But by 1971, Zak had raised it to $5,000, and a gram of Bolivian "Dancing Dust". What? You thought songs only got played 'cause their good"? (In all honesty, I'm just too busy getting bemused by putting all the ironic pieces of information together from a scene like this. They're treating Chicago like shit, and yet it's Peter Cetera who goes on to create one of the most memorable musical anthems of the 1980s, when he teams up with James L. Brooks to work on the soundtrack for a nice little rom-com by the name of Pretty Woman. I guess it's all a question of perspective, is what I'm saying. He who laughs last, and all that. Anyway, Richie continues.) "You heard of the Wolf in Sheep's Clothing? Zak goes to the same tailor. Skip Fontaine (J.C. MacKenzie), Head of Sales, with his "magic mustache (I hate that fucking thing). All those unsold records the stores sent back to us for a full fuckin' refund? Skip made em' disappear. (Cut to a shot of Skip bribing someone to dump the records straight into the Hudson).
"Something about the 90 Day Grace Period for Receivables, Materials Lost in Transit, some shit like that. The point is, suddenly a disaster becomes profit. But still, it's clear, all the book-cooking in the world ain't gonna save the company. Time to dump and run. So, this is my story. Clouded by lost brain cells, self-aggrandizement, and maybe a little bullshit, but how could it not be, this fuckin' life! Hey, you know what, let me just, shut up, put the record on for ya, drop the needle, and crank up the fuckin' volume". What follows is an odyssey trailing this one record producer through the highs and lows of the early 70s music scene, as he's there to witness the transition of the Rock industry from its early to modern sounds, including R-&-B Hip-Hop, Punk, and the rejuvenation offered by the artists of that decade. It's sounds interesting as hell. As a longtime music lover, I should be fascinated by such a premise. It's that same interest, however, which forces me to ask in the end: Really? That's all there is?
Conclusion: Why Vinyl Failed.
The fortunes of Vinyl can be discerned from a simple glance at its ratings history. The first episode premiered strong. In fact, it turned out to be the highest rated part of the whole enterprise. From there, a slow yet inevitable descent began. It's one that becomes easy to both see and understand in retrospect. The first half of the series never got any higher than the Pilot episode, yet it did manage to maintain a high amount of approval. Somewhere along the mid-point, however, the decline began, and the final results made HBO decide to pull the plug on ordering any further season of the Misadventures of Richie Finestra. Looking back on the whole project later on, Scorsese admitted he'd hoped to accomplish more with Vinyl, and that he was disappointed that the whole thing ended as fast as it did. He speculated that things might have gone better if he'd been more hands-on, perhaps even directing more than just the Pilot. It's clear where his original thinking on the matter was, at least. He was approaching Vinyl from the same vantage point that had worked for him with Boardwalk Empire. That remains the most successful TV series the director of Taxi Driver has ever produced to date. It therefore makes sense enough to theorize that Marty could have gone into this new venture thinking he'd built up enough audience sympathy so that viewers would be willing to follow along with this new character.
In terms of personality, Richie is both like, and unlike that of "Nucky" Thompson. Both are driven by an ambition that is really best thought of as an obsession. Each wants to be the ruler of their own little fiefdoms. For "Nucky", this would be Atlantic City's criminal empire at the start of the 20th century. For Richie, it's the chance to be one of the beautiful people in the music scene that's revolutionizing American culture all around him in the 70s. Where they begin to differ is not just the diverging playground each is trying to create for himself, but also their ways of going about it. Richie is high strung and haphazard, where "Nucky" does his best to be cool, calm, and calculating with his schemes. It doesn't always work out in the latter's case, and sometimes when he really fucks up he can and will lose his temper in a bad way. The trick is "Nucky" knows how to regain his cool, more often than not. Whereas Richie is just a bundle of nervous energy that he can't quite seem to figure out, much less know what to do with. Also unlike "Nucky", Richie isn't careful about the illegal substances around him. To give the ultimate statement of what separates these two, Richie is the kind of guy "Nucky" would pass along some of his supplies to, while the latter would just look on at the former with a level knowing, head-shaking irony which would then be topped off with a shrug. The message would be implicit.
