I know a little something about the trials of a rock band (having been a mediocre drummer in my early 20s in a not-half-bad blues rock group called the Sludge Brothers) and the difficulties of creating a sound that works and recording it the right way and getting the right gigs, etc. And yet Martin Scorsese and Mick Jagger‘s Vinyl, to go by this trailer and previous teasers, seems uninterested in the brick-and-mortar stuff. It looks like just another bacchanalian coke-and-booze Satyricon thing. Self-destruction (or dangerously flirting with same) by way of drugs and booze is not interesting. Almost Famous was 15 years ago — it would be great if Vinyl was more like it. You know…a longform about the music business of the late ’60s and ’70s that takes a Spotlight approach — one that shows you how it really works in a survivalist, real-world sense (songs, recordings, relationships, beautiful women, wild adventures, creative clear-light moments, finding and keeping the right manager…the general uphill struggle of it all). You know what would be really great? A longform about the creative-transcendence boom years of ’64, ’65, ’66 and ’67. It was all over by late ’68 anyway. There’s nothing more boring in the universe of narrative film than getting fucking wasted.