HBO's 'Vinyl' Series Soundtrack to Feature Otis Redding, Sturgill Simpson, David Johansen & Others

1/15/2016 by Melinda Newman



Two days before Vinyl, the highly anticipated new HBO series from executive producers Martin Scorsese, Mick Jagger and Terence Winter bows on Feb. 14, Atlantic Records and Warner Bros. Records will release Vinyl: Music From the HBO Original Series - Volume 1 and the music will keep coming weekly throughout the show’s 10-episode run.

Following Volume 1’s physical and digital release, each Friday, Atlantic and Warner Bros. will digitally release an EP with music featured in and inspired by the upcoming Sunday’s episode. Then the Friday prior to the season finale, a second physical and digital soundtrack will come out.

The series, set in New York in the early ‘70s, pivots around label head Richie Finestra (Bobby Cannavale), as he tries to save his record company. It also stars Olivia Wilde, Juno Temple, Ray Romano, Andrew Dice Clay and Jagger’s son, James, who plays the lead singer of fictional band Nasty Bits.

With a six-figure music budget per episode, each edition features up to 30 songs. Randall Poster and Meghan Currier are the music supervisors, with Scorsese, Jagger and Winter all weighing in with suggestions. Poster and Currier also paid slavish detail to make sure that all the instruments and studio equipment were of the period.

“There’s such an opportunity to [release] music around these weekly episodes,” says Atlantic Records Group President of Film & Television Kevin Weaver. “There was a wealth of amazing music, plus this idea of curating a music experience connected to the show by adding some inspired-by content.”

Atlantic partnered with sister label Warner Bros. on the project “to utilize the Warner Music Group catalog as a whole,” Weaver says, though stresses that the musical selections on the show aren’t limited to WMG’s holdings. “The idea has been to lean on our catalog and repertoire and our front-line roster in the best way possible, but always to serve the creative needs of the show first and foremost,” he says.

Volume 1 features 18 tracks that appear in the premiere episode, ranging from songs from the period, such as The Jimmy Castor Bunch’s “It’s Just Begun” and Edgar Winter’s “Frankenstein,” to songs used in fantasy sequences and flashbacks like Ruth Brown’s “Mama He Treats Your Daughter Mean” and Otis Redding’s “Mr. Pitiful,” and tunes performed by the characters, such as Nasty Bits’ “Rotten Apple,” written by James and Mick Jagger, Luis Felber and James Dunson.

The soundtrack, available as a physical and digital release, will also include Grammy nominee (and recent Atlantic signee) Sturgill Simpson’s theme song, “Sugar Daddy,” and “No Good” from burgeoning Elektra/Atlantic act Kaleo, which is used in a Vinyl trailer. “This is a vehicle for us to showcase new artists, no question,” Weaver says.

As far as Simpson’s theme song, Poster says “we cast a wide net” to find the right tone. “It had to serve a larger purpose than something that was just episodic,” he says. “It’s not that it serves as a narrative. Sturgill just captured this spirit of rock and roll. It feels classic and contemporary.”

When it comes to choosing songs for the show, the question is “how do you render this moment in a musical way that feels novel,” Poster says. “We’re on the verge of punk rock, we’re on the verge of disco, we’re getting the first hint of what will be rap, but you can’t jump the gun. CBGB isn’t open get. How do you set the stage for this revolutionary moment?”

Among the artists contributing original or previously released songs throughout the season are Charlie Wilson, Iggy Pop, Chris Cornell, Nate Ruess, Trey Songz, Chris Cornell, and David Johansen, who re-recorded two classic New York Dolls songs for the soundtrack. And, given the times and the executive producer, don’t be surprised if some Rolling Stones music finds its way into some episodes as well. Appropriately enough, throughout the series’ run, Atlantic and Warner Bros. will also release material on 7” and 12” vinyl.

Poster, Weaver and fellow Vinyl soundtrack and EP producer Stewart Lerman previously won a 2012 Grammy for their work on the compilation soundtrack for Scorsese and Winter’s Boardwalk Empire.

"Vinyl: Music From the HBO Original Series- Volume 1" track listing

1. Ty Taylor - The World Is Yours
2. David Johansen - Personality Crisis
3. Kaleo - No Good
4. Sturgill Simpson - Sugar Daddy (Theme from Vinyl)
5. Ruth Brown - Mama He Treats Your Daughter Mean
6. Otis Redding - Mr. Pitiful
7. Dee Dee Warwick - Suspicious Minds
8. Mott the Hoople - All The Way From Memphis
9. David Johansen - Stranded In The Jungle
10. Chris Kenner - I Like It Like That
11. Ty Taylor - Cha Cha Twist
12. The Jimmy Castor Bunch - It’s Just Begun
13. Soda Machine - Want Ads
14. The Meters - Hand Clapping Song
15. Soda Machine – Slippin’ Into Darkness
16. Edgar Winter - Frankenstein
17. Nasty Bits - Rotten Apple
18. Foghat - I Just Want To Make Love To You

[www.billboard.com]

Quote
bye bye johnny

wonder if they got their teeth at the same place? I'm pretty sure keef got a set also...

Quote
Rockman
....nice shoes Mick .....

Excellent shirt too :E

Excellent shirt too :E

Yes!!! but not the best shirt to wear when having a beetroot sandwich ....



ROCKMAN

James Jagger screaming at microphone reminds me of SOME GIRLS era Mick.

But nice to hear that Mick is so willing to share the credits these days.. Interesting to hear that Jagger/Jagger song. Could some of that punk spark influence the upcoming Stones album...

- Doxa



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2016-01-19 23:11 by Doxa.

Vinyl Review from the Globe and Mail:

It arrives on Feb. 14, Valentine’s Day, and if you like the rock ’n’ roll, you will love it to pieces. Even if you’re not a rock geek, just go with it.