"You're headed for a one-way, dead-end street aren't ya, boy? Well, none of my business. Don't let me get in the way of your downfall". That would be pretty much all that either man would have to say to the other. It also tells you a heck of a lot about Richie without having to go into details. He's reckless where "Nucky" prefers cool, cold calculation. Excitable where "Nucky" realizes only a level head will solve his problems (except for whenever they don't). When things don't go his way, Richie tends to throw a tantrum and reach for the nearest narcotic to drown his sorrows, whereas "Nucky" would start to carefully plan his next move, even if it involves killing someone in cold-blooded revenge. Richie, to his credit, never goes that far, yet the irony is the man with at least something in the way of a moral high ground on the Boardwalk cut-throat is still the one who struggles to keep it together. Come to think of it, that's sort of the major plot thread throughout the entire first season. Richie keeps putting himself through all sorts of schemes to make a big comeback for himself in the Music Biz, and all of them involve him mixed up in moments of euphoric highs, followed by cratering lows. There are just two problems with the way this trajectory plays out. The first is that it's formulaic to the point of cliche.
We've been here before. Stories like this have almost become dime a dozen in in other films or TV series dealing with the Rock and Roll life style. If you want to see an example where a character like Richie manages to achieve a personal nadir, then go and check out Gary Oldman's breakout performance in Sid and Nancy (if you've got the stomach for it). What's interesting about Scorsese's riff on this same material is that he somehow never goes quite as dark as he could (which isn't necessarily a complaint, merely an observation), and the other is that it's clear even in the Pilot that cinema's poet of the mean streets is somehow struggling to bring that same brand of brutal magic to life here. I think it's possible to see where he went wrong, and the funny thing about it is that it tells us a great deal about the kind of stories Scorsese is interested in telling, and what it says about his take on the concept of Heroes and Villains. It's not that he disbelieves in the former, and thinks only the latter exists. That's not the case. Instead, it's more that he's always been in the grip of his own personal obsessions about the bad things that people do, and it's left him with a very focused lens, which can come off as peculiar the more you think about it. The way it works is this. The cinema of Martin Scorsese is littered with heroes and villains, just as much as the work of his friends, George Lucas and Steven Spielberg. Where things get interesting is the way Marty has of tackling the same material as the other two famous directors.
The way it all seems to work is like this. He keeps his actual movies reserved for his villains. Whenever he decides to focus in on heroes, he'll eschew works of fiction entirely in favor of the documentary format. In other words, when it comes to the art of filmmaking proper, Scorsese has always remained obsessed with the narrative arc of the bad guy, or the anti-hero. It's a subject he's been more or less obsessed with from the very start of his career, and I think the word obsession deserves special attention from the audience, because that really does seem to be the driving force behind all of his fictional works, at least. We're dealing with a director in the grip of a desire to understand what makes bad people tick. From a pure cinematic angle, he's interested in trying to figure out what makes a person live the wrong kind of life, and above all, most of his films rest on a determination to see if it's possible to get as far inside the mind of life's dangerous outsiders as possible. What needs to be stressed about this approach is that it doesn't really come from a place of sympathy on the director's part, and that's the crucial saving grace behind everything Scorsese has done. He might be obsessed with why normal men do bad things, yet he never does it because he shares the various amoral outlooks that populate the scenes of his films. Instead, it's always been about something Stephen King once said.
In his non-fiction study Danse Macabre, King makes a distinction between being interested in the darker aspects of life, as opposed to wanting to embrace that same darkness. He posits that people like him, and those who like fiction about life's seamier side also tend to be those who are most concerned with morality and its applications in reality. The illustration he uses to make his point is the main character of I Was a Teenage Werewolf. Bear with me here, now. According to King, in that movie, the actor Michael Landon " becomes the fascinating embodiment of everything you’re
not supposed to do if you want to be good (45)". King then goes on to speculate a very interesting reason for the surprising amount of success this now mostly forgotten piece of schlock once enjoyed upon its initial release. "Undoubtedly part of the reason for the movie’s meteoric
takeoff at the box office had to do with the liberating, vicarious
feelings the movie allowed these war babies who wanted to be
good. When Landon attacks the pretty gymnast in the leotard,
he is making a social statement on behalf of those watching.
But those watching also react in horror, because on the psychological level, the picture is a series of object lessons on
how to get along (46)". It's his unspoken assumptions that connection to Scorsese.
