“Jackson C. Frank didn’t find what he was looking for in his own life, it doesn’t seem, though it may have become increasingly out of his control. He would be diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, which hardly partnered well with his pre-existing depression.”
Try another city baby another town
Wherever I have gone
Wherever I’ve been and gone
Wherever I have gone the blues come followin’ down
I remember the first time I heard it. It was with a friend of mine from school. Maybe she liked me, maybe I liked her, it was hard to say, but nothing ever happened. I’d taken her on a drive out to the ocean one night, well past midnight, to look out over the sea—as Robinson Jeffers might put it “to watch the stars go over the lonely ocean.” She was in a downward spiral and was in danger of failing out with just a semester to go, unable even to get out of bed to haul herself to class. She perked up a bit on the drive over, the promise of the destination bringing a brief respite from what was increasingly clearly depression. But the grimness returned just as we were pulling up to the overlook, almost the instant the first glimpse of the water came into view.
I’d take another friend on a similar drive years later when his mother was ailing and had little time left. The ocean, I’ve always felt, is a provider of perspective. It seems to tell us: No matter what one is going through, or in the case of Jeffers’ poem, whatever the world is going through, the ocean has been there for millions of years before we were born and will be here for millions of years after we are gone. But perhaps this message is better received among those suffering from an anxious mind rather than the sort of depression that tells one: Nothing matters, especially you; I should have been a pair of ragged claws scuttling across the floors of silent seas.
The girl I drove out to Long Island Sound that night must have been in the latter camp, and as we merged back on the highway to go back to school, only a few hours now before classes were set to start for the next day, she reached over and plugged in the aux cord of my phone, and it started to play:
Catch a boat to England baby maybe to Spain
Wherever I have gone
Wherever I’ve been and gone
Wherever I have gone the blues are all the same
One encounters this idea of escape—of reaching a place where one’s troubles don’t follow him— periodically in music, in literature, or in the sort of pie-in-the-sky conversations one has either in adolescence or just as that fourth beer starts to hit. In Desert Solitaire, a book I have in parts praised and deplored, Edward Abbey writes: “We need wilderness whether or not we ever set foot in it. We need a refuge even though we may never need to go there. I may never in my life get to Alaska, for example, but I am grateful that it’s there. We need the possibility of escape as surely as we need hope; without it the life of the cities would drive all men into crime or drugs or psychoanalysis.” For Abbey, the idea of being able to go elsewhere is what can keep the overworked, cubicle-bound office worker from flipping his lid, from becoming Lester Burnham.
But one also wonders what would happen if he actually did escape. Would he end up like Chris McCandless? Or was my father’s friend John Carlson right in the .pdf of life advice he sent me when I was about to graduate from high school and head to Duke: that people are like potted plants and might thrive in one location but not in another, and when nothing seems to be working, change your environment.
Jackson C. Frank didn’t find what he was looking for in his own life, it doesn’t seem, though it may have become increasingly out of his control. He would be diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, which hardly partnered well with his pre-existing depression. He also never got over the fire in his elementary school when he was eleven, which killed more than a dozen of his classmates including a girl he liked and left him badly burned. (Certain writers have attributed his depression to that incident, but my guess is it would have happened anyway.) Like in the lyrics of “Blues Run the Game,” Frank made his way to England in 1965 after dropping out of college. He financed his move with a $110,500 insurance payout he received on account of the fire. There he met Paul Simon, who produced his first (and only album) Jackson C. Frank. (1) This album, with “Blues Run the Game” as its first track, made quite an impression in London when it came out; maybe he would be the next big thing everyone thought. But his sanity failed to cooperate, and events did little to bail him out: He would run out of money, lose a girlfriend (to misgivings following an abortion), a child (to cystic fibrosis), then a wife (to divorce) before the schizophrenia really took over. He would die—like Howard Hughes—a shell of himself but, in Frank’s case, penniless. But before then, he wandered—back to England, to Woodstock, to New York City (in search of his old friend Paul Simon), and finally to Massachusetts, where he finally died—mostly forgotten—in a nursing home in March of 1999, having turned 56 the day before.
