GLASTONBURYOFTHEMIND

In the past 2 weeks the great Blues Run The Game, a classic 60s cult folk blues landmark by American exile in London Jackson C Frank, has been getting attention from deep and sombre men.

BLUES ONE

Picture this - Jackie Leven a man mountain of jazzy and dizzyifying Van like vocal magic and supine musical arisings. Down in the basement of The Troubadour, Earls Court ancient cawfee house equivalent, alive with the ghosts of another era, Jackie was East Fife Magician incarnate.

Bigging up the finally unleashed Doll by Doll back catalogue he concentrated  on his excellent Cooking Vinyl material. But a special swirl of sweet agony, a Fred Neil like repose,  rose up, like steam off a deep swamp, when he got to Blues.

BLUES TWO

Bert Jansch - early evening guest and accompanist to a surprisingly focussed, louche but likeable Pete Doherty  at the Hackney Empire . It is so great to see Bert, a living master at ease and alive and INTO HIS MUSIC, here on this  stage in a venue worthy of his beautiful talent.Bert could so easily have been a casualty of the 60s, his hard drug past keeling him over. But here he was as great a living thing as you can see onstage . So , when some disrespectful, know nothing, scnester who  took his front row balcony seat in ORDER TO TALK THROUGH THE PERFORMANCE.

Well I had to hit him with my riddum stick…

Jackson was one of Bert’s favourite singer song writers of the 60s and on his Blues, his flying free guitar mints the song, mints it as alive and new and free and real as the excellent rappers (Lethal Bizzle and before him - was it the excellent Rodney P?) that will later seamlessly elide freestyling into Pete’s bohemian thrall.

BLUES THREE

And now this morning b side of the extra, non-album track on the  Soulsavers Revival single, featuring isobel Campbell on cello and Mark Lanegan on vocal.

Are we detecting a linki between all 3 of these performers - recovering men in pain, perhaps?

Hard musical men with tough lives, hacking at the coalface of life, finding gold in the dirt, looking for the hymnal salve that sets the spirit free.

Lanegan’s version - the sad resolve of a quiet rasp, cautiously daring to raise up his wounded and down self, ordering whisky and gin, colours erupting or suggested beneath the grey mist. All round - a sense of love lost, vanquished but still there. The song hangs thick - thick, liike a Druid spell or an eternal truth.

And indeed for Jackson C Frank, who wrote the song on board a boat to England in 1964, the song became and was and remained and is still an eternal truth.

His transport costs to England were paid for by the late coming compensation for the near fatal burns Frank sustained in a school fire in Buffalo aged 11, saved fby  kids  patting his back with snow (like Joseph Beuys being wrapped in fat years before).

Celbrated in song by Sandy Denny and Roy Harper Frank became , according to his producer, folk singer Al Stewart, “impenetrable” playing songs of “psychological angst at full volume with lots of thrashing”

Maybe the British folk audiences of their time werent able to appreciate a displaced Ian Curtis mentality, 5 years before Mnanchester’s doom past demanded it. So Jackson quit went back to America to EDIT A LOCAL NEWSPAPER. Married a supermodel, had a baby son who died of cystic fibrosis, had a breakdown, entered various mental institutions.

A rumoured 1990s comeback was somewhat  scuppered when Jackson was left blinded after a  point blank shooting.

There was  talk of a comeback but it never came. In 1999 Jackson died of a cardiac arrest and pneumonia - in Barrington Massachussets.

He was 56  and blues had surely ran his game.