Court Jester

About Court Jester

OVERVIEW:

Baltimore, Maryland’s COURT JESTER began with an ad for a bassist and guitarist being answered by Jake Jakubik. The ad was placed by drummer Douglas Guckert who was looking for players to join him and another guitarist. Jakubik along with a guitarist friend of his would go to jam with the other two. Upon their meeting, the four would begin to work with six original songs written by Guckert. The next day both Jakubik and Guckert came to the decision to work together but to replace the two guitarists. They would begin to hold auditions that would take some time until finally guitarist David Braswell, who had played with Jakubik in a previous band, came in to fill the spot.

COURT JESTER was now a 3-piece and they would waste no time getting back to Guckert’s songs, as well as adding other originals, one of which was from Jukubik and Braswell earlier band together.

Soon COURT JESTER was ready and would enter White Marsh Studios. What would result from the sessions would be eight blistering NWOBHM influenced traditional heavy metal tunes that would comprise the band’s 1991 debut “The Jokes On You”. It would be self-released in only a 300 cassette run initially.

The release of “The Jokes On You” quickly began to circulate through the right hands allowing the material to be heard by the right people locally. This led to the band being noticed by a local cable show ROCK LIVE and Baltimore’s rock radio stations WIYY 97.9 FM 98 ROCK and WHVY FM 96.7 97 Underground FM who both would keep the band in regular rotation on their playlists. The band also began moving copies of their release through local record shops. Now with plenty of airplay and units of their cassette being moved, there was an increasing demand for the band to play live shows. Guitarist David Simmons would be added to fill out the band live.