Jack Ruby photo by Steven Barth

In the premiere episode of "Vinyl," the new HBO series created by Martin Scorsese and Mick Jagger, record label owner Richie Fenestra (played by Bobby Cannavale) sits on his couch, wired on coke and cigarettes, shaking his head to a song blasting from his stereo. The tune is "Bored Stiff" by a band called the Nasty Bits, whom Fenestra decides his company, American Century Records, absolutely must sign.

The Nasty Bits didn’t actually exist in the 1970s New York music scene that "Vinyl" depicts, but "Bored Stiff" did. It was originally written by one of those great bands that almost got lost to history, the proto-punk outfit Jack Ruby. The quartet existed sporadically for only a few years in the mid-'70s and never released any music commercially. But in 2011, Weasel Walter’s ugEXPLODE label released a CD of their 1974 demos; three years later, the small labels Saint Cecilia and Feeding Tube followed suit, releasing the same material from higher-quality tapes, along with more recently-discovered music.

Those releases caught the ear of "Vinyl" music supervisor Randall Poster, who heard the show’s fictional band in them. "There’s a punk rock foundation embedded in Jack Ruby’s music, before punk existed," says Poster, whose lengthy resume includes The Royal Tenenbaums, Boyhood, and Carol. "Their music is stripped of all classic rock artifice, and it puts forward the root of something that would evolve from there. It works for Kip Stevens [the singer of Nasty Bits], who is having a moment of crisis trying to connect to what brought him to rock and roll in the first place."

-=-=-=-Jack Ruby’s music is indeed a fascinating hybrid of underground sounds, made at a time when mainstream rock was becoming a cartoon and punk was just around the corner. Their songs were clearly influenced by the Velvet Underground and the Stooges, with singer Robin Hall’s snarl echoing Iggy Pop, as well as Richard Hell. But their tunes also include layers of noise generated by atonal guitars and electronics. Hall recalls bandmate Randy Cohen, who went on to write for "Late Night With David Letterman" and the New York Times, filtering stock sound effects through his Serge synthesizer, which was "the size of a coffin." The results foreshadow the unruly strain of post-punk known as No Wave. (One incarnation of Jack Ruby even included bassist George Scott, who later played in No Wave mainstays Contortions and 8-Eyed Spy.)

According to Hall, being both catchy and chaotic wasn’t seen as a paradox in the downtown New York scene in 1973. "Everybody was doing something different, and it was very generous in the boundaries," he recalls. "There was nothing that wasn’t allowed." So as much as the Nasty Bits scoff at their label’s attempts to smooth their sound in "Vinyl," Jack Ruby could dream of success while also refusing to bend. "We wanted to be popular, not underground," Hall says. "But we were also committed to noise, and there was no thought of compromising. We assumed no one was going to get us, even as at the same time as we thought we would have hit singles."

Judging by the music that survived, Jack Ruby’s Top 40 fantasies were not such a stretch. All four tunes that show up over the course of the show's initial 10-episode run—"Bored Stiff," "Hit and Run," and "Bad Teeth," plus Jack Ruby’s take on the Four Seasons’ "Beggar’s Parade"—are swinging and infectious, like punk before punk existed. It’s easy to hear why these songs could have impressed a label seeking fresh sounds; even 40 years later, Jack Ruby have a bracing immediacy.