HBO's Vinyl: As Wild and Dangerous As Rock & Roll Itself

Mick Jagger, Martin Scorsese, Rich Cohen and Terence Winter -- have combined won almost every accolade and lifetime achievement award imaginable.

Vinyl shows the music industry of the '70s through the eyes of Richie Finestra (Bobby Cannavale), the manic head of fictional American Century Records.

In the first scene of the two-hour, Scorsese-directed pilot, Finestra is sitting in his car, sniffing cocaine off the snapped-off rearview mirror.

Richie is haunted by his past, which re-enters his life in the form of a chance encounter with Lester Grimes (Ato Essandoh), a former blues singer who blames Richie for his failed career.

When his artist Donny Osmond flakes on a promotional appearance at a radio station owned by Buck Rogers (Andrew Dice Clay), it has disastrous consequences.

The subject material -- drugged-up crooks who happen to be involved in rock & roll in 1973 New York -- is pure Scorsese, while the exquisite attention to period detail, time-jumping narrative and real historical figures interacting with fictional ones are all elements that Winter perfected on Boardwalk Empire.

Vinyl and Boardwalk Empire are both at their heart shows about business, and much of the plot of Vinyl stems from contract negotiations.

Cannavale, a whiz at portraying volatile tough guys, plays Finestra as a man giving in to all the urges he'd managed to tamp down, whether it's rage, cocaine, or rock-fueled recklessness.

Considering the bands Richie's into and the raw energy he's pursuing, that important thing could be shepherding punk rock, which is still forming itself in 1973, into the game-changer it becomes later in the decade.

Scorsese directs the pilot with the controlled recklessness of his actual '70s movies, and the directors who step in after him do an able job of holding on to that spirit.

Even though it was the era of women's lib and equal rights, it was still pretty close to the Mad Men era in the way women were