Or at least that's the theory I'm willing to go with. King speaks of Teenage Werewolf's target demographic as being made up of an audience of (in his terms) "war babies" who "wanted to be good". He's describing his own age bracket of postwar Baby Boomers, and it helps to remember that Scorsese belongs to this historical segment of the population. The whole point of bringing King's words up here at all is because I'm convinced he's gotten as close as anyone to describing the underlying motivation behind Scorsese's films. The filmmaker can be just as loud and garish in his approach to his own chosen subject matter, and come to think of it, what else would you expect from a guy who was mentored in making movies from none other than Roger Corman? At the same time, no matter how gruesome he allows his stories to get (and few artists know better how to go too far in an artistic, believe me) he somehow manages to keep it all confined to his own chosen genres of the Noir Drama or the Crime Thriller. At the center of Scorsese's oeuvre remains the same main character. The best title I've got for this figure is to call him the Lonely Man. He's an often dangerous outsider who's warped outlook and temper makes him the catalyst for the various tragicomical dramas that sprawl across every inch of film the director has ever used. He's the focal point of every film Scorsese makes, and if an approach like that is enough for a lifetime of accolades, then the guy must be doing something right.
You can see the Lonely Man in real life figures such as Jake "the Raging Bull) LaMotta, or Ray Liotta's Henry Hill. In fictional terms, you've got Charlie and Johnny Boy from Mean Streets, or almost the entire cast of The Departed, along with Amsterdam Vallon and Bill the Butcher. The pinnacle poster boy for this recurrent trope remains Robert De Niro's chilling portrayal of Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver. Thinking back on De Niro's performance all these years later, I'm reminded of something else Stephen King once said in Macabre, he was talking about the movie King Kong, of all the damn things, yet his words there somehow manage to ring true as a description of De Niro's cab driving troubled soul. "We see the horror of being a monster in the eyes of Boris Karloff", King writes, as well as "in those of Christopher Lee; in King Kong it is spread across the ape’s entire
face, due to the marvelous special effects of Willis O’Brien.
The result is almost a cartoon of the friendless, dying outsider (61-2)". Perhaps it's also no coincidence to see that same occasional flicker of tragic self-recognition in Travis's own eyes. Those fleeting moments of realization when he knows the worst menace prowling the streets at night is the dead, weighted emptiness he carries around inside him. In some ways, the worst part isn't just that it drags a man down, it can sometimes have a way of turning a man into a dangerous beast.
So am I saying that Scorsese is, on some level, directing his own series of Werewolf films? Well, maybe, after a fashion. He might know how to take the traditional Gothic material and give it a good polishing up so that it can stand alongside prestige stories such as The Age of Innocence, yet underneath it all is the same note of cautionary moralism that wrings true all the way from the dark forests of Hansel and Gretel up to the pre-Urban Renewal streets of New York that Travis stalks like a displaced slasher movie villain. The point is that Scorsese never glorifies this figure in all of his guises. Instead, he does it with the same frame of mind that he brings to every picture. He wants to do more than just sensationalize violence. For Scorsese, it isn't enough just to watch out for the Werewolf. He also wants to see if he can get his viewers to consider the social and environmental factors out there that contribute to degrading men down to a level beneath even that of the beasts. This then, is the nature of the Scorsese villain. He's the recurring main lead and focus of most of the director's films, and it's clear Richie Finestra is meant to be portrayed as the latest in a long line of Underground Men. So if Scorsese's films are concerned in various ways with the exploits of villains, what, if anything, does he have to say about the good guys out there? Well, the answer is more than plenty. He's just got this weird way of going about it. Where others make up stories about heroes, Marty creates documentaries of their real lives. It might be the strangest thing anyone's ever seen, yet it's all somehow true.
Rather than tell tales of heroes, Scorsese seems to have made it his mission to track them down in real and record their deeds for the sake, not of fiction, but rather of history. If you want to see the director of Goodfellas telling tales of the Hero's Journey to his audience, then you'll need to leave proper movies behind, and turn to the director's long and impressive catalogue of documentaries. It's in those glimpses into real life that you'll meet the other side of the equation in Scorsese's cinema. It's a list that might be termed as peculiar yet also somehow impressive for the way the documentarian chooses to focus his lens in on the names of good people who are, so far as pop culture is concerned, total nobodies. What they reveal is a pantheon of artistic and personal icons that the director either holds dear, or else just sees as important. The real life cast list includes classic directors like John Ford, Alfred Hitchcock, Cecil B. DeMille, and lesser known names such as Val Lewton, the filmmaking team of Michael Powel and Emerick Pressburger, and silent film pioneer Georges Melies. The last name on that list proves somewhat special, as his story is the only one Scorsese has ever seen fit to turn into a proper dramatic film. In addition to these names, Marty's list of heroes is further impressive because an actual head count manages to out-number the rogues gallery most of us are familiar with. The rest of the list would include the major architects of African-American Blues, the newspaper staff that have made up the history of The New York Review of Books, along with more familiar names such as The Band, Bob Dylan, and the Beatles. I remember reading an interview where Scorsese said he liked to take a see-saw approach to the films he makes.
