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. 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.