Martin Scorsese and Mick Jagger's Flop TV Flop Continues to Be Much Too Much in Its Second Episode, "Yesterday Once More"
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Richie Finestra, the coked-up anti-hero of the short-lived, crazily expensive HBO drama Vinyl, is so ahead of the curve that he’s a punk with impeccable taste before the genre even existed.
That’s because, in a profoundly hokey exercise in pop mythologizing, the drug-fueled visionary is totally into the American bands that laid down the foundation for punk.
In the pilot episode, Richie discovers the transgressive sounds of the New York Dolls. Although they famously had only thirty or forty fans, every single one went on to start a seminal band or head up an important and influential label.
Yet our anti-hero, with his golden ears, just had to experience them live to realize that they represent the future of music. The New York Dolls’ albums sold in the double digits at the time of their release, but they were nevertheless important and influential to end up in a cheesy-ass, ham-fisted exercise in historical irony like Vinyl.
In “Yesterday Once More,” we get an extended glimpse of a band even more important and influential than The New York Dolls: The Velvet Underground.
As with the overloaded and understuffed pilot, which is notable primarily for being the first of what I imagine will be many collaborations between Martin Scorsese and Andrew “Dice” Clay, the dress-up costume party aspects of the show are the weakest.
During the scene where Richie once again illustrates his phenomenal, suspiciously prescient taste, I was annoyed by how little the actor playing Lou Reed resembled the rock icon. I was also irritated that Vinyl takes place in 1973 yet features a Velvet Underground lineup that had broken up years earlier.
By 1973, the Velvet Underground was Doug Yule, but this episode features the version of the band that included Nico and Lou Reed. This wouldn’t annoy me if I were more engaged, but the many scenes in Vinyl where fictional characters interact with real-life countercultural icons invariably take me out of the story.
I was triply annoyed by how clumsily the Velvet Underground is integrated into the action. We get multiple scenes here involving Andy Warhol’s pop art universe in multiple periods.
Before she devoted her life to keeping her powerful, self-destructive husband alive, Olivia Wilde’s Devon Finestra was one of Andy Warhol’s radiant muses.
Wilde has the exotic beauty and magnetism of a Warhol Superstar. She was an artist in her own right who traded in her creative dreams and aspirations to be a wife and mother to a man who needed to be mothered.
“Yesterday Once More” establishes Wilde’s frustrated spouse as more than just the protagonist’s wife. She has no illusions about what kind of a man she married, but her identity is irrevocably, inextricably intertwined with the sloppy, mercurial addict she married.
The episode begins with Richie again lustily embracing pop culture that time has been kind to. We open with a coked-to-the-gills Richie watching Bruce Lee in Enter The Dragon.
Like a child on powerful stimulants, Richie gets way too into the movie. He acts out Bruce Lee’s signature moves, along with the accompanying noises. Unfortunately for Richie, it’s 1973, and he is irritating the crap out of the usher and everyone else in the audience of the movie theater where the film is showing who are luckless enough to have to endure Richie’s excitement.
Like so much in Vinyl, watching Enter the Dragon over and over in a coked-up haze seems like it would be tremendous fun or brutal. Like so much involving drugs, and the 1970s, and using drugs in the 1970s, it looks like it would be fun initially and then extremely non-fun as time went on.
Richie is so excited about the prospect of turning The New York Dolls into multi-platinum superstars that instead of selling his label to Polygram, he tells the Germans he was about to get into business with to go fuck themselves and the small fortune they were about to pay him because he’s holding onto his company.
In a coked-up delirium, Richie also fires much of his staff, with the caveat that they have two weeks to win back their jobs if they can find him a cutting-edge artist or band worth signing.
Richie was conceived along the lines of other troubled cable anti-heroes/villains like Tony Soprano, Don Draper, and Walter White. We’re not supposed to like him, necessarily, but we’re at least supposed to respect him for, if nothing else, his uncanny, even wildly implausible, understanding of pop music.
Cannavale is a talented and charismatic performer, but I’m a little exhausted by this archetype. Vinyl simultaneously critiques and celebrates toxic masculinity and a music world culture that was wildly misogynistic and saw beautiful women as party favors and professional perks, not human beings.
The music industry is challenging in general, but it was particularly hazardous for women in the 1970s (and 80s, and 60s and, basically every decade). This is represented by the arc of Jamie Vine (Juno Temple), a big-eyed assistant with big dreams rooted in her passion for The Nasty Bits, a fictional proto-punk band.
James Jagger leads the Nasty Bits. In an incredible coincidence, Jagger happens to be the son of Vinyl co-creator and executive producer Mick Jagger.
That reminds me of one of my favorite showbiz stories. When Sylvester Stallone was putting together Staying Alive, the abysmal but very successful sequel to Saturday Night Fever, he claimed to have conducted a massive national search for an act to feature on the soundtrack.
Stallone looked far and wide for someone to follow in the footsteps of the Bee Gees before discovering Frank Stallone, a musician Sly was familiar with because they have the same father and mother.
Richie lives life on the edge. That’s rock and roll, baby! If you’re not in danger, you’re not alive!
He seems perpetually on the verge of abject failure and disgrace but somehow keeps finding a way to stay in the game.
Vinyl’s ridiculously loaded cast includes Ray Romano as Zak Yankovich, a promotions guy who is not quite as debauched as his boss, but only because that sets the bar impossibly high or low.
The sitcom star continues establishing himself as a surprisingly assured dramatic actor here. He’s particularly compelling in a solo scene where he realizes he’ll need to damage his car to maintain the fiction that he’s injured himself in a non-existent car crash.
Richie angrily demands the spotlight, but the most compelling scenes focus on the less domineering characters in his orbit.
I liked “Yesterday Once More” more than the pilot, partly because it’s half as long. With the possible exception of Jagger and Scorsese’s roles as executive producers and co-creators, the show’s integration of real-life musicians with a fictional narrative is its most attention-grabbing element but its least satisfying and most ham-fisted quality.
I’m still not entirely on board, but I am looking forward to the next episode, which was not true of the original, despite it being directed by Martin Scorsese.
I’m tempted to say that a legend like Scorsese can do no wrong, but the Vinyl pilot doesn’t begin to meet the legendary auteur’s absurdly high standards.
According to Wikipedia, Elvis Presley, Bob Marley, and DJ Kool Herc are all characters in future episodes. I’m looking forward to the scenes where Richie finds Elvis dead on the toilet and discovers, then popularizes hip hop.
If Vinyl had lasted more than a season, we’d undoubtedly have seen developments like Richie inventing MTV, the CD, and the iPod, but that, alas, was not to be.
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