Like when Ken Ruzicka hit a 40-year-old Frank O’Hara in the early morning hours of July 24, 1966 on Fire Island in a beach buggy when the tide was high, and he died the next day after doctors initially dismissed his injuries as superficial, there was something extra painful about such a departure. Tragedy can surely mark our final days, but in Jackson C. Frank’s case, it seems to have had him in its grasp not only at the end but for the duration.
Perhaps it had made sense, thus, for Jackson C. Frank to run. Upstate New York, the place where the fire was; where his depression started; where his marriage broke down; where his baby died was—in fairness—no place to stay, but England treated him little better, and to New York, he would return again and again—as if to say, this time, it might be okay.
He was just 22 when he released “Blues Run the Game,” but he already seemed to sense the futility in running, something also conveyed in his song “Milk and Honey.” Sometimes those who wander are lost, and relationships are fragile, fine one minute—it seems—and gone the next, like a still bustling restaurant whose debts keep silently piling up until one morning it closes, out of nowhere, having been mobbed the night before, and the customers wonder what could have happened so quickly when they come the next night looking to have dinner.
I’m goin’ down to the Greyhound Station
Gonna get a ticket to ride
Gonna find that lady with two or three kids
And sit down by her side
Ride ’til the sun comes up and down around me
‘Bout two or three times
Smokin’ cigarettes in the last seat
Tryin’ to hide my sorrow from the people I meet
And get along with it all
I’d like to stay but I might have to go
To start over again
Might go back down to Texas
Might go to somewhere that I’ve never been
Blaze Foley got around a bit, like soldiers and songwriters tend to. He was born in Arkansas, and lived variously throughout the South. But he liked to be thought of as a Texan, which I suppose he was, having spent much of his childhood in San Antonio. I didn’t know him, so I can’t say for sure how happy or not happy he was. (2) But he struggled badly with childhood obesity, had a limp from polio, was sidetracked by the drink, lost the woman he loved, and was shot dead at the age of 39. (3) (William F. Buckley, in the context of discussing political assassinations, had described how otherwise insignificant, broken people can cause so much harm by taking the lives of the most talented and cherished among us.) Like Frank, Foley, whose real name was Michael David Fuller, was much less well known than his contemporaries, even if they admired him and perhaps even considered him the superior talent. Just as Simon eclipsed Frank, just about everyone knows Foley’s dear friend Townes Van Zandt. In 2018, Ethan Hawke made a film called Blaze, hoping to remind the world who he was. The critics loved it, but the audience could take it or leave it, and he returned to the obscurity to which he must have been accustomed, even well after his death.
When Foley first met John Prine, he was too self-conscious to tell him that he was also a songwriter. But in 2005, when Foley had already been dead for 16 years, Prine covered “Clay Pigeons,” the song whose lyrics appear above, on his 2005 album Fair & Square. I’d imagine Foley would have been surprised. Prine sings mournfully, as the lyrics call for. There is none of the upbeatness of Rita Ora’s “Anywhere,” a track also about escape but one in which the suggestion is that everything will turn out alright, even if an exile of sorts is indeed required. (4) Foley’s lyrics convey a defeatism, an awareness that wherever the song’s persona ends up, any new beginnings will be short lived or certain to disappoint. What’s more, one gets the sense that the song’s protagonist knows he isn’t going anywhere; he’s not going to Texas. At best, he’ll get up from the coach he’s sitting on, the same one he’s had for 15 years and wander outside for a bit until it’s too cold, and he goes back in and forgets the idea altogether—at least until the day after tomorrow when it’s all too much too bear again. But in “Clay Pigeons,” like in “Blues Run the Game,” the song’s protagonist—unlike in “Anywhere” is very much single. Perhaps this world was indeed built for two.
