Jackson Frank - Blues Run The Game (Expanded Deluxe Edition)

As a response to Bay's New Moon post, I offer you my Elliott Smith - Jackson Frank. His life, filled with anyone's quota of neuroses, tragedy and melancholy, was like an early generation warm-up for the Smith exercise. Held up by some as the colonies' version of Nick Drake, or even better to some, the painfully shy, self-conscious Frank oozes trepidation and frailty.

NOTE: In lieu of uploading my puny original version of Blues Run The Game, I sniffed out a pre-posted Expanded Deluxe edition for you delight.

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From Crawdaddy:

Small Doses of Jackson C. Frank
by Anthony Firestine

I first heard the disconsolate vocals of Jackson C. Frank in a trailer for Vincent Gallo’s road movie The Brown Bunny. The lyrics were a bit on the ethereal side of things, but when combined with the simple imagery of an endless highway on the screen, it became the perfect design to repeatedly study in my head and obsess over. The film turned out to be fairly forgettable, but that lonesome voice resonated within me like some long lost Hank Williams acetate.

The lyrics did seem vaguely familiar. I had to find the record. When I did, as it turns out, I’d heard the song “Milk and Honey” before. Familiar with Sandy Denny’s more drawn out, fluttery version, what I didn’t know is that she and Jackson dated for a while in the ‘60s, and she covered a number of his songs. Nick Drake also covered a few, as did Simon & Garfunkel who did a rendition of his noteworthy semi-hit “Blues Run the Game.” Here’s this guy I’d never heard of who was highly respected and honored by heavy hitters of the folk world. Clearly I was in for something amazing.

Upon my first listen, I was completely captured by the way this album was forged in despair.
Jackson’s arrangement of the traditional blues staple “Kimbie” is almost playful, and yet it still has its foundation set in the story of spurned love. The withdrawn rhythm of “Yellow Walls,” the self-imposed solitude of “Dialogue,” or the pure unadulterated heartache that he called “puppy love turned rabid” represented in “You Never Wanted Me”—all of his songs contain an underlying, foreboding tone of assured desolation.

Exploring Jackson’s history on a deeper level, it was then that I understood how this woeful and wise voice emanated from a rather privileged, East Coast white boy in his early 20s. When Jackson was 11-years-old, a furnace exploded in his classroom, killing several of his classmates, leaving him with serious burns all over his body. This, unfortunately, turned out to be the first of many ill-fated events in Jackson’s painful path of a life.

He started learning the guitar in the hospital on his seven-month road to recovery. When he turned 21, he was awarded a hefty sum from an insurance agency in regards to the accident ten years prior. He decided to bring that guitar to England and live off of his settlement for a while.
Jackson’s only release was a self-titled album from 1965, recorded by a pre-famous Paul Simon, whom he shared an apartment and a number of local billings with in England. He always battled stage fright—a fact evident in those early recording sessions. Taking this to the extreme, he would insist on putting up barriers in the studio’s vocal booth so that no one could look at him while he was singing. These barriers seemed to mirror the fact that Jackson would never pass the walls of the folk community he was revered by.

Jackson’s melancholic tone was cherished by his peers, but the mad rush for a heavier rock sound in the late ‘60s, along with poor sales in the States, left him destitute and with little hope to record another album.

Then there was the matter of his battle with depression, stemming from the schoolhouse fire of his youth. Suffering from an inability to process the trauma of that tragedy, his depression morphed into mental illness. After spending many years in and out of institutions, Jackson tried to get his music career back on track. In the early ‘80s he found himself in New York City looking for Paul Simon to help him out.

After living on the streets and sleeping on park benches for a number of weeks, some kids messing around with a pellet gun randomly shot Jackson, which blinded him in one of his eyes. He died alone years later in 1999, at age 56, after numerous attempts at restarting his music career.

His life and songs are hard to comprehend, even by his own standards.
Jackson is quoted saying, “Songs that I write aren’t mine to admit to. They dwell a little too heavily on the grey area behind my eyes to become my friends, and with that pat explanation you can judge them yourselves.”

Go get this record when you find yourself a little too happily-ever-after. Take it in small doses, like Valium.

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