It’s Vinyl, HBO’s stunner of a drama series set in the music industry in the mid-1970s. A one-sentence summary would be this: “The owner of a struggling record company, Richie Finestra (Bobby Cannavale), tries to find the next hit record to save his company in the 1970s.”

But it is a great deal more than that. “I’ve been living with this guy, this character for more than four years,” Cannavale says to me in a quiet room away from the hustle and bustle of the TV critics winter press tour. “I’m into it, I know this guy, and it’s been a wild and crazy education. The working title for this was, ‘Sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll’ – for obvious reasons.”

Little wonder. Vinyl started years ago, an idea pitched by Mick Jagger to Martin Scorsese. He wanted an epic movie that spanned 40 years in the life and times of a record company guy. He had the stories, the anecdotes and the dirt to make it funny, smart and revealing. Scorsese loved the idea but struggled to find a script that would match his and Jagger’s ambition.

Nine years ago, Terence Winter, who had written many of the best episodes of The Sopranos and who created Boardwalk Empire, was asked to take a run at the screenplay. He did, gave it to Scorsese and, long story short, about six years ago the project was brought to HBO. Between those two times, the film project was re-conceived as a TV series and pitched to HBO as a series in 2010. Winter and Scorsese decided quickly that Cannavale, who played Gyp Rosetti on Boardwalk, was the man for the lead role. They ran the idea by Jagger, who agreed. These days, premium cable is, obviously, the best option for a story so dramatic, debauched and rich.

“I grew up an actor wanting to work with Marty Scorsese,” Cannavale says. “Not ‘somebody like Marty’ but Scorsese himself. Now I am, and Mick Jagger is the producer.”

From Jagger, he didn’t get direction but he learned a lot just by watching him. “It’s like hanging out with the sun. Mick is the centre of attention. I watched him deal with all these pumped-up people who wanted to be by his side. I watched how people treated him and reacted to him. I learned what rock ’n’ roll stardom means.”

The series is set in 1973, in New York, for a very specific reason – something that Scorsese and Jagger agreed upon. It was a time of multiple pop music genres, clashing, dying or emerging and vying for attention. Hard rock was enormously popular but on the cusp of fading; punk was exploding out of grungy clubs; disco was soaring into popularity in more swish nightclubs and, on the streets, hip hop was starting to form as a movement in black music.

“I kinda wish I’d been an adult then and lived through that time,” Cannavale says ruefully. (He was only three in 1973.) “It was chaotic and exciting. You can see in the first episode what Richie was experiencing, surrounded by music, sex and drugs. Me, I first smoked pot at a U2 concert in 1984 or thereabouts. I remember leaving the concert thinking, yeah, we’re gonna change the world. We didn’t. Everything was changing 10 years before that.”

One of the defining elements of Vinyl is its blunt depiction of an era when people bought vinyl records, the radio stations played them and the business was fuelled by money and cocaine. We see DJs paid to play new records with cash and coke. We see orgies hosted by radio station owners who believe they are the real power brokers in a multibillion dollar business. Vinyl is drenched in music, there is barely a scene that doesn’t have classic pop and rock playing. And all of it feels authentic, anchored in Jagger’s stories and staged by Scorsese with formidable verve.

“Marty rehearses a lot,” Cannavale says. “A lot. You do it, he watches. Then, weeks later you get a call to go to a hotel room and Marty has you do it again, over and over. Then a few weeks later you go back to the hotel and do it again. It’s work, believe me. But this is the most multidimensional role I’ve ever had.”

The crux of the plot is this: Richie’s label is in trouble and German investors want to buy it. They’d like him to sign Led Zeppelin first, but they want his company. Richie knows he can only avoid the Germans by finding the next big thing. He goes to see a punk band and he feels the thrill he first felt when he heard R&B when he was a kid. Meanwhile, he knows there’s something the black kids are doing, with turntables and rapping, that’s very interesting. Finding that hit, the next hit, means everything, Richie is married with kids. His wife, Devon, is played by Olivia Wilde, who sits down in Cannavale’s chair as soon as he leaves. Devon is a mysterious figure in the first episode. A suburban housewife, it seems, but there’s a beguiling backstory.

“It was important to me that Devon’s history explains why she’s a suburban mom,” Wilde says. “And important that we learn why she truly isn’t that at all. It’s about her sobriety issues. As you’ll see in later episodes, Devon was part of the Andy Warhol Factory scene. She had to get out. But what happens when Richie has this crisis pushes her back. That’s all I can say without spoilers.”

Wilde says that in order to get inside the Devon character she studied the women who surrounded Jagger over the years. “Looking at those women was very, very interesting to me. I had to ask myself: ‘Why did they stick around and put up with all that debauchery?’

“Mick Jagger is much more involved than I expected. He gives notes about what rings true in a scene or a piece of dialogue. He’s not in charge of everything on Vinyl, he’s just interested in accuracy. He lived through it. And something Mick said about the sixties and that 1970s period was helpful. He said, ‘None of these people knew they were changing the whole culture.’ ”

Winter explained the long gestation for Vinyl. “Mick talked to Marty in 1996. It came to me in 2008. I wrote a movie treatment that might have worked, but the world economy collapsed in 2008. We shot the pilot episode for HBO in 2014. So, Mick’s been waiting a long time for this to happen.”

Winter says there is a big emphasis in accuracy, realism and getting things right, but there are limits. “With the Internet, it can get insane, the nitpicking. People in the music biz are going to be watching this with a microscope. We have four consultants, experts in the music industry. Real people are depicted [the first episode has a gloriously colourful encounter with Led Zeppelin] and we send them the script pages that depict them. So far, everybody we’ve asked has agreed.

“But it’s very important to know that it’s a fictional story. Richie is like a guy from The Sopranos. He boasts, he’s all talk sometimes. He’s an unreliable narrator. If somebody finds we’re not accurate about something in this story, I’ll just tell them what the show is about – it’s rock ’n’ roll, just go with it.”

