I see a bad moon rising …
It looks like the building really did fall down last week. Which is confusing, because that scene could only have looked more like a dream sequence if it featured unicorns – and because neither the city nor the characters seem the slightest fazed by a catastrophe in central Manhattan. It hardly even figures in Richie’s crisis that he walked away from the epicentre with barely a scratch: he’s more weighed down by the prospect of selling his beloved record label to some “Nazi pricks”, relapsing on coke and the small business of covering up a murder.
It’s probably pointless to mull over why the building collapsed, because this is clearly the sort of show Vinyl is going to be. It does strange, self-indulgent and inexplicable things you can’t help but be drawn to. Quite a lot like Richie Finestra himself. This was the “character development” episode, after last week’s scattergun intro. Despite doing little more than snort and emote, Bobby Cannavale manages to flesh Richie out into someone we can almost believe in.
At least Richie has Max Casella’s A&R twerp Julie Silver in his corner. He’s easily the best character so far, and the only person who looks like he is remotely enjoying himself. It doesn’t matter that he is terrible at his job: when Richie describes rock’n’roll as something that “makes you wanna dance or fuck and go out and kick somebody’s ass,” Julie gets it – and we all need a friend like that.
It’s not like Julie has much competition as best-friend-material from the sadsacks at American Century. Zak “Raymond” Yankowich is revealed as a spineless, valium-addled bankruptcy risk who lives in fear of his awful racist wife. Skip Fontaine, meanwhile, still eludes any purpose above having an awesome name. Meanwhile, Little Jimmy Little barely features until Richie pays him a visit having decided that he is going to be the white guy who appropriates black music to get his fortune back.
There’s something seductive about Vinyl, but it still feels like it’s trying to spin too many discs at once. And no, we are not going to stop with the puns.
Every sha-la-la-la, every whoa-oh-oh still shines
With Richie’s story making little sense, it’s left to his wife Devon to balance things out. The episode is called Yesterday Once More because she spends most of the episode in flashback. These flashbacks to her days as a Warhol muse are so potent that (Lucy Jordan klaxon!) she wafts off into her own fever dream and starts driving around Connecticut imagining she is Karen Carpenter, oblivious to the fact that she left her children in a pancake house.
Olivia Wilde told the Guardian last week that she ad-libbed the scene in the pilot where Devon spits the whiskey in Richie’s face. The actor feared she and her kaftan would be shown the door for going off-piste in front of the Great Scorsese. Instead, he shaded the writers by saying: “Now she’s somebody.”
You can tell she was telling the truth, because here is Devon back as written – a bored placeholder wife with a colourful past she’s starting to miss. Wilde does handsome work with what she is given; I just hope that as this goes on, she’s given more than “gazes into middle distance”. To be fair, though, I wouldn’t leave him either. Not after that shirtless scene.
Fact and fiction
These impressions of real rockers are something we’re just going to have to get used to, but I’m still not having it. Devon’s flashback to the Velvet Underground show does play to its most narcotic strengths. But Fake Lou Reed just proves how much effort Real Lou Reed must have put into looking so convincingly dead-eyed. And all Fake Andy Warhol did was make me a little less regretful about not having lived through that period in New York – because whose fantasy looks like an underwhelming Ugly Betty episode? Saying that, Devon’s photoshoot was done with incredible class.
Sound and vision
Richie’s fall-and-rise routine has a very specific soundtrack. His swaggering, cokey return to the office gets Bowie’s Jean Genie; he falls apart to Creedence Clearwater Revival’s Bad Moon Rising, while his closing redemption-of-the-week sequence could signpost more clearly that Black Things Are About To Happen, with Lee Dorsey’s Everything I Do Gohn Be Funky From Now On. Co-creator Jagger gets to collect some PRS by placing Under My Thumb into Devon’s flashbacks, but our Song of the Week has to go to the title track, partly because we want Devon to bloom, but mainly because it’s beautiful.
Sleeve Notes
Which T-shirt sends out a stronger message: Pink Floyd or Black Sabbath? Well, Black Sabbath obviously.
The second David Geffen gag in as many weeks. Is this becoming a ‘thing’? Should we be reaching out to Mr Geffen for comment?
Coke Richie was mugged by God but he stole God’s wallet anyway. Sorry, I think I do officially fancy him now.
“Get back to Woodstock, you fucking freak, before I throw you down an elevator.” See above.
Zak was there when Keith Moon threw the TV out of the hotel room window, which makes him only marginally less of a douchebag.
Not much from Juno Temple this week, bar a fierce warning to the duplicitous receptionist that you do not mess with Jamie Vine and her awesome hair. Creepy Clarke was very quiet this week, too.
Is it going to be relevant that Richie is a strangler in the bedroom?
“What I just heard sounded like five dogs with their cocks caught in a lawnmower.” Despite everything, Julie can stay.
