“Conscience is no more than the dead speaking to us.”
-- Jim Carroll
[Obituary below reprinted in its entirety from the CBC website.]
Monday, September 14, 2009
Punk rock poet Jim Carroll dies at 60
Punk rocker and poet Jim Carroll, author of the autobiographical The Basketball Diaries, has died. He was 60.
He died Friday while working at his desk in his Manhattan home, according to his website. The cause of death is believed to be a heart attack.
His Jim Carroll Band combined his poetic sensibility with rock 'n' roll and was influential in the burgeoning punk rock scene in 1970s New York.
Carroll made a big impact with his album Catholic Boy and the single People Who Died, which was heavily played in response to ex-Beatle John Lennon's death in 1980.
He rubbed shoulders with artists such as the Velvet Underground, Patti Smith, Larry Rivers and Robert Mapplethorpe in New York.
"There ain't much time left, you're born out of this insane abyss and you're going to fall back into it, so while you're alive, you might as well show your bare ass," Carroll told Rolling Stone at the time.
Known for his deeply personal lyrics, Carroll recorded the albums Pools of Mercury, I Write Your Name and A World Without Gravity.
He was an influence on a later generation of artists, both musicians and writers, and worked with Pearl Jam, Rancid, Lou Reed, Danny Barnes and John Cale.
Mentioned in Warhol films
Carroll was a poet before he became a rock musician, publishing his first collection Organic Trains at age 16.
Carroll was mentored by poet Ted Berrigan, and moved in circles that included William Burroughs, Beat writer Allen Ginsberg and artist Andy Warhol. He appeared in two of Warhol's films.
From age 12, he kept a journal, chronicling his Catholic childhood as the son of an Irish bartender and the impact of his basketball scholarship.
Throughout his teens, he lived a double life, hooked on heroin but a basketball player and excellent student.
That story would become The Basketball Diaries, published in 1978 and made into a 1995 movie of the same name.
Other collections include:
* 4 Ups and 1 Down (1970).
* The Book of Nods (1986).
* Fear of Dreaming (1993).
* Void of course: Poems 1994-1997 (1998).
Carroll left New York in 1973 and moved to California where he vowed to kick his heroin addiction.
He spent several years enjoying solitude, writing poetry, and met his future wife, Rosemary Klemfuss, there. They later divorced.
In 1978, Patti Smith came to California on tour with her band, encouraged Jim to form a band, which led to the creation of the Jim Carroll Band.
[photograph of Jim Carroll, with Patti Smith, from a Google image search for "Jim Carroll" from Camera Lucida and Lovebomb website. Caption: "Photo: Patti Smith & Jim Carroll (via If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger… - sadly no photo credit given)."]
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Part 1: Below is the obituary from the New York Times by William Grimes, reprinted in full.
September 14, 2009
Jim Carroll, Poet and Punk Rocker Who Wrote ‘The Basketball Diaries’, Dies 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 “The Basketball Diaries,” 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 “The Basketball Diaries,” 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.
“I met him in 1970, and already he was pretty much universally recognized as the best poet of his generation,” the singer Patti Smith said in a telephone interview on Sunday. “The work was sophisticated and elegant. He had beauty.”
The diaries began, innocently: “Today was my first Biddy League game and my first day in any organized basketball league. I’m enthused about life due to this exciting event.”
By the end of the book, Mr. Carroll was a heroin addict who supported his habit by hustling in Times Square. “Totally zonked, and all the dope scraped or sniffed clean from the tiny cellophane bags,” the final entry read, continuing, “I 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.”
“The Basketball Diaries,” reissued in a mass-market edition in 1980, became enormously popular, especially on college campuses. In a film adaptation in 1995, Leonardo DiCaprio played the part of Mr. Carroll.
The writer’s good looks and flair for drama made him ideal raw material for rock stardom. “When 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,” 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, “Catholic Boy” (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. Mark’s Poetry Project in the East Village, falling under the spell of Allen Ginsberg and Frank O’Hara.
Still in his teens, he published a limited-edition pamphlet of his poems, “Organic Trains” (1967), which, with its successor, “4 Ups and 1 Down” (1970), won him a cult following that was enhanced when The Paris Review published excerpts from his journals in 1970. “Living at the Movies” (1973), issued by a mainstream publisher, won him both acclaim and a wider audience.
[con'td.]
Part 2: Below is the remainder of the obituary from the New York Times by William Grimes, reprinted in full.
September 14, 2009
Jim Carroll, Poet and Punk Rocker Who Wrote ‘The Basketball Diaries’, Dies at 60
By William Grimes
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 Warhol’s Factory, contributing dialogue for Warhol’s 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 “Forced Entries: The Downtown Diaries, 1971-1973.”
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. Carroll’s 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 “not so much a singer as an incantatory rock-and-roll poet.” Like Lou Reed, he had a mesmerizing power, evident on songs like “People Who Died” from “Catholic Boy,” a poetic litany of his dead friends that became a hit on college radio and part of the soundtrack for “E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial.”
The group’s next two albums, “Dry Dreams” (1982) and “I Write Your Name” (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 “Pools of Mercury.”
Mr. Carroll published several more poetry collections — “The Book of Nods” (1986), “Fear of Dreaming” (1993) and “Void of Course: Poems 1994-1997” (1998) — as well as releasing several spoken-word albums.
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