Later after these interviews, there was a chaotic and often hilarious press conference with the actors and Winter, plus Scorsese on a giant satellite screen from New York and Jagger on a giant screen from somewhere else in the world. Trouble was, Jagger couldn’t hear Scorsese and vice versa. Jagger just giggled throughout.

Asked why he went to Scorsese with his idea, Jagger drawled: “Oh, God. Marty is like a great connoisseur of music for a start, and in his movies, I think he’s one of the first people that really used rock ’n’ roll in movies, like, wall-to-wall. Before Marty, people used music occasionally, and he more or less invented this kind of use of music that we are totally at home with. And, of course, I always admire Marty’s movies from the seventies onwards.”

He seemed to wait for Scorsese’s reply and when there was silence he started laughing. Scorsese meanwhile mugged for the camera. After what Jagger said was relayed to him, fitfully, Scorsese said: “Well, for me, the music that they created, Mick and his group, you have to understand I come to it as a filmmaker and it’s stuff that is basically the inspiration for a lot of the visualizations that I have of scenes throughout my films, particularly in Mean Streets or even in Raging Bull and all the way up to The Wolf of Wall Street. So it’s a constant. It’s very much a part of my life. It was a natural for us at some point to try to do something together.”

Jagger was asked what was the first record he ever bought. He looked highly amused and replied, “I think the first record I bought was A Teenager in Love by Frankie Lymon.” Then he paused and added, “I still feel it.”

And at that point laughter was general. (Actually, Dion and the Belmonts did A Teenager in Love, but nobody noticed or cared.) It was chaotic, but I remembered what Terence Winter said, the most apt comment of all, about Vinyl: “It’s rock ’n’ roll, just go with it.”

Thanks camper, great read. Love Mick's line at the end - “I think the first record I bought was A Teenager in Love by Frankie Lymon.” Then he paused and added, “I still feel it.”

So true.

I'm really looking forward to this series.

Yes, thanks camper88. And credit to writer John Doyle.

[www.theglobeandmail.com]

‘Vinyl,’ Backed by Martin Scorsese and Mick Jagger, Looks at 1970s Rock

By DAVE ITZKOFFJAN. 20, 2016


Terence Winter, seated, the show runner of HBO’s “Vinyl,” which stars, from left, Ray Romano, Olivia Wilde and Bobby Cannavale.
Credit Brinson+Banks for The New York Times

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.

It is no accident that, from its opening minutes, “Vinyl,” with its mixture of grimy reality, nostalgia for 1970s New York and a throbbing rock ’n’ roll soundtrack, feels like a Martin Scorsese movie. Mr. Scorsese, the Academy Award-winning filmmaker, is an executive producer of the series and directed its two-hour pilot episode.

Should that pedigree feel insufficient for a narrative about bad behavior, existential crises and the redemptive power of music, Mr. Scorsese is joined on “Vinyl” by Mick Jagger, the lead singer of the Rolling Stones and a fellow executive producer on the series, which has its debut on Feb. 14.

With a cast that includes Olivia Wilde, Ray Romano and Juno Temple, and an aesthetic that mixes fictional characters with actors playing real-life music stars (like David Bowie, Elvis Presley and Lou Reed), the series is ambitious, expensive and — to its creative team — the closest proposition to a sure thing this side of a Led Zeppelin reunion.

As its show runner, Terence Winter, said, when he was invited to participate on the project: “I remember pitching it to myself and going, ‘All right: Martin Scorsese. Mick Jagger. Rock ’n’ roll. I don’t care what it is — there’s no way I wouldn’t watch this.’”

For HBO, which is now the network of “Game of Thrones,” “Sesame Street,” Jon Stewart and Bill Simmons, “Vinyl” is an important addition to its lineup: a way to keep people like Mr. Scorsese and Mr. Jagger in its talent stable, and to guard against encroachments from cable competitors like Showtime and streaming services like Netflix, which are preparing 1970s period series of their own.

To succeed, “Vinyl” will have to fulfill the promise of its sexy subject matter and its superstar producers. And it will have to find a coherent, compelling narrative in a heartfelt if abstract idea about how music defined people’s lives in that era.

As Mr. Scorsese explained earlier this month at the Television Critics Association press tour, to have grown up with rock ’n’ roll means “you see life around you played to that music.”

The goal for “Vinyl,” he said, is “that music becomes part of the narrative, but the whole narrative is like a piece of music.”

For Mr. Scorsese, music has been a persistent element in his fictional features, as well as his rock documentaries like “The Last Waltz” (about the Band) and “Shine a Light” (about the Rolling Stones).

By focusing on the 1970s in “Vinyl,” Mr. Jagger explained in an interview, the series could depict a thrilling, uncertain time in music, when a declining metropolis provided a crucible for punk, disco and hip-hop.

“New York was broke,” he said. “You’ve got a lot of poverty, a lot of rich people and a lot of disparity — all these scenes going on against a background of quite tough and grimy cityscapes.”

Also, Mr. Jagger added: “I forgot about the silly clothes. Some of them were ridiculous, and some were kind of sharp.”

It took a yearslong process to reach this point with “Vinyl,” which was planned as a movie, called “The Long Play,” that Mr. Scorsese and Mr. Jagger had been developing since at least 2000, and which would have followed characters in the music business over several decades and cultural eras.

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.

For their male lead, Richie Finestra, the angst-ridden head of American Century Records, the producers honed in on Mr. Cannavale, who won an Emmy playing the short-fused mobster Gyp Rosetti on “Boardwalk Empire.”

Mr. Cannavale, a star of Broadway (“The _________ With the Hat”) and film (“The Station Agent”), had bonded somewhat with Mr. Scorsese during his “Boardwalk Empire” run.

At an early table read, as he performed one of Rosetti’s increasingly violent scenes, Mr. Cannavale recalled, “Marty starts giggling — giggling, giggling, giggling.”

When Rosetti beat another character to death in the scene, Mr. Cannavale said Mr. Scorsese “lost it — he was crying with laughter and hitting me on the leg.”

