'Vinyl' Showrunner Terence Winter Sets the Stage for HBO's 1970s Rock and Roll Drama

The two big names HBO is trumpeting to sell its new period drama Vinyl — film legend Martin Scorsese and rock legend Mick Jagger — are enough right there to get plenty of viewers to tune in. But behind them sits Terence Winter: The Sopranos writer, Boardwalk Empire creator, and The Wolf of Wall Street screenwriter. As Vinyl’s co-creator and showrunner, he’s the one who brings this world of 1970s rock and roll — with Bobby Cannavale as Richie Finestra, an alpha-male record executive looking to recapture his mojo — to vital, pulsating life.

As HBO drops the needle on Vinyl this Sunday with a two-hour, Scorsese-directed premiere, Yahoo TV spoke with Winter about the long road Vinyl took to the small screen, his own connection to the grimy New York of the 1970s, how Martin Scorsese was obviously not an Everybody Loves Raymond fan… and what it’s like to be in a TV writers’ room when Mick Jagger walks in.

You just wrapped up Boardwalk Empire about a year ago after five seasons. Did you hesitate at all about jumping into another series so soon?
No, what a gift to go from one great thing into another. I didn’t have time to mourn the end of Boardwalk. We shot the pilot of this in the summer of 2014, while I was still shooting Boardwalk. So it was actually really happening at the same time. It was really just one right into the other. But it’s such a gift to be able to do this at all, let alone at this level with these people. So I’ll take a hiatus at some point. But this is great. This is such a playground.

Photos: Check Out More Pics From HBO’s ‘Vinyl’

Martin Scorsese and Mick Jagger had been tossing this idea around for a while. How exactly did you come onboard?
This originated as a feature. Mick had approached Marty in 1996 and said, “Let’s do a movie in the rock ‘n’ roll world, kind of like how Casino was in the Vegas world.” And there were a couple drafts of the feature, but they weren’t really clicking. In 2008, right after I wrote the pilot of Boardwalk Empire and I wrote the first draft of Wolf of Wall Street, Marty called me and said, “We have this rock 'n’ roll thing. Do you wanna take a crack at it?” I said, “Sure."

I wrote my feature version; I think I wrote a couple versions. And just when we got it to where we wanted it, the stock market crashed. And suddenly, it was very apparent this was not moving forward as a three-hour epic period piece. So we went back to the drawing board and said, "What about a TV series?” So that required me to go back and say, “Okay, well, it obviously can’t span forty years. It’s gotta land in one era. What’s the most interesting era?” And eventually, we landed on 1973, which is the year that punk, disco, and hip-hop all happened. I had to recreate the story and start from scratch again.

So that was in 2011, I think. And then it took a couple years. Boardwalk was happening, so it was like, “Okay, how are we gonna do both at the same time?” But it all worked out the way it was supposed to work out.

Watch the trailer for HBO’s Vinyl right here:

What’s your personal connection to this era? You grew up in New York City, and you’re at the right age where you might have been going to some of these concerts.
Yeah, I was a teenager in the '70s. I was born in 1960, so in '73, I was a little young. I wasn’t quite going into the city yet. By 14, I was sneaking into Manhattan and going to Times Square and doing stuff I wasn’t supposed to be doing. I actually went to CBGB’s later in the '70s, when I was 18, 19. It was sort of the tail end of that stuff. But I was aware of all of it.

I was a big music fan. I was the last of five kids, so I had the benefit of having grown up listening to all my siblings’ music, and then discovered my own stuff. So I had a really firm grasp of rock 'n’ roll history. So by '73, I was reading Creem and Circus magazine and Rolling Stone, and was just really up on what was going on. The first album I ever bought was a Rolling Stones album: Goats Head Soup, which came out in '73. And I bought it with my 13th-birthday money. Which is amazing to think that, years later, here am I working with Mick Jagger.

So is this a mind-trip for you, to see entire blocks of New York getting transformed back into that era?
Yeah, it’s such a different place. My wife’s from L.A., so she only knows the clean, Disneyland version of New York. I always describe it as, “I grew up in Taxi Driver New York." That was what I remember. So it’s so trippy for us, because usually you use visual effects to make things look better. We actually have to use it to make things look worse! We have to bring our own garbage. We have to spray our own graffiti. Put dog s–t around. Make this building look dilapidated. It’s such a different thing. There was not a single thing that didn’t have graffiti on it.

