"When Jackson Frank was 11, a furnace exploded at his school, sending a
ball of flames down corridors until it ended up in Frank's music
classroom in the Cleveland Hill Elementary School in Cheektowaga, New York.[1] The fire killed fifteen of his fellow students and burned Frank over more than half his body.[1]
It was during his time in the hospital that he was first introduced to
playing music, when a teacher, Charlie Castelli, brought in an acoustic
guitar to keep Frank occupied during his recovery.
...in 1966 things took a turn for the worse as his mental health began
to unravel. At the same time he began to experience writer's block. His
insurance payment was running out so he decided to go back to the United
States for two years. When he returned to England in 1968 he was deemed
a different person. His depression, stemming from the childhood trauma
of the classroom fire, had increased and he had no self-confidence. Al
Stewart recalled that:
While in Woodstock, he married Elaine Sedgwick, an English former fashion model. They had a son and later a daughter, Angeline. After his son died of Cystic Fibrosis, Frank went into a period of great depression and was ultimately committed to an institution."He [Frank] proceeded to fall apart before our very eyes. His style that everyone loved was melancholy, very tuneful things. He started doing things that were completely impenetrable. They were basically about psychological angst, played at full volume with lots of thrashing. I don't remember a single word of them, it just did not work. There was one review that said he belonged on a psychologist's couch. Then shortly after that, he hightailed it back to Woodstock again, because he wasn't getting any work."[1]
In 1984, Frank took a trip to New York City in a desperate bid to locate Paul Simon, but he ended up sleeping on the sidewalk. His mother, who had been in hospital for open heart surgery, found him gone with no forwarding address when she arrived home. He was living on the street and was frequently admitted and discharged from various institutions. He was treated for paranoid schizophrenia, a diagnosis that was probably correct, though he had always claimed that he actually had depression caused by the trauma he had experienced as a child
It almost made me cry, because here was a fifty-year-old man, and all he had to his name was a beat-up old suitcase and a broken pair of glasses. I guess his caseworker had given him a $10 guitar, but it wouldn’t stay in tune. It was one of those hot summer days. He tried to play Blues Run The Game for me, but his voice was pretty much shot."[1]
Soon after this, Frank was sitting on a bench in New York while awaiting a move to Woodstock, when someone shot him in his left eye and consequently blinded him. At first no details were known, but it was later determined that children from the neighborhood were firing a pellet gun indiscriminately at people and Frank happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Frank died of pneumonia and cardiac arrest in Great Barrington, Massachusetts on March 3, 1999, at the age of 56." - wikipedia
Seems like real shit will always manisfest itself from takin the hard road... or it's all just garbage and tumbler fodder.