Mr. Cannavale’s preparations for “Vinyl” were more extensive and intimate, including meetings with the talent manager Danny Goldberg (who has represented artists including the Beastie Boys and Nirvana); guitar lessons with Lenny Kaye, a founding member of the Patti Smith Group; and lots of time spent with Mr. Scorsese, who helped shape the Richie character.

“He said to me, ‘You’re a big guy, and you put your hands all over people,’” Mr. Cannavale recalled. “Every time I would go near him, I could feel him pull back a little bit. He said: ‘I want you to keep that. I want Richie to be like that.’”

Ms. Wilde, a veteran of TV shows like “House” and “The O.C.,” also sought input into her character, Devon, who is Richie’s wife and a one-time denizen of New York’s decadent art scene.

In conversations with the “Vinyl” producers, Ms. Wilde said: “I am already a fan. But in order to sign up for it, I need to know that you’re not asking me to be the long-suffering housewife. I want to make sure there’s something there.”

Ms. Wilde said she was satisfied not only by the back story for Devon, a former muse and confidant to Andy Warhol, but also by the producers’ attitudes of openness and collaboration.

“This was not a case of, ‘There’s an auteur whose words you are to speak, and you must dot every i,’” she said.

Other co-stars just seemed happy for the opportunity to see themselves reimagined in wide lapels and luxuriant facial hair.

Mr. Romano, the comic star of “Everybody Loves Raymond,” who plays Richie’s record-label partner Zak Yankovich, said that when he submitted his audition tape to Mr. Scorsese, the response he got back was, “He’s never heard of you.”

“I’m not that pompous to think everybody has to have heard of me,” Mr. Romano said with a chuckle. “It just seemed a little odd.”

Still, said Mr. Romano (who has since appeared on shows like “Parenthood” and “Men of a Certain Age”): “It ended up being a blessing. He didn’t have any preconceived notions of me.”

Production for the “Vinyl” pilot began in the summer of 2014 and ran 35 days, during which time Mr. Winter said he left Mr. Scorsese to his work.

(During the making of the “Boardwalk Empire” pilot, Mr. Winter said, he approached an assistant director to give Mr. Scorsese a creative note. “I said, ‘How do I do this?’” he recalled. “And he said: ‘I don’t know. No one’s ever given him a note before.’”)

Mr. Cannavale, who worked 16- to 17-hour days, five or six days a week, playing a frantic and frequently coked-up executive, said the commitment to Mr. Scorsese was worthwhile. “This is what I’ve always wanted to do,” he said. “It could have been twice as long.”

Since being picked up as a series, “Vinyl” has become a significant undertaking for HBO, occupying some 11,400 square feet of stage space at Steiner Studios in Brooklyn, where the offices of American Century, about 6,400 square feet alone, have been created in intricate detail.

It is a sprawling workplace filled with vintage album covers, ashtrays, Rolodexes and typewriters, and filled with a simulated low-level haze of (presumably) cigarette smoke. On floors above the stages are the show’s production offices and estimable costume department, occupying real estate inherited from “Boardwalk Empire,” which concluded in 2014.

No one would comment on production costs for “Vinyl,” which uses enough new and licensed music that HBO plans to release a soundtrack album for each episode. But Mr. Winter said he told HBO, “Yeah, there’s going to be a big price tag, but the payoff is awesome.” (He added an expletive for emphasis.)

Mr. Winter, who wrote the “Vinyl” pilot with George Mastras (“Breaking Bad”), acknowledged a criticism frequently leveled against “Boardwalk Empire,” that the show took its time setting up characters and plot lines before it came to explosive fruition.

“‘Boardwalk’ was a slow burn, but it was a completely different story,” Mr. Winter said. On “Vinyl,” he said: “You’re shot out of a cannon. It should feel like you’re strapped onto a rocket, and it just goes.”

Should “Vinyl” draw comparisons to a series like “Mad Men,” the AMC drama about a conflicted, hard-living New York executive in an era of social and cultural upheaval, Mr. Winter could only shrug.

“There’s nothing I can do about it,” he said. “I’m sorry. People work in offices. It’s New York City.”

Despite a drumbeat of competition, including coming shows like Netflix’s “The Get Down” (whose creators include Baz Luhrmann, and which is also set in 1970s New York) and Showtime’s “I’m Dying Up Here” (set in the Los Angeles comedy scene of that era), Mr. Winter was unconcerned.

“I’m not going to pay attention to any of those other projects,” he said.

For Mr. Jagger, the ongoing production of “Vinyl” has been his introduction to one of very few showbiz experiences he has never had before, and a continual lesson in how much to be involved in the process.

“You’re not going to spend every minute of your life on this — that’s not your job,” he said. “But it’s your baby, and you don’t want to give it away. Without getting to be obsessive, you have to keep your hand on the tiller.”

(One further reason for Mr. Jagger to keep an eye on “Vinyl”: His son James is an actor on the show, playing the frontman of an unseasoned proto-punk band. “I didn’t say I insist” on his casting, Mr. Jagger explained. “I just said, ‘Let him audition and see how he does.’”)

Mr. Winter said that “Vinyl” had been another chapter in Mr. Scorsese’s cultural education, too, in learning how to apply a rock fan’s ear to a visual medium and bring his cinematic skills to television.

Reflecting on an early conversation about “Boardwalk Empire,” Mr. Winter recalled explaining to Mr. Scorsese the difference between a mini-series and an ongoing series.

“I said, ‘A mini-series is a finite amount — six, eight, 10 episodes, and that’s it,’” Mr. Winter said. “‘A series is, you do the pilot, and then it continues.’”

Slipping into an affectionate imitation of Mr. Scorsese’s rapid-fire delivery, Mr. Winter continued: “He goes, ‘So the pilot is the movie, and what happens in the series is after the movie? I get it. I’ll do the movie, and then you do the series.’”