I remember when an aunt of mine’s mental health started to deteriorate, she got divorced and left Boston for Martha’s Vineyard, spending just about all of an inheritance on a home there she could scarcely afford. It was a converted garage, I think I remember hearing. Later, when she was foreclosed upon, my father traveled up there to try to reason with the banks to let her stay a bit longer. They weren’t too sympathetic and told him this sort of thing was common: When people are depressed, they think the answer might be to live all the time in a vacation destination, especially if it was a place where they had fond memories from when they were young. I don’t think my aunt ever visited there as a child; the bank didn’t let her stay longer; and when she left Martha’s Vineyard, she came home to New Jersey, and things didn’t get much better. The blues are all the same.
Sometimes when we would travel together when I was young, my father would remark how amazing it is that we spend so much of our lives in a single corner of the vast globe. There is a Newtown, Pennsylvania; a Newtown, Indiana; a Newtown, Missouri; a Newtown, Isle of Wight. How if I had the time (and maybe one day I will), I wish I could roam around Northern Maine, drive its long, pine-lined roads at night, perhaps find a bed and breakfast, walk into town the next morning, have a coffee, stay a while if I like it. Then, maybe I’d head up into Canada, to those sprawling, empty lands all the way to St. Pierre and Miquelon, with its tiny villages and brown bays, that I see from the airplane window when I know it’s only another two hours or so to New York and I don’t have time to start one last movie.
There are rivers to paddle there, just as there are here, I’m sure; people to meet; some type of cuisine I’ve never heard of to try; streets to walk where they have stalls selling fresh fish in the mornings, even in winter. Maybe it would be as I envision; maybe better, or maybe not; maybe it’s not any better “about a million miles from Meridian.”
Daniel Kahneman famously argued that moving to California is unlikely to make one happier. We have an idea of what our life would be like if we moved there, but the reality tends to be quite different. Just as in the summers of childhood, we thought we’d catch butterflies by morning, sell lemonade in the afternoon, and watch the ballgame at night, mint chocolate chip ice cream dripping down our wrists. But, in the end, most days, we sat by the television complaining about the heat and wondering where the summer had gone by August’s end, all the books we’d planned to read still sitting on our nightstands just a few pages in. California has its traffic, taxes, and wildfires, after all. Jackson C. Frank, too young to be so mournful, seems to know this already—that new beginnings, unless one is Robert Hoagland—can be hard to come by. (“Ireland shall get her freedom and you still break stone.”) And all the more so if the underlying issues within remain unaddressed. (5).
Erich J. Prince is the editor-in-chief of Merion West.
Endnotes
- Contrary to the image of the tormented genius, writers tend not to produce their best work amid mental anguish. Stability and equanimity tend to be more conducive to output—so much so that one wonders if those tormented geniuses were getting their writing done in spite of mental anguish rather than because of it. I think of a line from Robertson Davies: “You are still young enough to think that torment of the spirit is a splendid thing, a sign of a superior nature. But you are no longer a young man; you are a youngish middle aged man, and it is time you found out that these spiritual athletics do not lead to wisdom.”
- But maybe the details of a given songwriter’s life only matter so much. Cheerful and brilliant writers can write poignantly of sadness, and the reverse is certainly true.
- As Saul Bellow once wrote, “All my troubles come from women.”
- Guy Clark’s 1970 song “L.A. Freeway” conveys the relief associated with leaving Los Angeles. (Clark, another Texas native, wrote it shortly after departing Los Angeles for Tennessee after a short stint living in California.) “L.A. Freeway,” has its memorable lines such as, “Throw out them LA papers/And that moldy box of vanilla wafers/Adios to all this concrete/Gonna get me some dirt road back streets.” Like in “Anywhere,” contra “Blues Run the Game” and “Clay Pigeons,” Clark’s lyrics suggest that the problem is indeed more the place or the current circumstances there than something within, with new and better beginnings very much attainable.
- Opinions on depression vary. I’m no expert on Jacques Lacan, but I know he considered depression a “moral failing”; others see it as a loss of courage, and Johann Hari, in his 2018 book Lost Connections, rejects this idea of depression as a chemical imbalance, suggesting that it can be better understood as an alarm bell that—in many cases—one needs to change how he lives his life.
