Jim Carroll RIP

Jim Carroll died in New York City on September 11. It has been reported that he died of a heart attack while working at his desk. He was aged 60.

Jim Carroll was a unique and mercurial artist. He was a writer of poetry and sometimes prose. He was a diarist whose most famous work The Basketball Diaries (1978) charted his life on the streets from the ages 12 to 16. In 1995 The Basketball Diaries were adapted as a film with Leonardo DiCaprio in the role of Jim Carroll.

He fronted the Jim Carroll Band for three albums the first of which Catholic Boy (1980) featured the extraordinary People Who Died – a song that has subsequently attained an almost mythic status.

He also released a remarkable spoken word album Praying Mantis (1991).

Later he returned to live performance mixing spoken word, readings and rock n’ roll, often in the same show. In 1998 he released a book of poetry Void Of Course and an album Pools Of Mercury. Both works contained his poem 8 Fragments For Kurt Cobain, which became one of the most utilized pieces of reflection following Cobain’s death.

Those are the facts and while they paint a picture of an artist who was clearly of significance, a mere roll call of his works cannot begin to explain his importance.

Carroll is often mentioned in the same stratosphere as musicians like Lou Reed and Patti Smith, but also poets like Rimbaud and William Burroughs and even comics like Bill Hicks (although the latter comparison owes more to a sometimes overlapping fan base than actual content).

Jim Carroll was a writer before all else. He was the son of a New York bar owner who excelled at school and basketball and he received a scholarship for the latter to an elite NY school. His teen years were extraordinary – he combined basketball with drug use and poetry and he chronicled those years in The Basketball Diaries. The stories he told weren’t pretty and his descent into the grip of heroin was compelling reading when it was released in 1978. By that time it was a retrospective – Carroll’s poetry had already won him a sizeable underground following.

He was a product of the Lower East Side and could count amongst his supporters the likes of Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac. His peers included Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe and he spent time in the orbit of Andy Warhol’s Factory.

However the drug scene in New York was taking its toll and in 1973 Carroll relocated to Bolinas, an artistic community north of San Francisco. He had no intention of forming a band – and in fact his entrée to that world was when Patti Smith’s band played music backing a poetry reading at her suggestion.

Following this he formed the Jim Carroll Band and reportedly with the assistance of Keith Richard he quickly attained a record contract. The album Catholic Boy was released in 1980. Of interest is the appearance of Bob Clearmountain as co-producer and engineer and Annie Leibovitz as the cover photographer.

The music was a frantic post punk sound that bore some resemblance to the Ramones and Television and to English new wavers like Graham Parker and the Stiff Records family. But it was distinctly American  – Carroll somehow managed to sing in a voice that was urgent and raw and yet had the inherent threatening tone of Lou Reed. He was described as a “rock n’ roll poet” which was both literally correct and an apt description.

It was around this time that I had my introduction to Jim Carroll. Like thousands of others of that era the process of discovering new music happened via the swapping of cassette tapes amongst like minded friends. I had (and still have) one such friend named Andrew Rutter who gave me a tape containing Warren Zevon’s Stand In The Fire live album – and as a bonus track the Jim Carroll Band’s song People Who Died.

Important tape, that one.

As much as I loved Zevon and continue to play his music frequently to this day, it was the Jim Carroll song that caused my teenage jaw to drop. The song was a incessant, urgent, spiky punk rock song but the lyrics were the most graphic I had ever heard. Carroll ran a roll call of friends who had died – suicide, murder, brutal misadventure, drug overdoses and disease. The descriptions were so vivid that it never occurred to me that the people in the song could be anything but real.

I went out and bought the album although it couldn’t have been that easy to do – the sleeve still bears the sticker reading “Import $8”.

From that time onwards I was a fan of Jim Carroll but I never again was to be struck as intensely as by my first exposure to People Who Died. He released two more albums with the band – Dry Dreams (1982) and I Write Your Name (1984) and really by the latter the confines of the rock n’ roll format were proving restrictive for  Carroll. The music had become a little too polished and generic and whilst Carroll’s lyrics were still several cuts above most rock songs it was clear that his days as a frontman of a rock n’ roll band were numbered.

I moved on and so did Carroll. He wasn’t to record another rock n’ roll album until 1998.

These were the days before everyone’s every breath and most of their bowel movements were publicized via social networking sites and blogs. I assumed Carroll had gone the way of many a rock n’ roll casualties and had drifted off into obscurity. It wasn’t until the early 90’s when I became friends with Johnette Napolitano of the band Concrete Blonde that I discovered that Carroll was alive and  writing and had released a couple of spoken word albums. I still remember Johnette raving about his ‘new’ work backstage at a Sydney show and me deciding that I had to seek out those albums.

I found Praying Mantis.

In around 48 minutes recorded live mainly at St Marks Church on the Lower East Side, Carroll traverses subjects such as STD’s (A Day At The Races), Street Life (Time’s Squares Cage), his own early performances (Tiny Tortures), Robert Mapplethorpe (To The National Endowment of The Arts) and masturbation (The Loss Of American Innocence).

He’s funny, poignant, disturbing, confrontational, and crude and an imperfect speaker and he certainly draws on the beat poet tradition. Apparently not everything was completely written before the performance and some was ad-libbed but clearly he spoke with both the poets attention to detail and the orators inspiration. I found his spoken word as compelling as his early punk rock inspired records.

Around 1997 I moved to New York City and for some reason it never occurred to me that I was in Jim Carroll’s city. I certainly wasn’t on a pilgrimage and I didn’t have expectations relating to him. But when I saw that he was advertised to perform at a club called The Bottom Line which was one of my regular haunts, I was stunned. I immediately bought a ticket. Just one. I had no desire to try and convince anyone else about the importance of this artist.

Carroll had recorded a new music album by then, motivated by Lenny Kaye. The performance was to be a combination of the songs from that album Pools Of Mercury and poems from a new book called Void Of Course.

The show was amazing. Seeing Jim Carroll for the first time was disturbing. He looked pale and frail and thin – not in a ‘rock star thin’ way, but in an ‘unhealthy thin’ kind of way. He clung to the microphone stand almost as a support structure but when he sang he was riveting. The voice was powerful, almost threatening and yet when he spoke he was hesitant and looked almost terrified. I spent equal parts of the nights scared for him and in awe of him. The words, the music and Carroll’s persona combined to make this a startling performance. I was honoured to have been in his presence and it was one of the highlights of my time in New York.

The show passed almost in a blur – but I realised at the time that it was a night that I was never likely to repeat.

I never did.

And now I never will.