[www.nytimes.com]

Jagger's new HBO series about the 1970s NY music scene, VINYL, starts with the lead character having a revelation at a concert by The New York Dolls.

Read the real life story of debauchery and craziness recording The Dolls in 1974. Here's a clip:

“Arthur Killer Kane, bass player for the New York Dolls, meet Glenn Berger. Glenn’s going to be assisting on tonight’s session.”

I look at the clock. It’s four in the afternoon, and the session is booked at seven. That meant they probably won’t start till ten.

I reach out a hand. He shakes it limply, and mumbles, “Yeah man, hey.”

Lana, with a perfect combo of sardonic and compassion in her voice, says, “Killer. The session won’t be starting for a long time.”

He stares at us blankly with his mouth open, looking like he is about to drool. A paramecium had to have a better functioning brain than this dude. He scrunches up his nose, and is silent for a minute. Then says, “Ya gotta TV?”

Read the complete story here: Stranded in the Jungle with The New York Dolls.

Love this song

Meanwhile, back in the States

Reviewed! Martin Scorsese and Mick Jagger’s HBO series, Vinyl


It seems strange, in retrospect, that Martin Scorsese has never directed a movie about the music business. After all, for over 40 years now, he has pursued a fruitful career alternating between feature films and music documentaries. His concert films on The Band and the Rolling Stones have been exceptional; meanwhile his profiles on Bob Dylan, the blues and George Harrison have worked hard to explore the complexities of their subjects. All his music projects, though, gravitate towards a romantic, mythological and quintessentially Scorsese theme: rock’n’n roll as a force for personal liberation.

Episode 1 of HBO’s new series Vinyl – directed by Scorsese – opens with a particularly instructive example of this. It is the early Seventies. Beleaguered record label boss Richie Finestra (Bobby Cannavale) has lost faith in the music industry. Sitting alone in his car, parked in an insalubrious part of Greenwich Village to buy cocaine, we witness his breakdown. The first nine minutes of Vinyl take place entirely inside the car, full of jerky, blurred shots and tight close ups on Finestra’s face. But – wait! – what’s that noise? Serendipitously, Finestra has parked close to the Mercer Arts Center, and he is drawn from his existential crisis by the raucous sound of the New York Dolls in full flight. In a breathtaking shot travelling deep into the bowels of the Mercer, Scorsese shows Finestra first hand the redemptive power of rock’n’roll.

Admittedly, it would be pretty funny if at this point, Finestra said in voiceover, “As far back as I can remember, I’ve always wanted to be a record company executive.” Like GoodFellas or Casino, Vinyl is concerned with money: the bribes and the cons, sackings and whackings and the cultivation of high rollers. Although by the end of the first episode, there have been no mysterious burials out in the desert, you suspect they may not be too far behind.

But Vinyl isn’t entirely a Scorsese venture. He has directed the two-hour pilot and is an Executive Producer on the show, along with Mick Jagger. The project was cooked up by Scorsese and Jagger when they worked together on Shine A Light; at one point, The Departed’s scriptwriter William Monahan was employed to write a feature-length screenplay. Jagger’s original idea – for two friends in the music industry, and the ebb and flow of their relationship across many decades – mutated as the project moved around studios, before finally arriving at HBO. The showrunner here is Terence Winter, a Sopranos veteran who previously worked with Scorsese on Boardwalk Empire and The Wolf Of Wall Street.

But despite Vinyl’s lengthy gestation and the strong personalities of all involved, the imprimatur is entirely Scorsese’s. The voiceovers, flashbacks, period detail, impeccable soundtrack choices, freeze frame, tracking shots, violent outbursts… even the hysterical mugging between Finestra and his colleagues at American Century Records recall the banter between, say, Robert De Niro, Joe Pesci and Ray Liotta in GoodFellas. Their mistrust of outsiders and an impulse to take care of business according to their own rules are all commonplace within a Scorsese picture. But there are other particular qualities to Vinyl: some specific to Scorsese, some less so.

Vinyl is set in 1973, the same year Scorsese made Mean Streets. Many of the episode’s locations – particularly those round Greenwich Village, where the director was raised – would be familiar haunts. The date is significant for other reasons besides. One sequence is bookended by a Led Zeppelin show at Madison Square Gardens and Kool Herc’s legendary hip-hop jam at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue. In it, Finestra is chauffeured through New York’s streets at night. The car makes painfully slow progress – a burst water main is the culprit – allowing Scorsese’s camera to dwell on strange expressionistic details – abstract neon signs, the elongated shadows of pedestrians – that evoke the hallucinatory, nightmarish qualities of Taxi Driver.

In the background, meanwhile, the car radio drifts in and out of stations, providing a handy sound collage of contemporary voices: the King Biscuit Flower Hour, Humble Pie’s “Black Coffee”, an election broadcast by mayoral candidate Albert Beame, “All The Young Dudes”. In an interview in Entertainment Weekly, Scorsese explained, “New York in the 70s was at an all-time economic low point. Nothing worked. The subways were falling apart. The crime rate was sky-high. But then, at the same time, culturally speaking, it was a high point… The early 1970s, and 1973 in particular, was a time of great change in the music industry, and it all started in New York City – punk, disco, hip-hop, they all began that year right here in this city. So we decided to start there and see where it would take us.”

