Jackson C. Frank's original 1965 album Blues Run the Game,
produced by Paul Simon, is a lost classic, daringly complex and honest,
filled with virtuoso playing that is all the more impressive for the offhanded
way that Frank and company (including a young Al Stewart on one track) make
it look so easy. There is a convergence elements here that may confuse the
uninitiated, because of their seeming contradictions — a flashiness
and assertiveness on the acoustic guitars and the approach to singing on
numbers like "Don't Look Back" and "Yellow Walls" that
are byproducts of Frank's early history as a rock & roller, a depth
and complexity of blues playing that derives from life as much as from talent
and dexterity; and the meld of American and English folk sounds is like
nothing that any listener has heard from either side of the Atlantic anywhere
else. Some of these elements paralleled characteristics of Simon's work
— he, like Frank, had been a devotee of rock & roll before he turned
toward folk music, and also assimilated American and English folk influences
while staying in London — but Simon's resulting work was smoothly commercial
and mostly comforting and upbeat, and even playful, whereas Frank's music
seems laced with and pointed toward an overpoweringly serious and sad take
on life and living. "Blues Run the Game," "Yellow Walls,"
"My Name Is Carnival," and "You Never Wanted Me" all
help make album kind of overpowering — but it's the downbeat nature
of those same songs that likely would have prevented Jackson C. Frank from
being anything much more than a major cult favorite at the time. Today it's
just a brilliant piece of essential listening, and most easily found in
its various reissues from Mooncrest, Castle, and Sanctuary Records.
(by Bruce Eder, All Music
Guide) |
Plattentipp 
