J.T. IV - The Future [2LP]

Format: 2 x LP 
Catalogue No.: DC842
Barcode: 0781484084211
Release Date: 20 Jan 2023
Genre: Indie/Alternative

 Barely heard in his lifetime (1961-2002) but hailed as an outsider hero of ur-punk since 2009’s ‘Cosmic Lightning’ compilation, J.T. IV strikes back!
 15 unheard-of tracks found on an obscure cassette tape make the schizo split in his music - rabid rock & roll fantasy and cold-eyed acoustic introspection - an epic. ‘The Future’ is J.T. IV’s mad magnum opus.
 The 2009 comp LP, ‘Cosmic Lightning’, cast his tragic silhouette up on the big screen for all to see: the lost boy, alone in the world, standing before the mic and releasing his inner star with glee and vengeance, his antisocial visions flying high atop a raging funnel of distorted guitars and blunt rhythms. Or couched, childlike, within a heart breaking billow of acoustic guitars - a schizophrenic split that only magnifies the display of his deep emotions.
 ‘The Future’ goes even further, excavating fifteen recordings from a previously unheard-of cassette entitled ‘The Best Of Johnny Zhivago Retrospective 1979–1993’, and adding four more uncollected tracks from his slim (and impossible to find anyway) discography.
 Of these nineteen tracks, eight are covers - and J.T. IV’s picks, from Velvets to Mott the Hoople, Roxy Music, Lee Hazlewood, The Kinks, Eno and Stephen Sondheim, sharpen our image of the misfit adrift; on the outside looking in, but maybe just a few
steps away from his goal.
 ‘The Future’ unfolds like an epic, as both sides of J.T.’s persona - the street-smart, damaged rocker and the heart struck poet of the scene - live on together in the best performances of his short career.
 A punk of the old order, John Henry Timmis IV was born in 1961 into a dysfunctional, abusive and eventually broken family. By the mid-70s, he was desperate to get out, running away from his mother’s home several times while still a teenager living in the greater Chicagoland area. At wit’s end, she had him committed to the Menninger Clinic for a year or so. Released on his own reconnaissance, he began his meteoric ascent to the mythic level of self-aggrandizement in which he appears here. Inspired by the underground, proto-punk sounds in the air (the likes of which any sharp-eyed young thing might chance upon in the back pages of Creem, Crawdaddy, Trouser Press, etc.) and desperate to be heard himself, J.T. presented like the scabby younger brother of Bangs and Laughner: born only to rock, his musical conception a rabid personality crisis of proselyte elitism and nihilist excess.
 Now, 20 years on from his passing, ‘The Future’ is ever farther away from the world in which he struggled so mightily - but his stinging iconoclasm, whether screamed from Marshall amps or mic-ed up close, feels ever more powerfully infused with his unique breadth of illness and essence.
 These songs represent the two sides of J.T. - and while they emanate from the 80s, they find themselves potently renewed in the polarized world of today, making ‘The Future’ a worthwhile destination for everyone who ever had a heart touched by the  transgression and freedom promised by rock & roll.

Tracklisting
Space Baby
I Wish I Was Your Mother
Pictures From the Past
The Loner
The City Never Sleeps at Night
The Fat Lady of Limbourg
The Future
If There Is Something
Sunday Morning
Jet Lag Time Drag
A Fix of Rock N Roll
Somebody to Love
The Ballad of Oliver North
I Love You
Out of the Blue
Tonight
Caroline Says II
Celluloid Heroes
My Fellow Americans