With "The Racket", Vinyl, Martin Scorsese and Mick Jagger's HBO Flop, Settles Into a Solid Groove
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In the 1970s, the whole goddamn music industry was involved with drug and sex trafficking. That was the essence of payola: a freak from the label wants a DJ to play the new Canned Heat single, so they bribe him with cocaine and sex workers.
“It was a different time” doesn’t just explain away a lot; it explains away just about everything when it comes to 1970s rock and roll. Corruption wasn’t just expected in the corridors of our nation’s most important and successful labels; it was demanded.
Sex and drugs were the grease that kept the money machine functioning.
Vinyl, Martin Scorsese, and Mick Jagger’s notorious flop about sin and salvation in 1973 New York is historically accurate in its depiction of the industry as a fetid cesspool where everyone was high off their ass on cocaine at all times.
This is particularly true of Richie Finestra (Bobby Cannavale), Vinyl’s suspiciously prescient anti-hero and a man who famously has golden ears and a nose of iron. He can sense the future of music before anyone else can and do more cocaine than anyone in history.
Richie’s cocaine addiction and all of the mercurial behavior and self-sabotage that goes along with it imperil his troubled marriage to Devon (Olivia Wilde). She’s a former Warhol superstar and model who traded in a glamorous bohemian existence as Andy Warhol’s muse for a still glamorous but much more depressing upper-middle-class existence as the trophy wife of a hard-charging executive with an aversion to sobriety.
“The Racket”, the fourth episode of Vinyl, opens at the funeral of Frank “Buck” Rogers (Andrew “Dice” Clay), the executive Richie killed in a fit of rage in the pilot. Richie is understandably absent so that he can have couples therapy with his long-suffering wife.
The episode alternates between Richie beating Buck to death and Richie smashing a couch with a tennis racket as a therapeutic exercise. Richie is so overwhelmed in so many ways that he doesn’t realize that his marriage is failing, and his wife is looking intently at the front door and a life that doesn’t involve saving a man-baby from himself and his insatiable appetite for self-destruction.
There’s a great scene where Devon consults a divorce lawyer who lets her know, in no uncertain terms, how difficult it will be for a woman to get a fair divorce without proof of physical abuse.
The system is stacked against women like Devon, who, despite being an extremely attractive white woman, has to deal with sexism on a personal and institutional level.
Richie is distracted by work, specifically securing the professional services of Hannibal (Daniel J. Watts). This being the seventies, Richie gives the funk icon several vials of high-quality cocaine and several good-time girls of similar quality.
Vinyl depicts the corruption of the 1970s record industry with winking acceptance and no moralism. It does not have a problem with sex and drugs being illegal or unethical. It instead portrays sex and drugs, matter-of-factly, as a perk of the business and not a sure-fire road to ruin.
Lester Grimes (Ato Essandoh), the tragic bluesman Richie wanted to turn into a star before a vicious beating robbed him of his voice and compromised his future returns with a VERY dramatic gesture.
Richie wants to release the recording Lester made before he lost his voice. Lester is so enraged by the idea of Richie exploiting him further that he sets the reel on fire.
The crazy thing about fire is that it spreads very quickly and is hard to control. The blaze unsurprisingly spirals out of control, costing Richie thousands.
Lester reappears to give the members of Nasty Bits, the proto-punk outfit headlined by James Jagger, a lecture about the harsh realities of the music industry. It reminded me of Steve Albini’s classic 1993 essay “The Problem With Music,” which laid out, in excruciating detail, all the ways that labels can fuck over their artists while pretending to make their dreams come true.
Without someone to protect them, artists are at the mercy of labels whose business model requires them to take as much as possible from them as possible without giving them anything in return.
Lester solves this problem by ensuring that the Nasty Bits have someone knowledgeable to look out for them: himself. Lester, who is even angrier than most struggling musicians, and for better reasons, emerges as the Nasty Bits’ manager.
In a fit of rage, Richie tells Lester that there’s no way white men will pay him twenty percent of their earnings. That feels less like a personal expression of racism than an acknowledgment of the innate racism of the industry and, by extension, society as a whole.
Richie is in the hot seat professionally as well as legally and romantically. His fellow executives suspect that he’s stealing from the company and not letting them have a cut.
I liked “The Racket” a lot more than the first two episodes because it depicts Richie as an extremely flawed anti-hero trying to hold onto his life and career while everything spirals into madness around him rather than a rebel hero whose myriad character flaws can all be excused and forgiven because of his creative brilliance.
Late in the episode Richie’s past catches up with him when he’s visited by a pair of detectives intrigued that he was the last person Buck talked to on the phone before he was killed.
They consequently have more than a hunch that Richie might be involved in Buck’s death but before they get down to business they discuss Robert Goulet’s Christmas album so extensively you’d think they were employed by Billboard, not the police department.
Richie knows he’s in trouble. He needs an alibi so he seeks out his moody musician father (David Proval) in hopes that he can get him out of yet another jam.
Vinyl got off to a creaky start with a feature-length pilot that was way too impressed with itself despite being directed by executive producer and co-creator Martin Scorsese.
It helps that the star of the week is Robert Goulet, the least hip singer in the history of pop music. Goulet is supposed to epitomize 1970s cheese. He’s an unabashed cornball cutting a Christmas album for Richie’s company rather than a hipster or future rock legend.
It finally feels like Vinyl is comfortable enough with itself that it does not have to try way too hard or shoe-horn in appearances from rock royalty.
Vinyl is settling into a solid groove. I’m here for it. It’s at its best when it’s not aspiring nakedly to greatness or historic significance.
Nathan needed expensive, life-saving dental implants, and his non-existent dental plan didn’t cover them, so he started a GoFundMe at https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-nathans-journey-to-dental-implants. Give if you can!
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