The new HBO series Vinyl, cocreated and executive produced by Martin Scorsese and Mick Jagger (along with Terence Winter of The Sopranos and Boardwalk Empire, and Rich Cohen of Magic City), is set in the music industry of 1973, which functions as a kind of year zero for the main character, a tormented label head named Richie Finestra, for whom everything must change whether he’s ready or not.
Vinyl has an absurdly huge number of things going for it—the collective genius of its creative team, unprecedented access to music that would be too expensive for most productions to license, keys to the deepest vaults of backstage scuttlebutt, and a cast full of fantastic actors. All of which made the experience of watching the feature-length pilot (directed by Scorsese), and especially the second episode, all the more staggeringly disjunctive. How, you felt the shrinking world of rock ‘n’ roll true believers wonder in unison, can a show about rock ‘n’ roll created by Mick Jagger and Martin Scorsese be so incalculably poor?…
