treasure island vacation

ending the year as we began — obsessing over rock ‘n’ roll

Hello!, & welcome to the grand conclusion of JACKALS!’ “self-consciousness” year. Of course, self-consciousness is surely as built into my brand as autodidacticism, floridity and naïveté — but I do hope you don’t feel absolutely forgotten as I work things in my head out on the page, dear reader. The way certain other blogs seem totally indifferent to translating such stuff at all irks me, and vaporizes lingering thoughts that I have no right to be doing this to you at all (unlike all those actual intellectuals subbin’ ‘Stacks). Being a critic, or a writer of any kind, is nothing more than a lifelong effort to master the art of communication, honoring subject, audience and your voice in equal parts. I don’t need to rehash my most, er, soliloquial italicized intros — suffice it to say that, while this project is inescapably Me, I suspect it might also have some value for You.

If you’re new here, hi! I’m Ryan Maffei. I’m a sometime critic (generally all my writing is some form of artistic criticism) — as well as a sometime actor and musician, but I’ll draw your attention there another time — whose biggest, proudest credit remains the print-bound liner notes to the three limited-edition volumes of Domino Records’ Go-Betweens box sets. As the Go-Betweens are still my favorite band, I’m lucky that their hiring me for that is insurance I’ll die happy if I kick it before I get old — seeing as my career is pretty much nonexistent (as of this writing!) beyond it. Yet if JACKALS! is the whole of my significant web presence, I’m not even a little bit upset. A survey of three years of architectural foxtrots etc., heavily revised reprints from the places that gave me chances and new shit I like better, it’s an outsider’s portfolio I’m beaming about.

Stop! If you’re thinking “why is this person still talking at me”, here’s the reader-voted JACKALS!’ Greatest Hits. If you want to see me stick the landing uniting this self-focus with a bigger picture, try “Eclecticity”, which is nominally about Supertramp (though not for most of it). If you’d rather a piece that turns its lens from both normal criticism and this writer, try my Aladdin Sane anniversary whim; it’s sort of the sort of thing you submit for contests. We deal so often with Boomer shit on here, my plunge into fellow millennial Frank Ocean’s Blonde must’ve felt refreshing. Said Boomer shit includes an interview feature with Bob Stanley (b. 1964, but not the Boomer I’m referring to) about his ravishing American Baroque compilation. If you love songwriting duos, fascinating sibling stories or niche Beatle fanatics, my Nourallah Brothers feature is for you. Also, you could peep if I’ve written about your favorite band — or tackle my takes on today.

But here’s something less specific, and a bit more concise, though it’s 72 pages’ worth of concision. A key part of my critical upbringing, as it was for many of my peers and betters, was an immersion in the work of the unimpeachable Dean of American Rock Critics (and who are the international Deans?), Robert Christgau. In addition to being his fan and occasional pest, I met some of my favorite people of all time as a member of the Expert Witness collective/cult that formed around him ca. 2010; we also went to an Amadou & Mariam show together, which felt less like a social outing and more like a failed audition. RC’s as good a gateway as any to not only some of the finest rock ‘n’ roll you’ve never heard of, but the impossibly rich world of his contemporaries. And I mean his late ‘60s and ‘70s contemporaries — his heyday never really stopped, but at various points Ellen Willis, Ed Ward, Paul Nelson, Janet Maslin, Lester Bangs, Nick Tosches, Langdon Winner, et al. dropped out, died, or narrowed/changed their focus.

All of these writers (hardly a complete list, but part of why The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll, 2nd edition, is so often such a great read for something with the goddamn Rolling Stone logo on it) are featured in Stranded, which if you’re reading this is probably something with which you’re familiar. But in case you aren’t: Stranded was the book my very likely second-favorite “OG” rock critic (you could fill eight Strandeds with the great ones working today — good thing it’s a thriving industry) Greil Marcus compiled for an ambitious publisher who wanted to do a series of “what art would you take to a desert island?” paperbacks, wisely starting with the only medium that works for the concept*. Somebody should do a Stranded for 21st century pop. But for myself, I just wanted to (finally) make my way through Marcus’ discography in the last chapter.

