The Future (2LP)

Barely-heard in his lifetime (1961-2002) but hailed as an outsider hero of ur-punk since 2009’s Cosmic Lightning comp, J.T. IV strikes back! 15 unheard-of tracks found on an obscure cassette tape make the schizo split in his music – rabid rock n roll fantasy and cold-eyed acoustic introspection – an epic. The Future is J.T. IV’s mad magnum opus.Outsider freekz, make with the haste! It’s time to get back to The Future — the one promised back when rock and roll was king, remember? J.T. IV believed in the promise — and now, the mystery man behind barely-released private press 7" records of the ’80s like “Destructo Rock” and “Cosmic Lightning” and a film holding the Guinness record for worlds-longest — 85 hours! — has been called back to our mortal coil, to live out his glittering, rapacious dreams once again.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 heartbreaking 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 heartstruck 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.Under the circumstances, what could a poor boy do? Unable to function in the straight world, John got fucked up and jammed his tunes with friends, taping the music and eventually making a series of singles from the tapes. Instead of real live shows, canned audience noise was layered over studio recorded tracks — or staged events were videoed, for posterity. J.T. IV didn’t want to control so much as fabricate — maybe even satirize? — the narrative. Wrapping this conceptual fabric around his natural gifts as a singer, his naked form of expression and the delirious visions of youthful angst in his songs, J.T. IV was a fully realized rock rebel — yet as he wrecked himself with liquor and drugs over too many fast, hard days and nights, would anyone ever discover him and everything he held inside?As it was, Cosmic Lightning finally struck again in 2009, when John Timmis was seven years gone, unable to see his reissued music cleaving open a crater in the cultural landscape. 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.The album is called The Future for several reasons. The title track extols the virtue of being an independent thinker, which scans with our data on J.T. But it’s also an optimistic, even anthemic, call for a better tomorrow, giving the next generation a world of love and hope! John’s scathing cynicsm melts away showing his pure soul underneath. Then, “My Fellow Americans” closes the album with another future-oriented song, though this time it’s a dystopian landscape where the president, a Reaganesque war monger, delivers an ominous and bizarre State of the Union address to the American people, suggesting that he replace Congress with clones of Adolf Hitler to mandate the extermination of all welfare and social security recipients in the US. 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 and roll.