Martin Scorsese and Mick Jagger's Flop HBO Drama Vinyl Gets Into the Groove With Its Third Episode, "Whispered Secrets"
Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.
Thirteen years and a lifetime ago, I had the honor of spending an unforgettable afternoon visiting the birthplace of hip-hop alongside the legendary Grandmaster Caz as part of the Pop Pilgrims series at The A.V. Club.
Being head writer of The A.V. Club sure had its perks. I miss it. I mention this because a very small percentage of the third episode of Vinyl takes place in the unassuming Bronx basement where Hip Hop was born.
In the kind of coincidence that fills Martin Scorsese and Mick Jagger’s cheesy-ass tribute to the coke-fueled record biz of the early 1970s, Lester (Ato Essandoh), a gifted blues progeny who lost his voice in a vicious attack, happens to be working as a super in the building where it all went down.
Lester had ample reason to feel and sing the blues even before a vicious goon beats him up so badly that it reduced his once-sonorous voice to a deathly rasp. When Bobby Cannavale’s wheeler-dealer label head, Richie Finestra, visits Lester to discuss recordings he made before the beating, his eyes are alive with anger and indignation.
A man who promised to be his star-maker instead indirectly led to him losing what mattered most to him: his voice.
There is a lovely fantasy sequence in which Lester’s default scowl melts into a smile of supreme joy as the tragic musician imagines a world where the ferocious fists of a white henchman do not imperil his career and professional future.
Lester imagines himself singing the blues with an incongruous smile. He fantasizes about the beautiful wife and children who would complete the idyllic life that might have been his had fate not been so cruel.
“Whispered Secrets” opens with Jackie Jervis (Ken Marino), a rival executive, delivering a racism-and-insult based spiel at a banquet that touches upon Richie’s decision not to sell his label to Polygram for millions.
This is how Richie’s long-suffering, spooky-eyed wife Devon (Olivia Wilde) learns that her hubby didn’t sell his company or tell her of his decision, costing them millions.
Devon is apoplectic, mainly because she needs to fund a ballet company from behind the Eastern curtain with money that her husband turned down.
This causes her to visit her old friend Andy Warhol (John Cameron Mitchell) to see if he can help her raise the necessary funds.
I tend to roll my eyes in irritation when Vinyl clumsily introduces or re-introduces a famous figure from pop culture and pop music.
That was my response to Warhol’s introduction in the last episode. I responded much more positively this time around because Warhol and his frustrated protege have an intriguingly tricky and complicated dynamic.
Devon needs Warhol to sign a painting that Warhol made of her so that she can sell it to raise funds. The pop-art icon is understandably ambivalent about Devon selling a gift. However, he ultimately can feel her pain and acquiesces to her request because he can see how unhappy she is being the trophy wife of a coke-addicted womanizer.
Elsewhere, Clark Morelle (Jack Quaid) encounters Alice Cooper (Dustin Ingram) at a recording session and instinctively decides to woo him as a solo artist rather than the frontman for a band that, confusingly, shares his name.
The two seem to hit it off famously. They become fast friends. Alice Cooper loves drinking, naked women, and golf. Oh, and snakes. Clark is so eager to sign the shock rocker that he lets one of his snake friends nearly squeeze the life out of him.
Alice seems ready to abandon his bandmates, but it’s all an elaborate ruse to humiliate Clark and, by extension, the label he works for.
The scary rock and roller makes Clark think he’s about to lose his head to Alice Cooper’s guillotine after he reveals that Clark’s boss, Ritchie, once stood them up after they made tremendous sacrifices to perform for him.
It’s tremendously cheesy but in a fun way. That’s similarly true of a subplot where the ambitious Jamie (Juno Temple) tries to get Richie interested in her pet band, the Nasty Bits, a Johnny Thunders and the Heartbreakers-style proto-punk band fronted by Mick Jagger’s son Jamie, by having him come to one of their concerts.
Richie canonically has golden ears and an iron nose. He has the best, most adventurous, and right instincts of anyone in the music business, and he does more cocaine than some record labels in their entirety.
Being right all the time, Bobby gets angry because he senses that his employees are trying to soften up The Nasty Bits’ image and sound so that they would appeal to a broader, more mainstream audience.
Jamie (Max Casella, who has grown up quite a bit since his Doogie Howser M.D) has the Nasty Bits sell the fuck out by performing a cover of the Kinks’ “All Day and All of the Night.”
The Kinks hit is part of the primordial stew from which punk emerged. It’s a punk anthem from a pre-punk era, but Richie and Jamie intuitively understand that these rough edges set the band apart and make them special.
Richie isn’t just disappointed in Julie’s commercial sensibilities; he’s enraged. He knows The Nasty Bits could sell even more albums with the proper marketing and mentorship than The New York Dolls.
“Whispered Secrets” is the best episode of Vinyl to date because its many subplots take the show away from its core of Richie doing lots of cocaine, then anticipating the future of music with his diamond gut.
Don’t get me wrong: Richie does a LOT of cocaine here. The dude loves the white stuff! He can’t get enough. There’s a perpetual cocaine party going on in his nostrils.
Richie struggles for personal and professional survival. He’s still on edge after witnessing the brutal murder of an eccentric bigwig played by Andrew “Dice” Clay and feels the need to cut the majority of his acts in a desperate bid to stay in business.
Vinyl continues to be a show for Mojo readers and only Mojo readers, but it has improved considerably since its underwhelming feature-length debut.
The first episode of Vinyl was directed by Martin Scorsese, who has said that the show might have succeeded or at least made it past a single season if he had directed every episode.
Martin Scorsese doesn’t just have a lifetime pass for me. He has a series of lifetime passes. He could murder a hobo in a PCP haze, and I would be mortified, of course, but not ready to give up the director of After Hours and King of Comedy.
Scorsese didn’t direct the best episode of Vinyl yet. Music video hotshot Mark Romanek did.
“Whispered Secrets” made me think I might just be a Vinyl fan after all.
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