Trivia / Vinyl

• Colbert Bump:
  • Barrabás's "Wild Safari" featured on the eighth episode and renewed some interest in the group's work.
  • Ruth Brown's "(Mama) He Treats Your Daughter Mean" also became well known, as did Buddy Holly's "Rave On".
• Creator Killer: Terence Winter was riding high with HBO and Scorsese. He'd gone from a celebrated gig on The Sopranos (by the final season, Winter was the longest serving writer other than Chase) to Boardwalk Empire (which was never a massive hit, but had a devoted fan base and ran a respectable 5 seasons). He'd even written "The Wolf of Wall Street" for Scorsese. Winter seemed particularly well loved by Scorcese, with the acclaimed director making the Boardwalk Empire pilot, and Winter in return being picked to handle Vinyl, which was a decades long passion project project Scorcese. Vinyl seemed to grind his career to a sudden halt. He was embarrassingly forced to leave or maybe even fired, the show was cancelled after just a single season and Winter left his two decade home of HBO as a result. He was later attached to co-write a The Batman (2022) spin-off series for HBO Max but then left the project while it was still developing. Winter would seemingly bounce back by running Tulsa King in 2022, though he later left that show again, once more due to "creative differences". Vinyl marks a clear time when his lucky touch seemed to shift within a couple of months in 2016, with the lucky touch never fully returning.
• In Memoriam: "Cyclone", the sixth episode, is dedicated to David Bowie, which is fitting since he appears in that episode (played by Noah Bean) and two of his songs "Suffragette City" and "Life on Mars" are covered on the show. Mick Jagger added the dedication after Bowie's death in January.
• What Could Have Been: The show was renewed for a second season, after the pilot aired but after the critical reception of the later episodes wasn't very positive, HBO nixed it. The network's head of programming Casey Bloys said of the decision, "It didn't land. With limited resources, we didn't think the retooling was worth the producers' time if it would only move the needle a little bit."

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