Goldman
2009-09-13 23:57:48 UTC
September 14, 2009
Jim Carroll, Poet and Punk Rocker, Is Dead at 60
By WILLIAM GRIMES
Jim Carroll, the poet and punk rocker in the outlaw tradition of Rimbaud
and Burroughs who chronicled his wild youth in ³The Basketball Diaries,²
died on Friday at his home in Manhattan. He was 60.
The cause was a heart attack, said Rosemary Carroll, his former wife.
As a teenage basketball star in the 1960s at Trinity, an elite private
school on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, Mr. Carroll led a chaotic
life that combined sports, drugs and poetry. This highly unusual
combination lent a lurid appeal to ³The Basketball Diaries,² the journal
he kept during high school and published in 1978, by which time his
poetry had already won him a cult reputation as the new Bob Dylan.
³I met him in 1970, and already he was pretty much universally
recognized as the best poet of his generation,² the singer Patti Smith
said in a telephone interview on Sunday. ³The work was sophisticated and
elegant. He had beauty.²
The diaries began, innocently: ³Today was my first Biddy League game and
my first day in any organized basketball league. I¹m enthused about life
due to this exciting event.²
By the end of the book, Mr. Carroll was a heroin addict who supported
his habit by hustling in Times Square. ³Totally zonked, and all the dope
scraped or sniffed clean from the tiny cellophane bags,² the final entry
read, continuing, ³I can see the Cloisters with its million in medieval
art out the bedroom window. I got to go in and puke. I just want to be
pure.²
³The Basketball Diaries,² republished in a revised version in 1980,
became enormously popular, especially on college campuses. In a film
adaptation in 1995, Leonardo DiCaprio played the part of Mr. Carroll
The writer¹s good looks and flair for drama made him ideal raw material
for rock stardom. ³When I was about 9 years old, man, I realized that
the real thing was not only to do what you were doing totally great, but
to look totally great while you were doing it,² he told the poet Ted
Berrigan in the 1960s. In the late 1970s, with the encouragement of Ms.
Smith, he formed the Jim Carroll Band, whose first release, ³Catholic
Boy² (1980), is sometimes called the last great punk album.
James Dennis Carroll, the son of a bar owner, spent his childhood on the
Lower East Side of Manhattan, where he attended Roman Catholic schools.
After the family moved to Inwood, at the northern end of Manhattan, he
won a basketball scholarship to Trinity. There he discovered a love of
writing and began spending time at the St. Mark¹s Poetry Project in the
East Village, falling under the spell of Allen Ginsberg and Frank O¹Hara.
Still in his teens, he published a limited-edition pamphlet of his
poems, ³Organic Trains² (1967), which, with its successor, ³4 Ups and 1
Down² (1970), won him a cult following that was enhanced when The Paris
Review published excerpts from his journals in 1970. ³Living at the
Movies² (1973), issued by a mainstream publisher, won him both acclaim
and a wider audience.
His life was colorful. Hailed by Ginsberg, Berrigan and Jack Kerouac as
a powerful new poetic voice, he became a fixture on the downtown scene.
After briefly attending Wagner College on Staten Island and Columbia
University, he found his way to Andy Warhol¹s Factory, contributing
dialogue for Warhol¹s films. Later he worked as a studio assistant for
the painter Larry Rivers and lived with Ms. Smith and Robert
Mapplethorpe, the photographer. He chronicled this frenetic period in
³Forced Entries: The Downtown Diaries, 1971-1973.²
In 1973 Mr. Carroll left New York to escape drugs. He settled in
Bolinas, an artistic community north of San Francisco, where met and
married Rosemary Klemfuss in 1978. The marriage ended in divorce. He is
survived by a brother, Tom.
Mr. Carroll¹s music career started by accident when Ms. Smith brought
him onstage to declaim his poetry with her band providing background.
Encouraged by the response, he formed his own band. It caught the
attention of Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones, who arranged a
three-record deal with Atlantic Records.
The critic Stephen Holden described Mr. Carroll in The New York Times in
1982 as ³not so much a singer as an incantatory rock-and-roll poet.²
Like Lou Reed, he had a mesmerizing power, evident on songs like ³People
Who Died² from ³Catholic Boy,² a poetic litany of his dead friends that
became a hit on college radio and part of the soundtrack for ³E.T.: The
Extra-Terrestrial.²
The group¹s next two albums, ³Dry Dreams² (1982) and ³I Write Your Name²
(1984), caused much less stir. After writing lyrics for Blue Oyster Cult
and Boz Scaggs, Mr. Carroll returned to the studio in 1998 to record
³Pools of Mercury.²
Mr. Carroll published several more poetry collections ³The Book of
Nods² (1986), ³Fear of Dreaming² (1993) and ³Void of Course: Poems
1994-1997² (1998) as well as releasing several spoken-word albums.