Summarizing all of rock ‘n’ roll up to about ‘80, which is when things got fraught and interesting and started to give way to why “pop” is what rock ‘n’ roll left in its wake, is something I’ve always kind of wanted to do. But even proceeding down someone else’s list is a bit of an uphill climb for me, owing to a few bizarre and unnecessary ways that my brain doesn’t work. So “Treasure Island”, Marcus’ ‘48-‘79 rock ‘n’ roll discography, technically took me 17 years to listen to in its entirety. Shrewdly — not for absorbing the list, many of whose items I can’t instantly recall, but for the productivity that per annual tradition fell off in the depressed back half of last year — I decided, this year, to key it to a writing project, for accountability or whatever. Historically speaking, it was a “definition of insanity” decision. And yet, it worked: I finished it, practically a first.

A first for both list-listening and writing-project-completing, I should specify — I can definitely finish things on a deadline with, you know, incentive. Good things, to boot; I’ve learned a lot this year about, to steal a phrase from Christgau’s Any Old Way You Choose It, how much cream I can skim off the top of my head. But I really drove that home for myself this January, writing for an audience no broader than the vestiges of the Expert Witness group still haunting Facebook (many of them among the loveliest dudes), tasking myself with eight-hour chunks of a 200ish-hour list (oh honey, I made the playlist a long time ago) over five work weeks. From my constituents, I got polite Likes and encouraging Loves, occasional prickly objections (sometimes with praise wrapped inside, thanks Chuck), and welcome clarifications — even one fellow over a certain age who rejoined with invaluable perspective and printed it all out at the end.

The main thing I got, however, was better — solely by Frank’s advice to “keep writing”.

In this day and age, only one item listed was impossible to locate (the fake one), and I appreciate that the gentleman from New Orleans who valorizes “the quest” spared me his chagrin and provided me the correct take of the Spike Drivers’ “Strange Mysterious Sounds”. Unconfronted with that old “seeker’s game”, the parameters of my challenge were to fill four lines of Calibri text on a Microsoft Word document, no more no less, for each entry, be it single (many of which Marcus spared himself the task of writing about) or album. I’d like to note in passing — self-reflexive as all this is so far — that these parameters are an eccentric adaptation to my day-to-day reality. Wherever else OCD manifests, I cannot leave words hanging at the bottom of the paragraph. I want clean little boxes. While at times this obstructs the main mission — finding the best way to say things — it also forces me to self-edit, because it seems just asking myself to won’t do. (That how all of this gets messed up when you read me on a phone doesn’t make me want to jump off a cliff hopefully assuages you about the degree of the issue.)

Anyway, enough introduction — there’s an entire other introduction in the thing I’m here to show you, and forgive the redundancies in advance. Below you will find, from me, a Christmas present you did not ask for: the official document from my silly little project, a slice of bootleg rockcrit for insiders, superfans, and the otherwise insatiably curious. Treasure Island Vacation, I called it; not my most inspired title, but an accurate description of what I did during work hours. Though I edited it strenuously (well into the morning) the day I finally finished it, mistakes remain, though something like “the ‘70s are my favorite genre” is probably more Freudian than erroneous — and this is to say nothing of what you might object to in my writing, or criticism, itself. But what I hope it is, especially if you’ve followed JACKALS! on its journey to date, is, well… fun.

And I’m grateful to say the one person I never intended to see it seemed to think so — though I’ll probably never learn how far he made it past C, and worry that some of the gentle ribbing rubbed him the wrong way. But even as it spoils my favorite joke in the whole shebang, I’m proud to finally print Greil Marcus’ review of my Stranded project, typically terse and generous (he’s given me his time before): “Having a great time but have to stop and say maybe in the next life I’ll get to hear the Four Deuces do ‘HUAC.’ They recorded right down the street from where I live at Music City.” Thanks, Greil.

So here, without further ado, is “Treasure Island Vacation”. Feel free to take it into the outhouse with you — or print it out and laminate it, in the unlikely event of shipwreck.

Treasure Island Vacation

643KB ∙ PDF file

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(I wish I could just embed something you can scroll, but either Substack has not yet developed that technology, or I gave up on googling it before I figured out the way.)

And there you go. Thus, I tie a bow around this blog, the gift I gave myself this season (also that Blondie box set). Thank you to all my readers, paid or unpaid; stick around for another free 365 of a whole new thing, as one of the far too many heroes we’ve lost since this was written said. And also, the same old song — though hopefully only the good parts, strengthening as we go through repetition, dedication, and, y’know. Faith.

*the electricity issue notwithstanding (or maybe it is just “books”)