At least he'll be the slightly-off Vinyl version of that great, lost boundary-smashing hope of 1970s rock, who for a shining moment in 1974 became the most visible gay man in popular music. There's just no way around it: Gary, morphed by Zak into Xavier, is going to become Jobriath. He draws a Ziggy lightning streak over one eye, crosses out the Italian name and writes "XAVIER." Cut to Scott Levitt, the company's attorney, gazing bisexually at Gary's photo while a female companion sleeps naked nearby. Later, he nurses a nightcap while doodling on Gary's theater-nerd headshot. After listening raptly as the kid waxes on about cosmic love, then launches into a newly-written melody in a falsetto that puts him closer to Tim Buckley than Bowie, Zak hastily signs Gary to a probably terrible contract. (Tell me that wasn't Leonard's as for that version of "Life on Mars?," it was actually sung by R&B class act Trey Songz.) Zak wants to make Gary the new Bowie, partly because the Starman recently spurned a small offer from the label after Zak bungled their first meeting.
Zak found Gary in his daughter's bar mitzvah band, singing a David Bowie song while the waiters broke down the chairs at Leonard's of Great Neck. At a diner, the doghouse'd and disillusioned Ameican Century Records promotions man Zak Yankovich sits across from the dewy Gary Giombetta, his plate of breakfast meats looking dated next to Gary's cantaloupe with cottage cheese. This week's episode honed in on another of the most colorful 1970s rock stories while promising, again, to pull it slightly astray. When is that Sylvia Robinson biopic coming to set the record straight? And don't get the haters started on all those white music bizzers almost discovering hip hop. The funkmeister Hannibal had a disco name but his style was pure Rick James, his stardom predating the Superfreak's by five years. The show's house band, the Nasty Bits, recalls New York punk originator Richard Hell fronting Cleveland's The Dead Boys, which is plausible, but anachronistically feature a British singer and, even weirder, an African-American manager – a nod to Hell's former bandmate Ivan Julian? Or, even more obscurely, the Detroit proto-punk band Death? Probably just a plot point.
Gay for fans brandt license#
The fake cameos from the likes of Alice Cooper and Gram Parsons are one source of fun then there are the show's amalgamated "original" characters, whose trajectories can be granted more license (they never happened, after all) but can still get remotes thrown at TV sets. For music mavens, the glee and groans are prompted by the show's haphazard treatment of the history of rock and roll - and hip hop and disco and Donny Osmond. HBO's Vinyl offers plenty of incentive for pleasurable hate watching, from its macho take on gender relations to its sub- Sopranos murder subplot. The latest episode of HBO's Vinyl has introduced a character seemingly based on his career.
Almost famous, Seventies singer, Jobriath (born: Bruce Wayne Campbell).