Liam Catchings and The Jolly Racket

Meet the Band

Listen to the Single

See the Show 11/16/13

Liam Catchings and The Jolly Racket listen to rock music. A lot of it. And, as with any band that reaches far and deep into their influences the goal is to avoid sounding like unoriginal hacks with no ideas of their own and too much tracing paper.

My Name is John the Baptist not only has the Stones’ swagger, and Dylan’s intense, cutting ability to tell somebody to go jump off something tall, but it also feels modern. It handles a very old problem in a very contemporary way. Class slumming. This is not new terrain for rock music. Far from it. From ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ to ‘Common People,’ we’ve heard this one before, but not this one. With a smirk, a wink, and more than a little self-awareness, ‘My Name is John the Baptist’ rails against young, privileged, kids trying to co-op the pain and hardship less fortunate souls receive as birthright. On the surface, sharing human misery is just simple empathy. But in the end it is not empathy at all, but a way to turn the spot light from others to ones own self. Class slummers end up sounding like out of touch politicians, “Gosh, it’s terrible that you have cancer. I know how you feel. I had a cold once.” What we resent is the lack of honesty, self awareness, and a safety net. Can you really write a blues song before you’ve fallen on your face? If there’s always someone there to catch you have you really learned the lesson? What is it in us that wants to believe that we’ve endured real hardships?

The Jolly Racket rambles through a rock song as classic as the blues itself, but speaks clearly and distinctly to the youth of today. The character in this song isn’t some manic pixie girl from a movie set in an idealized past. I know this person. I’ve heard this guys band. I’ve read his poetry. I have suffered through his one-man-play. ‘My Name is John the Baptist’ asks every artist, “What do you have to say?” It challenges, “Is what you have to say worth saying?”

Let’s think about what makes an artist. We concentrate on the idea that they must have some hardship, some grand life experience to create soul stirring art, but in reality they need just two things: time and means to create art. Let’s not ignore that artists do tend to be a little privileged. Jack Kerouac was only able to criss-cross America looking for himself and the lost American dream because he wrote home every few months and asked his mom for money. Bob Dylan was a fairly well-to-do Jewish kid who lied to his New York friends about traveling on trains for most of his life. But would we have had a Bob Dylan if he was a poor kid who grew up to work in one of those god-awful Minnesota coal mines?

And isn’t this all relative? Isn’t the artist who has to keep his day job, who looks with scorn at the artist who’s parents support them actually the envy of some less fortunate fool? Of course, but two things. One: It’s all about honesty. It’s okay to be fortunate. Just don’t pretend that you’re not, and Two: This is where I think the song is at it’s most brilliant. Lyrically Liam Catchings seems to be spinning the gun around. Sure he’s aiming at others, but every once in a while the barrel seems to point at himself, and you’re never quite sure who he’s going to shoot. He doesn’t say “You want to be Bob Dylan.” He says, “We all want to be Bob Dylan.” Honesty. Self-Awareness.

The song snarls with the best of them. It swaggers and drunkenly shakes its finger in faces, but it seems to only ask for honesty and self-awareness. “Tell me you know how it tastes at the bottom/ without a dime to your name,” and I’ll tell you that you are a liar. Quietly self-reflective and ferociously destructive, ‘My Name is John the Baptist’ makes me ask all the right questions. It makes you question the nature of art and the artist… -but, more importantly, you can dance to it. Go forth and tear the young and clueless a new one, boys.

Sincerely,

DJ Clay Achee