[NY Times] Jim Carroll, 60, Poet and Punk Rocker, Dies

aghast · Sep 13, 2009

For anybody who likes basketball, reading about basketball, heroin, or reading about heroin, a great one just passed.

[NY Times] Jim Carroll, 60, Poet and Punk Rocker, Dies

Those are people who died. Dang.

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Oski2005 · Sep 13, 2009

RIP

aghast · Sep 14, 2009

This guy was one of the heroes of my youth: All-American playing high school ball against Lew Alcindor by day, street thug by night, descending into junkiedom and writing about it both day & night.

Sounds like a cliche of what every teen could possibly want in his/her self-styled adolescent rebellion, but ----, the guy could write.

It's a pretty good obituary:

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.

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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Reading the summary of the entirety of his life, it also appears he either lived with or screwed all my other heroes.

Also,

...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.”
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"People Who Died" was in the children's movie E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial? Um, what?

REEKO_HTOWN · Sep 14, 2009

and I just watched "Basketball Diaries" last week. RIP

Shroopy2 · Sep 14, 2009

Forgot about DiCaprio hanging on the rim in the rain. Was supposed to be like an iconic image of our generation or something ... lol.

Dont know about E.T. but People Who Died was also in the movie Tuff Turf

aghast · Sep 14, 2009

Shroopy2 said:

Forgot about DiCaprio hanging on the rim in the rain. Was supposed to be like an iconic image of our generation or something ... lol...[/URL]
Click to expand...

True, but I don't blame Shakespeare for She's the Man.

Jim Carroll wasn't responsible for the butchery Hollywood made of his life and work.

(DiCaprio was good, but the script was terrible, especially given the richness of the source material. Also, 5'7" PF Marky Mark pulling down "50 rebounds" kinda strained belief.)

[CatholicBoy.com] "Jim Carroll's Comments on The Basketball Diaries Film":

Following a reading at Bowling Green State University in Ohio on 2/20/96, Carroll answered the question, "What do you think of the film?" He replied:

I thought it was well made. I thought the performances were fantastic. I thought Leonardo was wonderful; I couldn't have asked for a better actor. I thought the whole cast was great. Unfortunately, the director had no idea what my book was about. . . . Some of the stuff worked and stuff. . . .

Personally, my favorite pieces were the voice-overs which were straight from the book. But I think that, you know, as a separate movie with Leonardo it was kind of interesting, but it's just like . . . this guy was a techno freak, the director, and, you know, he went a little over the top.

And then the ending was much more ambiguous [originally]. . . . They changed it and re-shot it in L.A., so I didn't know about that [until] I saw [the final version of the film]. And so I said, "You're not gonna like make it ----ed up and preachy and stuff," and they said, "No, no!" That's what they did!

...but you know, Hollywood has to tie everything up so there has to be a . . . nimbus around his head. . . . [Ironically:] which actually did happen to me . . . at my first reading . . . the Holy Ghost did descend [makes halo sign over his head] . . .
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Though, even with the movie's failings, DiCaprio's shotgun bloodbath daydream scene could indeed be considered iconic, given Columbine and the rash of Columbine-like shootings.

DFWRocket · Sep 14, 2009

REEKO_HTOWN said:

and I just watched "Basketball Diaries" last week. RIP
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I just saw it last week as well..sad day indeed.

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[NY Times] Jim Carroll, 60, Poet and Punk Rocker, Dies

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