Four on the floor

Opinion

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This article was published 12/02/2016 (2992 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

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The through-line to HBO’s new ’70s-era drama Vinyl might be “it’s only rock ‘n’ roll,” but this turns out to be a down-and-dirty, gritty music-industry story that soars to the epic, operatic heights of a Shakespearean tragedy.

Both aurally and visually, it’s a yarn that somehow manages to be blunt and ugly and intricate and beautiful all at the same time.

Created and produced by an impressive team that includes Martin Scorsese, Mick Jagger, Boardwalk Empire creator Terence Winter and author Rich Cohen, Vinyl takes viewers inside the world of Richie Finestra (Bobby Cannavale), a street-smart New York City hustler who built a record empire from the ground up during the 1960s. Now, as punk and funk collide violently with the old-school rock of the early 1970s, is trying to unload his bloated company before it collapses under the weight of its own out-of-touch dysfunction.

The two-hour series première, masterfully directed by Scorsese, opens with a scene in which Richie, wasted and clearly at the end of his rope, is in his parked car on a dingy downtown street, trying to score some coke from a passing dealer.

After making the deal, he’s about to do enough of the drug to do himself serious (and perhaps intentional) harm, but before he can finish snorting the lines he has spread across the clumsily removed rear-view mirror, his attention is diverted by a sound he hears from a club across the street.

It’s music. Raw, hard-driving music. And that, for Richie, is the most powerful drug of all, so he drops the mirror, stumbles across the street and descends into the basement room where an undiscovered punk-rock quartet is in the process of driving a crowd into a frenzy.

And with that, Vinyl flashes back to a couple of parallel storylines — one in the distant past, and one much more recent — that explain what brought Richie to this scale-tipping moment in his life and career.

The more distant narrative shows Richie as a young bartender with a deep love of — and a very good ear for — music; after watching the latest lounge act perform, he befriends the band leader, a crazy-good blues player named Lester Grimes (Ato Essandoh), and their conversation about music soon turns to a discussion about Grimes’ career and the suggestion things might take an upward turn with Richie acting as his manager.

With Lester as his calling card, Richie gets his first job in the music business, and the long journey toward the creation of the American Century Records empire has begun.

Meanwhile, in the more recent sub-storyline, Richie and his right-hand man, promotions manager Zak Yankovich (Ray Romano), are in the final stages of negotiating an agreement to sell American Century to German-based Polygram, but closing the deal depends largely on Richie’s ability to lock Led Zeppelin into a long-term distribution contract.

Unfortunately, relations with the British supergroup are on the brink of a nasty implosion, which means the bigger deal could be scuttled.

And that’s only one of the disasters threatening Richie’s fortune — there’s also the matter of a powerful radio-industry executive (Andrew Dice Clay, almost unrecognizable), who’s threatening to drop all American Century artists from his stations’ playlists because one of them — Donny Osmond, to be precise — refused to attend an autograph-signing session.

While he professional life is unravelling, Richie is also trying to keep the peace at home, where his wife, Devon (Olivia Wilde), a former model and Andy Warhol party girl, is growing increasingly disenchanted with her anonymous and thankless housewife/mother role.

These interwoven storylines unfold against a backdrop awash in the excesses of the ’70s — you know, sex and drugs and rock and roll — as well as the darker elements of music-biz history involving a slightly more glamorous but possibly more brutish brand of organized-crime thuggery than that depicted by Scorsese and Winter in Boardwalk Empire.

Of course, Vinyl features a killer soundtrack that informs every scene and punctuates every emotional beat. From soul to rock to gospel to punk, it serves as the fully revved engine that drives Vinyl’s multi-layered narrative forward at a captivating pace. It’s rock ’n’ roll, all right, but it isn’t only rock ’n’ roll.

HBO remains the most ambitious of cable TV’s networks, forever in search of the next great series that will earn a place alongside The Sopranos, The Wire, Deadwood and Game of Thrones. If the rest of its first season lives up to the promise of its two-hour première, Vinyl might just earn a spot on that exclusive hit parade.

brad.oswald@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @BradOswald