Bobby Cannavale was so great as Gyp Rosetti on Boardwalk. Did you think of him when you were writing the character of Richie?
I did not. I knew Bobby as an actor, but I didn’t know him when I first wrote the pilot. It’s silly now, when we think about it, but Bobby was already working on Boardwalk as Gyp — it was Season 3 — and Marty and I were talking about casting the pilot. The script was already written, and the part called for a very handsome, charismatic 40-year-old Italian-American New Yorker. And we were like, "Who the f–k are we gonna get for this?” And we’re batting ideas around, and finally we looked at each other and went, “I think we have him, right?” “Oh my God, of course!” You know, the whole expression about the pheasant landing on the shotgun. It’s like, he just was there. So I called Bobby and said, “Can I send you something?” And he was like, “Oh my God, what do I have to do to play this?” And that was it. It was the easiest casting decision we ever made.

Ray Romano was an inspired choice to play Richie’s business partner Zak. He’s an underrated dramatic actor. What did you see in him that made you think he’d be great in this role?
You know, Richie describes Zak as “a wolf in sheep’s clothing.” Ray obviously has a persona as a comedian — of being a soft, lovable guy. But he’s also very formidable. There’s a really strong, calculating aura that he gives off as well. He’s a great foil for Bobby, too.

Marty cast him; our brilliant casting director, Ellen Lewis, brought Ray into Marty. And Marty wasn’t aware of Ray as a comedian. He didn’t know who he was. He had never seen Everybody Loves Raymond. He just responded to him as an actor, and said, “This guy is really great.” And she said, “You know that’s Ray Romano.” And he said, “Who’s that?” She’s like, “He’s a huge sitcom star.” It meant nothing. That’s why I like him. But there are so many levels there. Ray can do more with a look than most actors can do with a page of dialogue. He’s so deep. There’s moments throughout this season that are really incredible, and it’s all him.

Mick Jagger’s son James is in the cast as well, as the lead singer of the Nasty Bits. But he wasn’t even born until this era had already passed, so do you have to fill him in on what it was like back then?
No, James is like a punk musician. He fills me in a lot. Things that I thought I knew, he’s like, “Well, actually, it happened in this year…” So he’s really, really well-versed in the punk scene and the music. He’s great. He absolutely inhabits this character, and is so incredibly believable and natural. You know, obviously, it didn’t hurt watching the greatest rock star ever growing up. But it’s funny; now I can’t imagine anybody else having done this role. He’s so become that character.

There’s a Led Zeppelin cameo in the pilot, with an actor playing Robert Plant. Do you have to run that by their lawyers before you do that?
Yeah, I think you can depict famous people as long as you’re not being defamatory. But just as a matter of courtesy, every real person we depict has been notified. And in some cases, we’ve shown them the script pages and just said, “This is what we’re doing, and hopefully you’re on board.” And everybody has been. Everybody’s been very complimentary. Actually, my hope is as the series progresses, people will want to be included. It’s like, “Well, do us! Put our band in there.” We see everybody from Alice Cooper to David Bowie to Lou Reed to Elvis Presley… the list goes on. And of course, they’re mixed in with our fictional bands.

Mick Jagger is an executive producer. What’s his role on the show? Is he just feeding you great stories from the era? Giving you atmosphere?
Yeah, all of that. And he’s also a very seasoned producer in his own right. The guy wears a lot of hats. In addition to having that little band of his, he’s involved in producing movies. He’s very involved in the story, and developing characters. There’s a lot of conversations about where the season is going, and Richie, and the interplay. And he’s very interested in it. He actually came and sat with us in the writers’ room a few times… which was really pretty trippy. For not only me, but for my other writers. He said as we were going in, “What’s gonna happen in there?” And I said, “Well, for the first fifteen minutes, people are just gonna be freaking out that you’re in the room. And then maybe we’ll start to talk.”

Vinyl premieres Sunday, Feb. 14 at 9 p.m. on HBO.