[rating=8.00] “Yesterday Once More”
Following an arrogant, over-stuffed, and fantastic pilot episode, Vinyl looks to both stretch its legs as it establishes its unique, uncompromising voice. Scorsese steps back to be more of a guiding force, allowing other talented, TV auteur mainstays to take turns at the helm, each trying their hand at telling the story of the decadent freefall of the music industry in 1973. As the show comfortably settles into its groove, here’s a look at the this episode’s top-five greatest hits.
5. The theme song
While we didn’t get one last week, we got a fully produced, lush and nuanced sequence, all set to Sturgill Simpson’s “Sugar Daddy.” With a sound they call both “classic and contemporary,” it’s the musical equivalent of Richie Finestra’s wild, consequence-filled abandoned.
4. Richie Finestra
If there was any looming doubt over the ending of last week’s being “real,” within the defined universe of the show, Richie blew it all out of the water showing up covered in dust, coked-out, and bleeding from the head, all to blow his business deal in epic fashion. Bobby Cannavale, who stole the show in Boardwalk Empire’s near-perfect third season, slowly became more and more unhinged to the point of him breaking by the show’s finale that year, all during a moment still highlighted as one of the best moments they’d ever done.
Here, luckily for us, Cannavale gets to start the second episode a profane spectacle, smashing Jethro Tull records, and breaking his business partner’s nose high on his vision from god, his passion for rock and roll, his hours of kung fu movies, and lots and lots of cocaine. His behavior is underscored by his wife, Devon’s damning endorsement that “he’s always fine, it’s everyone around him that gets fucked” that starts to make it more apparent that Richie is definitely not the hero in his own story.
3. Julie Silver
Coming fresh into a series like this, I’m always curious to find the Mikey Palmice of the first season. Equally hated and likeable, a kind of anti-anti-hero, and with Vinyl already racking up a body count, albeit a small one, there’s bound to be some mainstays that don’t make it out of the first season for one reason or another. Played well by longtime TV veteran Max Casella, with him joining Richie by the hand as he dives back off the cliff of excess, it’ll be interesting to see how his input with restructuring the sound of The Nasty Bitz plays at their showcase. Judging by the “next time on…” scene we were shown, not very well.
2. The Karen Carpenter… cameo
It’s perfectly in sync with the nature of this show (so far) to have Devon’s backstory include running with the Warhol gang, snapping photos at Velvet Underground shows and doing plays with Nico. The pilot’s inclusion of a few seemingly out-of-place cutaways to lookalikes of legendary musicians seemed to provide some kind of pantomime to the soundtrack, but seemed like one of those things that wouldn’t go past the pilot (remember when Six Feet Under would insert commercials for funeral products?)
It turns out, the second episode doubled down by having Devon lose herself in a flashback to the point where Karen Carpenter isn’t just singing a song like it was meant for her, but she was actually in the car, singing to Devon. So powerfully that she drove off and left her kids in a diner. I’m more than a little curious to see where this goes.
1. The Keith Moon story
A throwaway anecdote told by Zach to some less-than-amused German record executives, the show again finds a way to believably slip itself into the fabric of over-the-top rockstar lore. While not as pronounced as Ian Hart’s cameo as Led Zeppelin’s manager Peter Grant, it’s an almost-subtle nod to those of us that still read way too many rock and roll biographies.
