Sex, drugs, cursing, violence, New York City, the 1970s, mirrors smudged with coke residue, the Brill Building, a label acquisition, racial epithets, booze, broads, orgies, cooked books, deals made under the table, the enticing thought of Ray Romano vacuuming up lines of coke with his architecturally handsome nose, the sound of a skull cracking, cash stuffed in envelopes and record sleeves, Brooklyn accents, murder, a punk brawl, a trashed living room, and, finally, rock ‘n’ roll. There’s not much of an order of importance to the list of things crammed into Vinyl, the new HBO show brought to you by Mick Jagger, Martin Scorsese, Terence Winter (Boardwalk Empire), and journalist and author Rich Cohen (The Record Men, Tough Jews). Vinyl centers on the music industry—but all too often the drama places more weight on anything but the music.
Finestra is blessed with more than a golden ear. He’s got historical hindsight on his side. While stuck in nighttime traffic on the Cross Bronx Expressway he orders his driver to head back to the city and is immediately drawn to the funk groove emanating from a high-rise. It’s a hip-hop party thrown by the genre’s real originator, DJ Kool Herc, of course, but Finestra’s attraction flies in the face of logic; Dan Charnas’s engrossing account of the business side of hip-hop, The Big Payback, lays out how the genre’s struggle to get many labels to give it them time of day spilled over into the 1980s. But Finestra’s instinct to follow his ears toward the beats is merely a narrative point to bring him back into the life of Lester Grimes (Ato Essandoh), the broken blues musician who was Finestra’s first client. Still it’s one of many moments that makes Finestra look like the Forrest Gump of the music industry.
