Jackson C. Frank (2001 Remastered Version)

Jackson C. Frank's original 1965 album, 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.