As you might imagine in such a vivid milieu, Finestra is surrounded by many colourful supporting characters – many of them fictional, a few conspicuously not. At home, there is his demure wife, Devon (Olivia Wilde), a former model (“Andy asked for you just the other night. Lou was with us,” says Borgen’s Birgitte Hjort Sørensen, a kind of Nico analogue). At American Century, meanwhile, Scorsese introduces us to Finestra’s lieutenants. There is the blustering A&R exec who can’t sign the right band, a business partner who inadvertently insults everyone he meets, a talented female A&R scout whose on-the-money tips are routinely ignored by her male bosses (Juno Temple, evidently having a blast). Elsewhere, there is a strong cameo from Andrew ‘Dice’ Clay as the belligerent owner of a chain of radio stations, unrecognizable beneath a pair of substantial walrus sideburns, and James Jagger as the English vocalist with proto-punk band, Nasty Bits. In flashbacks, Scorsese shows us Finestra’s entrance in the music business during the early Sixties: the money and influence of the Mob grease his rise, allowing Scorsese the opportunity to deliver a signature incident involving a baseball bat. In these sequences, Paul-Ben Victor excels as a vulpine executive who offers advice to Finestra. But again, this is classic Scorsese territory, recalling the way the young Henry Hill worked his way through the mob hierarchy, only here Finestra is pushing novelty hits rather than running numbers.

The depiction of ‘real people’ is more variable. A conversation with Robert Plant backstage at Madison Square Garden, for instance, finds Plant’s accent wandering amusingly between Cockney and Australian, though the depiction of Peter Grant more successfully nails his volatile temperament. It transpires that “The Zeppelin deal” becomes a critical plot point for the first episode. For future episodes, the show’s IMDB cast list includes David Bowie, Stephen Stills, David Crosby, Hilly Kristal and Peter Tosh. Bobby Cannavale, incidentally, is excellent. His heavy-lidded eyes recall Al Pacino; though he is a warmer screen presence. In one boardroom scene, he and his partners are in final negotiations to sell American Century to German competitors.
“Fiscally speaking, “1972, American Century claimed 6 million dollars in profit,” notes one eagle-eyed German businessman. “Yet 92% of the records you released were, speaking frankly, flops.”
“Technically, yes,” nods Finestra. “But in reality, they only look like flops…”

[www.uncut.co.uk]

Vinyl: Mick Jagger: Back to the ’70s > [www.youtube.com]

Making Vinyl: Recreating the '70s > [www.youtube.com]

From Feb 4 LOS ANGELES TIMES

For Mick Jagger, the sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll of HBO's 'Vinyl' is a familiar world

Meredith Blake Contact Reporter REPORTING FROM NEW YORK




Sometime in the mid-'90s, after grunge and before the boy band era, Mick Jagger approached Martin Scorsese with an idea for a movie about the music business. The project would span several decades of rock history and focus not on decadent musicians, as one might expect, but on the executives who ran the record labels.

"Everyone was very familiar with all the musicians' excesses of the period — throwing televisions out the window, excessive sex and drugs and all this sort of thing," said the Rolling Stones frontman, lounging in his capacious (and very much intact) hotel suite last month. "My observation was that the business people were really crazy."

Twenty years and numerous incarnations later, Jagger's vision has finally been realized in "Vinyl," which premieres Feb. 14 on HBO with a two-hour pilot directed by Scorsese.

Set primarily in 1973 New York City, the drama stars Bobby Cannavale as Richie Finestra, the coke-snorting president of an embattled record label called American Century. The drama also includes "Boardwalk Empire's" Terence Winter as a show runner, and co-stars Olivia Wilde as Richie's wife, a sobered-up Factory Girl now living in the Connecticut 'burbs, and Ray Romano as the sleazy head of promotions at American Century.

Both the excess and the energy of the period were evident during a visit to "Vinyl's" Brooklyn set last fall. Cannavale and several dozen extras clad in black leather, gold lame and frayed denim were filming a raucous party scene at American Century's earth-toned, smoke-filled offices.

As the Velvet Underground's "Sweet Jane" throbbed in the background, an assistant director gestured toward a young man with Allman Brothers-style hair and a silk bomber jacket. "Can I get a joint for Matthew?" she asked. "Marijuana for Matthew?"

With painstaking detail, right down to digitally re-created graffiti on the subway, the series vividly captures an era when New York was financially strapped but creatively thriving. It's a milieu that Jagger, who lived in New York for some of the decade and partied at Studio 54, certainly knows well. But as a co-creator and executive producer on "Vinyl," the rock 'n' roll icon has done more than play the part of '70s eyewitness.

"People think that's the only thing I do," said Jagger, trim as ever at 72, "but that's like number 20."

"Mick is a great artist, period, but he's also a great creative partner," Scorsese said in an email. "It's not just a matter of knowing this or that story but of getting the feel of it: what it felt like to be a promotional assistant at a record company, or a platinum-selling band at the mercy of the executives, and what it felt like to be in those offices, in those recording booths, in those clubs. The texture of it all, the life … that's what Mick brought to it."

The filmmaker, who also directed the Rolling Stones concert film "Shine a Light," was excited by the idea of putting the suits at the center of the story. Drawing inspiration from a variety of nonfiction books about the industry, including "Howling at the Moon: The Odyssey of a Monstrous Music Mogul in an Age of Excess," by former CBS Records President Walter Yetnikoff, and Fredric Dannen's "Hit Men: Power Brokers and Fast Money Inside the Music Business," Jagger began to develop the script with Scorsese and journalist Rich Cohen.

Winter, who wrote the screenplay for Scorsese's "The Wolf of Wall Street" and won two drama writing Emmys for "The Sopranos," was eventually invited on board. He didn't take much convincing. "'Taxi Driver' was the movie that got me interested in cinema," he said, "and the first album I ever bought, in 1973, was 'Goats Head Soup' by the Rolling Stones."

When the economic collapse of 2008 cooled Hollywood's appetite for risky, adult-oriented movies, the trio decided to reconceive the project for television, which, led by the likes of HBO, had become a viable outlet for ambitious storytelling. "After 'The Sopranos' and several others like it, TV series started to come into their own, making money, attracting big actors," Jagger said.

Over tea at Scorsese's Manhattan townhouse in 2010, they pitched the series to HBO's top executives, Michael Lombardo and Richard Plepler. Lombardo, the network's programming president, was immediately struck by both Jagger's un-rock-star-ish ensemble (a fine cashmere sweater, no leather) and, more critically, his producing smarts.