I can no longer recall the entirety of the article, yet I know the gist of it. The basic premise the director laid out was that he basically liked to tackle first the dark and then the light halves of existence, at least so far as he's ever known them. The overall implication is that this seems to be his way of keeping some sort of balance in his own personal and artistic outlook. He may keep his film camera trained on the Mean Streets, yet he evens this out by keeping the documentary reels filled with cannisters of the best that people have been able to achieve in life. Looked at from this perspective, it seems as if the over-arching meaning of his films is an examination of the Dignity of Human Beings, and of the various methods by which we choose to either ascend or fall from the ladder of meaning and self-worth. At least that's the best snapshot blueprint I'll ever be able to provide for an outline of what makes the cinema of Martin Scorsese tick. If this is the layout of the director's mindset, the what does all this have to do with a now almost forgotten limited run TV series? Well, I think the answer can be found in one of the most common criticisms leveled against it. The most notable complaint I've heard about Vinyl is that there's an inherent problem just with the premise alone. It's just not a gripping kind of story.
The reason cited for this criticism is also the most interesting I've ever run across. It's a story focused on the music industry that sort of gets too confused about why anyone would want to tune into it. The whole issue is one of focus, and hence of a disconnect between audience sympathies versus what the filmmakers think is most interesting. The trouble with Richie Finestra is that he's a record executive, not a musical artist. The distinction might sound like a small one on paper, yet the more I think it over, the clearer it seems this is the best explanation for why Scorsese got it wrong this time. He went into a story about Rock and Roll, and then made the fatal error of choosing one of the business suits to be the main protagonist, when the one thing anyone in the audience cares most about is the performers, the singer-songwriters who have shaped the world of popular music into the ongoing phenomenon that it still is to this day. The thing about any good piece of music and the people who sing it is that whenever they've done their jobs right, however they went about it, then it's like they've created a form of Art that manages to connect with listeners on multiple levels. One of the glories of good music is that it works from more than just one point of reference. This can be seen in the way the songs of Chuck Berry helped spawn the power of teenagers as a shaping social force during the 1950s, or how Jimi Hendrix, Dylan, the Beatles, or Bruce Springsteen managed to be the voices of their respective generations.
There's just something in both the melody, lyrics, and voices that, when they're combined in the right way, it's like someone was lucky enough to unlock a vital piece of the human mind. One that's powerful enough to reconfigure the way people choose to live their lives. I'm not sure I can put it any better than that. I also couldn't tell you for the life of me if that's supposed to make any sense. I just know it's what's happened time and again whenever the singer is able to create a song of enough quality that it establishes a connection between artist and audiences. In some cases, those connections have managed to become permanent fixtures throughout the history of pop culture. It takes a special kind of talent to create Art that good, and it's this key fact which fascinates us in any kind of story having to do with music. The focus doesn't even have to be on Rock and Roll, for that matter. Look at the ongoing success and intrigue surrounding a film like Amadeus if you want a good idea of just how much of a grip that kind of story maintains on our Imaginations. If you are looking for a good example within the Rock genre, then look no further than the fact that A Hard Day's Night is one of those old school pictures that nonetheless keeps creating and replenishing a new crop of fans for itself with each passing generation. I get the impression these two films can stand for a good idea of what audiences want from any fictional premise centering around the daily business of making music. I'd also argue it's the disconnect between the natural mythos of such films, and the way things were handled with this series, which also goes on to account for why such an otherwise talented director could screw up a good idea.