Jim Carroll, Poet and Punk Rocker, Is Dead at 60
By WILLIAM GRIMES
Jim Carroll, the poet and punk rocker in the outlaw tradition of Rimbaud
and Burroughs who chronicled his wild youth in ³The Basketball Diaries,²
died on Friday at his home in Manhattan. He was 60.
The cause was a heart attack, said Rosemary Carroll, his former wife.
As a teenage basketball star in the 1960s at Trinity, an elite private
school on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, Mr. Carroll led a chaotic
life that combined sports, drugs and poetry. This highly unusual
combination lent a lurid appeal to ³The Basketball Diaries,² the journal
he kept during high school and published in 1978, by which time his
poetry had already won him a cult reputation as the new Bob Dylan.
³I met him in 1970, and already he was pretty much universally
recognized as the best poet of his generation,² the singer Patti Smith
said in a telephone interview on Sunday. ³The work was sophisticated and
elegant. He had beauty.²
The diaries began, innocently: ³Today was my first Biddy League game and
my first day in any organized basketball league. I¹m enthused about life
due to this exciting event.²
By the end of the book, Mr. Carroll was a heroin addict who supported
his habit by hustling in Times Square. ³Totally zonked, and all the dope
scraped or sniffed clean from the tiny cellophane bags,² the final entry
read, continuing, ³I can see the Cloisters with its million in medieval
art out the bedroom window. I got to go in and puke. I just want to be
pure.²
³The Basketball Diaries,² republished in a revised version in 1980,
became enormously popular, especially on college campuses. In a film
adaptation in 1995, Leonardo DiCaprio played the part of Mr. Carroll
The writer¹s good looks and flair for drama made him ideal raw material
for rock stardom. ³When I was about 9 years old, man, I realized that
the real thing was not only to do what you were doing totally great, but
to look totally great while you were doing it,² he told the poet Ted
Berrigan in the 1960s. In the late 1970s, with the encouragement of Ms.
Smith, he formed the Jim Carroll Band, whose first release, ³Catholic
Boy² (1980), is sometimes called the last great punk album.
James Dennis Carroll, the son of a bar owner, spent his childhood on the
Lower East Side of Manhattan, where he attended Roman Catholic schools.
After the family moved to Inwood, at the northern end of Manhattan, he
won a basketball scholarship to Trinity. There he discovered a love of
writing and began spending time at the St. Mark¹s Poetry Project in the
East Village, falling under the spell of Allen Ginsberg and Frank O¹Hara.
Still in his teens, he published a limited-edition pamphlet of his
poems, ³Organic Trains² (1967), which, with its successor, ³4 Ups and 1
Down² (1970), won him a cult following that was enhanced when The Paris
Review published excerpts from his journals in 1970. ³Living at the
Movies² (1973), issued by a mainstream publisher, won him both acclaim
and a wider audience.
His life was colorful. Hailed by Ginsberg, Berrigan and Jack Kerouac as
a powerful new poetic voice, he became a fixture on the downtown scene.
After briefly attending Wagner College on Staten Island and Columbia
University, he found his way to Andy Warhol¹s Factory, contributing
dialogue for Warhol¹s films. Later he worked as a studio assistant for
the painter Larry Rivers and lived with Ms. Smith and Robert
Mapplethorpe, the photographer. He chronicled this frenetic period in
³Forced Entries: The Downtown Diaries, 1971-1973.²
In 1973 Mr. Carroll left New York to escape drugs. He settled in
Bolinas, an artistic community north of San Francisco, where met and
married Rosemary Klemfuss in 1978. The marriage ended in divorce. He is
survived by a brother, Tom.
Mr. Carroll¹s music career started by accident when Ms. Smith brought
him onstage to declaim his poetry with her band providing background.
Encouraged by the response, he formed his own band. It caught the
attention of Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones, who arranged a
three-record deal with Atlantic Records.
The critic Stephen Holden described Mr. Carroll in The New York Times in
1982 as ³not so much a singer as an incantatory rock-and-roll poet.²
Like Lou Reed, he had a mesmerizing power, evident on songs like ³People
Who Died² from ³Catholic Boy,² a poetic litany of his dead friends that
became a hit on college radio and part of the soundtrack for ³E.T.: The
Extra-Terrestrial.²
The group¹s next two albums, ³Dry Dreams² (1982) and ³I Write Your Name²
(1984), caused much less stir. After writing lyrics for Blue Oyster Cult
and Boz Scaggs, Mr. Carroll returned to the studio in 1998 to record
³Pools of Mercury.²
Mr. Carroll published several more poetry collections ³The Book of
Nods² (1986), ³Fear of Dreaming² (1993) and ³Void of Course: Poems
1994-1997² (1998) as well as releasing several spoken-word albums.