"As you find out right away with Mick Jagger, you're talking to a very able, perceptive and experienced producer," he recalled.

Jagger has been involved in the movie business since the late '60s and early '70s, when he starred in films like "Performance" and "Ned Kelly." More recently, he's produced several well-received movies with his Jagged Films partner Victoria Pearman, including the James Brown biopic "Get on Up," the World War II code-breaking drama "Enigma" and the Rolling Stones documentary "Crossfire Hurricane." Still, the pace and scale of television took some getting used to. "It's easier doing movies," he said wearily.

Throughout the process, Jagger met with directors, weighed in on casting, music cues and costumes, and even visited the writers room. He particularly enjoyed the "literary part" of making a series, he said. "How are the characters going to develop? Making sure they're not cardboard characters, the minor characters are fleshed out, a lot of chats about the women characters, because everyone's so sensitive about it.... It's all very interesting."

Though he was a hands-on creative producer, it was sometimes difficult for his collaborators to forget that he was also, well, Mick Jagger.

Winter admits being star struck for at least a few months. At one early creative meeting in Jagger's hotel room, the singer suggested ordering food from Serafina, a relatively modest Italian restaurant. "I remember thinking, 'Oh, my God, he eats at Serafina? I eat at Serafina!' I went home and told my wife and she's like, 'Well, what do you think he eats?'"

Lombardo, who says he used to lie in his bed listening to "Angie" on repeat, was provided with a potent reminder of Jagger's fame one night over dinner with Plepler when, during an intense conversation about the challenges of the series, a young female server came to the table. "All of a sudden, the vibration changes," he said. "There's something about a huge rock star that's very different than being with a famous actor or director."

While there are no plans to write the Rolling Stones into the series (you know you were wondering), "Vinyl" references real artists from the era — the New York Dolls, Led Zeppelin and the Velvet Underground all show up in early episodes.

It also features fictionalized performers, like a proto-punk band called the Nasty Bits whose sneering lead singer is played by Jagger's 30-year-old son, James. (The younger Jagger is not the only rock progeny to appear in the series; Juno Temple, whose father, Julien Temple, directed the Sex Pistols in "The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle," stars as a striving A&R assistant who keeps a stash of "bennies" in her desk drawer).

"Vinyl" is the first of several television projects that will transport viewers back to New York in the "Taxi Driver" era, a time that now seems unimaginably distant despite its relative proximity.

Last month, HBO greenlighted "The Deuce," a drama from "The Wire" writer David Simon set in the Times Square porn industry, while later this year, Netflix will launch Baz Luhrmann and Shawn Ryan's "The Get Down," which follows a group of Bronx teenagers in the early days of hip-hop and disco.

"Life in the city was kind of hard if you were poor, and even if you were rich it was not that pleasant, but there was a lot of creativity going on," Jagger said, citing the explosion of musical genres like punk, reggae, funk and hip-hop and the flourishing downtown art scene. "It was very vibrant, so I think that's appealing to people through the misty glass of time."

"Vinyl" is an attempt to re-create some of that lost magic, Scorsese said. "Patti Smith said that if you're a young artist finding your way, don't come to New York. She's right. So 'Vinyl' is about the city that those kids dream of — a crazy city, dirty, very dangerous in spots, sometimes nonfunctional, but also alive."

Re-creating it is one thing; reliving it, quite another. For his part, Jagger isn't exactly longing to travel back in time to the Me Decade.

"It was very different to now, but what's the difference? I was on the dance floor last night dancing, so what? The music was different, but I'm still probably dancing the same steps. D'you know what I mean?" he said with a dismissive laugh. "The same girls with not much on. So what?"

When you're Mick Jagger, some things never change.

Well the Stones were as much part of the NYC music scene as anyone. If LZ is included I wonder if there's a scene with Mick and Keith (not knowing anything about the series)...would be fun.

Larger version of the MJ/Bobby Cannavale photo by Niko Tavernise.

Thanks for the article and pics, Title 5 and johnny. Mick is such a unique character, truly a renaissance man in his interests, tastes, and talents.

The show will also be broadcast in the U.K on Sky Atlantic channel starting on Monday 15th February.

Nate

Sex, Drugs, Jagger and Visceral Violence Fuel HBO's 'Vinyl'

By Stuart Miller On 2/6/16


Bobby Cannavale and Olivia Wilde star in HBO's new drama "Vinyl." - Macall B. Polay/HBO

The feature-length pilot for Vinyl, HBO's new music industry drama set in 1973, is directed by Martin Scorsese and, not surprisingly, fueled by violence, drugs and rock ’n’ roll. The climax is both shocking and surreal: As the coked-up, stressed-out record executive Richie Finestra (Bobby Cannavale) grooves to a New York Dolls concert, the walls of the Mercer Arts Center start cracking open. But what seems like a character's psychotic break becomes a living nightmare when the building collapses on top of him.

The scene is intense, yet the notion of a building just giving way seems outlandish and unrealistic...until a Google search reveals that the Broadway Central Hotel, which housed the Arts Center, did indeed crash down that August.

“It was a perfect metaphor for Richie's state of mind,” says Vinyl showrunner Terence Winter (who created HBO’s Boardwalk Empire). An earlier draft just had Richie listening to the music, but Winter says “there was something missing” until he rediscovered this bit of New York history that comes to symbolize a death and rebirth for the protagonist.

The scene is also a perfect metaphor for the show, which makes its debut February 14. It fuses a rigorous devotion to accuracy—regarding the city, the music, the clothes—with what Winter calls a “Hey, it's rock and roll!” willingness to break rules to tell a dramatic story. For instance, the New York Dolls played that club but not that night. The artistic license is aided, Winter adds, by Finestra's voice-over acknowledging he's the most unreliable of narrators: “This is my story, clouded by lost brain cells, self-aggrandizement and maybe a little bullshit.”