The trouble with Vinyl seems to be that Scorsese was focused on the same type of story he always prefers to tell, and this time it cost him. Now to be fair, there is nothing wrong as such with what might be termed the typical Scorsese setup. If that were the case, we wouldn't even be talking about films like Taxi Driver and Goodfellas to this day. Instead, what I think a series like this demonstrates is that Scorsese's typical setup only works so long as its directed into its proper narrative channels. The director carries around this obsession with exploring morally ambiguous protagonists who spend the entirety of the plot walking a thin line between guilt or innocence, between sanity and the lingering threat of madness or self-destruction, and it's pretty clear he's revisiting all these familiar themes yet again in the character of Riche. Let's say instead that this is what was trying to do. The success of his efforts here tells us a great deal about the underlying short-sightedness of this same technique when it's applied in either the wrong way, or as in this case, to the wrong sort of plot. See, if it's the musicians and the music they make which interests audiences the most when it comes to behind-the-scenes stories of the record business, then perhaps that's where the focus should have remained to begin with. The way viewers reacted to at least one of the characters in the series seems to bear this idea out.
Part of the problem with Vinyl is that everyone was complaining about how it was difficult to get involved with most of the main cast. The reason for that is because a lot of the series is just Richie pinballing from one unlikable and unhelpful figure to the next. The net result felt like a game of Going Nowhere with a bunch of Nobodies. There was, however, one person in the stage list that everyone seems to have taken a liking to. This would be the character of Lester Grimes, the former blues musician played Ato Essandoh. What makes him stand out among the cast is down to two things. He's the most well held together personality in a ship of fools, and everything about his backstory makes him the most likeable and relatable member of the cast. It's also what makes him something of a rarity. It's not often you see a reasonably well held together character in a Scorsese movie. The only others person I can think of who fits this bill is the FBI Agent played by Kyle Chandler in The Wolf of Wall Street, and that of Chloe Grace Moretz in Hugo. The fact that one of them exists in the director's only kid-friendly Fantasy movie should tell you all you need to know on just how much of a Blue Moon occurrence that is. Lester appears to be the latest, yet overlooked member in Scorsese sparse yet genuine gallery of regular, normal heroes. The fact that he's there at all in Vinyl makes him the best main lead choice.
What I mean is that it's just possible to see how a better version of Vinyl could have gone, while also staying true to the themes of Scorsese's works. The easiest way to do it would be to simplify things down to a few core plot elements. Don't get rid of Richie Finestra, but ditch the idea of him being the main protagonist. Instead, let that role go to Lester, and let the plot revolve around his struggles to break into the music business. Let the revised opening of the series be either where Richie has a falling with Led Zeppelin, or else open it right after that scene, where he's on his way home in a limo and he is drawn to the sound of a neighborhood block party. It soon becomes clear he and the audience are hearing the initial opening beats of Hip-Hop music, and the African-American culture that is emerging from it. The scene itself can then play out intact as it is in the finished Pilot, however everything after the first flashback featuring Lester would verge off in a different direction. Instead of cutting back to Richie, the focus would zero in on Grimes, and stay there for the remainder of either the series or the film. In other words, let Lester be the main character and hero of Vinyl. Let it be an underdog story of this talented Blues musician who once had a chance to become a name, and then had his voice violently choked out of him, leaving his dreams in tatters. Let the rest of the story focus on Lester getting a second chance to fulfill those old dreams. Meanwhile, Richie works best as the villain of the story.
Take the most interesting subplot of the show and make it the actual story. Let Vinyl focus on Lester getting his old love for making music back when he encounters Kip Stevens (James Jagger) and his proto-Punk band, the Nasty Bits. Have Lester recognize that they've got a lot of talent to their music, no matter how loud they like to make it, and that they're also just a bunch of kids wandering around clueless in a place where the woods are full of ravenous wolves who wear tailor made suits, like Richie. Keep the part where Grimes tells Skip and the band how they'll get screwed over if they aren't careful, and they end up signing him on as their manager. From there, my idea is to let the rest of the story be more or less a variation on an old film noir called Body and Soul. It's an old 1947 John Garfield movie that's best summed up as what you'd get if Martin Scorsese directed his own version of Rocky. It's about this champion boxer who has to struggle to maintain his dignity both as a sportsman and a man as his success in the ring propels him further into the hands of the shady criminals who control what should otherwise be an honorable sporting profession. So the rest of the film is just Garfield having to navigate a precarious gauntlet of New York's criminal underworld as they try to turn him into one of their mob lackies. My thinking is all you'd have to do to make a project like Vinyl work is to take that same premise, and just apply it to the 1970s Music Industry, with Essandoh in the John Garfield role.
