Generally labels do reissues to make some easy money, either by pouncing on a buzz band’s little-heard back catalog or by whipping up a “special edition” of a beloved classic for fans who can be suckered into buying it again. But every so often somebody reissues a record that sank into obscurity when it first came out in hopes that a second go will help connect it with the audience it deserves. This is a nobler undertaking, but also a dicier one: not only is the label putting money on a proven loser, it’s also dealing with an artist who’s probably burned out, disenchanted with the music biz, or dead.
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But of all the acts Drag City is trying to rescue from the edge of oblivion, the most fascinating and obscure has to be John Henry Timmis IV, aka J.T. IV, a glam-punk savant who died in 2002, almost 15 years after his last single. On November 18 the label will release a ten-track collection of Timmis’s music called Cosmic Lightning through the Galactic Zoo Disk imprint run by Steve Krakow, aka Plastic Crimewave—who last winter featured J.T. IV in the Secret History of Chicago Music strip he does for the Reader.
Manis heard Staring Down the Barrel about three years ago while living in Portland, Oregon, and decided that its one J.T. IV track, “Death Trip,” wasn’t enough. Aided by an online network of similarly obsessive punk collectors and abetted by his wife, who’d been born in Chicago and wanted to go back, Manis moved here in June 2007 and has spent the past year tracking down Timmis’s music and piecing together his story.
“He was an antisocial megalomaniac,” says Manis. “He wanted to be this legend but he didn’t have the balls to pursue that. He never wanted to get onstage. Those performances were just parties, self-promotions that he put on himself. I doubt that there was anyone in the audience. He probably just had a group of friends film him and clap.” And Manis has talked to some of Timmis’s old buddies who say he had to get “incredibly fucked up” in order to play even then. “He was an abuser of everything,” Manis adds: booze, weed, coke, heroin. Late in his life he also struggled with anorexia and bulimia.
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