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HBO's 'Vinyl' looks and sounds great

When we first meet Richie Finestra, the hero of Vinyl, the new HBO drama about the 1970s glory days of the music business premiering with a two-hour Martin Scorsese-directed pilot at 9 p.m. Sunday, the exec played by Bobby Cannavale is scoring an eight-ball of cocaine.

In the series “Vinyl,” cocreated by Martin Scorsese, Mick Jagger, and Terrence Winter, Bobby Cannavale plays a stressed-out 1970s music executive and Olivia Wilde is his former fashion-model wife.  HBO
In the series “Vinyl,” cocreated by Martin Scorsese, Mick Jagger, and Terrence Winter, Bobby Cannavale plays a stressed-out 1970s music executive and Olivia Wilde is his former fashion-model wife. HBORead more

When we first meet Richie Finestra, the hero of Vinyl, the new HBO drama about the 1970s glory days of the music business premiering with a two-hour Martin Scorsese-directed pilot at 9 p.m. Sunday, the exec played by Bobby Cannavale is scoring an eight-ball of cocaine.

It's 1973, and Finestra, the stressed-out head of American Century records, is in rundown Soho in Manhattan. Before breaking off his rearview mirror for a snorting surface, he has a brief conversation with his dealer.

Asked if he is "a Wall Street man," the label mahoff takes offense.

No, he corrects. He's a "record man . . . until now."

"Oh yeah," the coke dealer wonders. "What happens now?"

That is what Richie desperately needs to figure out, and what Vinyl, cocreated by Scorsese, Mick Jagger, and Boardwalk Empire creator Terrence Winter, takes great delight in chronicling.

Costars of the excellent Cannavale include Olivia Wilde as his wife, Devin, a former Andy Warhol Factory girl and fashion model, and a bearded, surprisingly good Ray Romano as his payola-proffering right-hand man, Zak.

Ato Essandoh plays Philadelphia-born bluesman Lester Grimes, and Jagger's not-bad-at-all son James appears as the leader of a punk-rock band called the Nasty Bitz. And yes, that's a nearly unrecognizable Andrew Dice Clay as an obnoxious radio power broker.

Vinyl, a sensory-overload depiction of the bloated carcass of the music business collapsing on the weight of its own excess and being reborn with the street urgency of punk and hip-hop, has beaten Baz Luhrmann's Netflix series The Get Down (due in August), which will also delve into 1970s New York, to the small screen.

Finestra - whose last name means "window" in Italian - provides the first-person perspective on the pulse-quickening chaos that swirls around him. As the series begins, he's trying to cash out and sell to a European conglomerate.

American Century is in trouble. The deal could hit a snag, for various reasons. Richie has had a revelatory experience at a New York Dolls concert at the legendary Mercer Arts Center (spectacularly rendered by Scorsese). Vinyl mixes characters drawn from real life, such as the Dolls, with fictional contemporaries. There's an amusing subplot in the third episode involving Alice Cooper and an onstage guillotine.

As expected with Scorsese at the helm, the Vinyl pilot is hyper-adrenalized.

After flying home from Europe in a private jet with an ample supply of cocaine and trio of Russian prostitutes - with Winter and cowriter George Mastras flaunting prestige-TV pretensions in a script that cracks wise about Chekhov's Three Sisters - Richie has to hurry directly to Madison Square Garden to meet Led Zeppelin backstage and try to resolve a conflict over a disputed royalty rate.

His busy day continues when a diversion through the Bronx keeps him from making it home to Connecticut and brings him to the projects where DJ Kool Herc is inventing hip-hop. Richie, the man with the golden ears, has his driver pull over, only to be confronted by a pistol and the sight of Grimes, his former protégé who now - coincidence upon coincidence - is the super in Herc's building.

With shouted dialogue and a punch in the nose, the story checks many required Scorsese boxes, seen for decades from Goodfellas to The Wolf of Wall Street. Sure enough, before the pilot is done, Italian mobsters are in the street kicking those who won't bend to their wishes, Sonny Corleone-style.

Outside of Richie, Vinyl seems uncertain in its early stages of where to go with its characters. A happy exception is a story line involving Juno Temple (a rock legacy herself, the daughter of filmmaker Julien Temple) as an ambitious drug-procuring "sandwich girl" trying to crack into the star-making "A & R man" role in a misogynist music biz.

The story is overstuffed with incident and expository flashbacks. But the raw material is rich. Vinyl looks and sounds great, in the pilot and subsequent episodes when Scorsese hands over the directorial reins to calmer hands.

With the elder Jagger credited as executive music producer, the show is jam-packed with original recordings of the era, plus a healthy dose of the blues and soul that Richie (and the Rolling Stones) came up on.

The show's potentially awkward device is to use music as a memory trigger, with look-alike actors lip-synching songs by the artist the character is hearing in his or her mind. So an actor resembling Otis Redding sings when Richie feels like "Mr. Pitiful," and when Devin is trapped in the suburbs and waxing nostalgic, a Karen Carpenter manque joins her in the front seat to sing "Yesterday Once More." It sounds corny, but like the rest of Vinyl, most of the time it works.

ddeluca@phillynews.com

215-854-5628 @delucadan

Vinyl
Two-hour premiere
at 9 p.m. Sunday on HBO.