Vinyl is the brainchild of executive producer Mick Jagger and was inspired by his day job as lead singer of the Rolling Stones. He first suggested the project to Scorsese in the late 1990s as “a sprawling film idea that spanned four decades of the world of music in New York City.” Twenty years later, it was reborn as a series. “I thought 1973 a perfect moment in time,” Jagger says. “New York was very dangerous, gritty, but also very exciting musically. It is a sweet spot for early proto-punk, rock ’n’ roll, R&B, and disco was on the brink of being discovered.”

Scorsese grew up on the mean streets of New York and in 1973 emerged as the director who captured the city's seediness and decay with a rough vibrancy and memorable soundtrack. (His Mean Streets, released that year, featured songs by the Shirelles, Eric Clapton and the Stones.)

Winter was just a 13-year-old with the finely feathered hairdo of that era’s top teen heartthrob, David Cassidy. Living in deep Brooklyn, he would sneak into Manhattan with friends to wander around Times Square and Greenwich Village. “There was a palpable sense that anything could happen at any time,” he recalls. “There was a lot of crime and violence, drug dealers and prostitutes. It was intimidating but exhilarating.”

Scorsese set the tone in Vinyl’s quest for authenticity. Location manager Kip Myers used many historic buildings, shooting at the Brill Building (a renowned home to music industry), the Chelsea Hotel and Electric Lady Studios, which guitar shaman Jimi Hendrix built. Vinyl also recorded its original music there. For a scene in which Finestra stumbles upon the gestation of hip-hop, Scorsese asked for the exact high-rise where DJ Kool Herc once held block parties, but it was right off the Cross Bronx Expressway, which created noise problems. The crew stayed relatively close to that spot, however, because Myers says it lent “an authentic vibe.” They also recreated the music club Max's Kansas City near its spot downtown, and old-timers in each neighborhood would share stories, providing a taste of the original scene for cast and crew.

Unfortunately, Myers says, the scene in which the Mercer Arts Center vanishes in a cloud of dust is also a “metaphor for the fast pace of change in the city.” The Brill Building has had its exterior renovated with electronic signage. The Chelsea has been remade into a boutique hotel. A furniture store in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, with tile ceilings was a perfect stand-in for an East Village rock club, but now, he laments, “it's going to become condos.” (Even the famous Ziegfeld Theatre, where the Vinyl premiere was held, just showed its last movie.) And in a world where even Manhattan’s Bowery now has a Whole Foods, the crew had to add trash to dirty up all the downtown street exteriors.

Series costume designer John Dunn says Finestra is on the prowl for new sounds, so that is reflected in his clothes. “Some people in his office are still stuck in the late ’60s, which evidences itself in their clothing. There was some very cool clothing then—that era was the birth of interest in vintage clothing, a counterculture reaction to Nixon and the rise of plastics,” he adds. “But there were also some definite missteps in the direction of polyester.”

The biggest casting challenge was finding people to play the music icons who appear as characters or perform in flashbacks and musical interludes. An actor portraying Led Zeppelin's Robert Plant shows up in the pilot, and later episodes feature Lou Reed, Karen Carpenter, Otis Redding and Alice Cooper. (The show borrowed Cooper's original guillotine from his live shows.) Even Elvis Presley shows up. “You have to find a good physical match, someone who can move and sound like them but also have their presence,” says Winter.

More than most series, Vinyl must not only look right but also sound right. “It's not a conventional narrative: Music becomes part of the story, but the whole story really is like a piece of music,” Scorsese says. “It's almost like you’re listening to Richie’s private soundtrack, the one he’s hearing in his head, whether he wants to or not.”

Randall Poster, Vinyl’s music supervisor (with Meghan Currier), says that after doing his research for Boardwalk Empire he felt like the expert on 1920s music. For 1973, though, “everyone has an opinion; they have their own sacred songs with personal associations.” Poster says that to choose “key songs in the evolution of rock ’n’ roll” for the series, he consulted people like Lenny Kaye (Patti Smith's guitarist), Seymour Stein (co-founder of Sire Records) and David Johansen (of the New York Dolls), who re-recorded some Dolls songs for the soundtrack.

Poster even made sure all recordings featured period instruments and studio equipment, but wants the series to be “not simply a nostalgia exercise but a place for music discovery.” He searched for tunes “that would still catch the ear of contemporary audiences,” and became excited about the chance to “dust off undervalued pieces” by artists such as Rosco Gordon, Bobby “Blue” Bland, Lulu, Mickey Finn and the Sonics. But not every song could or should be a classic or an undiscovered gem. Winter, who bought his first album in 1973 (Goat's Head Soup by the Stones), credits Poster with choosing bands like Slade, which churned out the cheesy glam rock Finestra and the punks rebel against.

“Radio in 1973 was all over the map, from John Denver to Led Zeppelin,” says Winter. He adds that they are still searching for right balance for incorporating the biggest band in the world in 1973. They have not cast anyone to play Stones guitarist Keith Richards or Mick Jagger (whose son James plays the lead singer of a fictional proto-punk band, the Nasty Bits). But a little tune called “Under My Thumb” does find its way into the second episode. “It’s tricky,” Winter says. “It feels a little incestuous. But to ignore the Rolling Stones on this show would be crazy.”

[www.newsweek.com]

Mick and Martin Scorsese will appear Friday, February 12 on NBC's Today Show; 7 - 9 a.m. (According to my TV's schedule "grid." )

The Dolls symbolize punk rebelling against the "cheesy glam" of Slade? What the hell are they talking about?

Loving the music soundtrack in the promo clips for this. Which are probably all I'll be seeing/hearing, as I don't have HBO.

Quote
Aquamarine
Loving the music soundtrack in the promo clips for this. Which are probably all I'll be seeing/hearing, as I don't have HBO.

i don't have HBO either not to mention I'm living in the UK at the moment but I'll be finding it online

[www.b.dk]

eeeeerrrrr need help .... what's does she say ?????????



ROCKMAN

Nothing, really. But she looks good...

Huh?