Let the story be about this former musician who "Could have been a contender", and yet he never lost his ear or music, or for spotting talent. Let those be the saving graces he has to try to hold onto as he shepherds first the Nasty Bits, and then the talented artists from his own neighborhood into the wolf's den of the Record business. In doing so, Lester finds himself helping to pioneer the sounds of both Punk Rock, and African-American Hip-Hop. The crux of his journey from then on revolves around the same question John Garfield finds himself confronted with in Body and Soul. How to hang on to your artistic and personal integrity while working in an industry whose sole purpose it to leech all of that life right out of you. And at the center of the conflict would be old Richie, who would serve as the ultimate villain of the piece. He would be the devil's advocate for the worst sins of the executives and mobsters in charge of the music business, and it would be his schemes and machinations that Lester and his band mates would all have to struggle against. It's a journey that can be reflected in any number of side stories for the bands that Lester becomes the manager of as both the Punks and the Rappers begin to struggle with keeping their own authentic musical voices heard. That's the kind of conflict which seems to resonate best with audience in this kind of narrative.
I have to admit that sounds a lot more interesting than what we got in the final product. I will have to give Scorsese this much. There's one thing he was great at with this show, no matter how abortive it was. On a visual level, it's some of the best images he's ever conjured up for his audience. There are moments in the Pilot, at least, where it's clear you can tell the director of Taxi Driver is really feeling the nostalgia for his glory days growing up as a guerilla filmmaker on the mean streets of NYC. There are moments when the 1970s of Scorsese's misspent youth are recreated in precise yet loving detail. Something tells me the artist is at a point in his life when he's ready to look back with a better amount of fondness and forgiveness for the street rat he used to be back in the day. It makes me think he should set his next picture back during that classic time period, and just let it be a fond collection of remembrances. Now that would be one hell of an interesting change of pace from the Goodfellas director. As things stand here, I think I've given a clear enough idea of why Vinyl doesn't quite succeed as well as it should. For one thing, it's a story that demands a different, perhaps even a more traditional rags to riches approach that's at odds with Scorsese's usual storytelling methods. What works for a character like Tavis Bickle doesn't come off quite so well in the story of a subculture where a simple bunch of singers are able to turn themselves into heroes and icons at the strike of a chord.
That sort of setting requires at least something of a more idealistic approach, because it's exactly that type of idealism which propelled guys like Elvis Presley, Bo Diddley, or John Lennon to even take their first tentative steps into the recording booth. They were all just a bunch of dreamers hoping to live out their dreams, and then one day they got a chance for their wishes to come true. That's what audiences care about the most when it comes to the Music scene, and it's where Scorsese's energies should have been directed. Instead, the director let his usual methods and obsessions get in the way and, in what is a very rare occurrence, they sort of held him back rather than propelling him forward. It's a strange, yet very true part of the equation for this series' failures. The other half probably has to do with the haphazard nature of its initial origins. The sources above all say that the initial idea wasn't Scorsese's, but rather that of fellow series producer Mick Jagger. Now, it's probably telling that when I think of the frontman and lead singer for the Rolling Stones, it's the music I go to first and foremost, and very rarely do I consider the sporadic career the singer has had in the movies. He's done some work, I grant you (the most memorable being a surrealist gangster film by Nicholas Roeg called Performance), yet his efforts in this particular direction have been scattered so far in between that it's really just a sideline deal in the artist's interests, and perhaps it was never going to really be the main one out of them all.
Still, he did have this one idea about a film focused on at least some character connected with the record business and his role as both a participant and fly-on-the-wall as he both shapes and watches the Music Industry evolve and grow around him. The problem here seems to be that the initial idea needed to have more meat on its bones, and I can't shake the thought that there might have been an initial amount of personal ambition rather than artistic Inspiration around the concept. In other words, I get the impression that it all started out as a vanity project on Mick's part, and that Scorsese just came along to try and see if he could help flesh it out into something approaching a proper story. The fact that neither of them was able to succeed in this task just proves what happens when none of the filmmakers involved in a project can figure the right way into the material. As a result, I'm afraid I'll have to grant a non-passing grade to Vinyl. What I can applaud about it is that somewhere along the way, a level of genuine ambition managed to attach itself to the series, and there were hopes that something good could have come from it. So while I can't call Vinyl a success, I can at least view it as a kind of noble failure.
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