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Jim Carroll-Phot: Eric J. Thompson
Jim Carroll? It is impossible to put him in a box, even now that he has passed away. He was a memoirist, a musician, a poet and actor and a heroin addict. He had dark connections to the whole New York sub culture of drugs and the Andy Warhol scene of the 70’s.
As for music, Jim Carroll collaborated with such greats as Lou Reed; Ray Manzarek of The Doors; Pearl Jam and others, but he was an accomplished musician in his own right. And with the encouragement of another friend, Patti Smith, he started his own band, Jim Carroll Band. It was a New Wave/Punk band whose first effort “Catholic Boy” (1980) is sometimes referred to as “the last great Punk album.”
Poetry ran through his veins very early on though. The son of a bar owner, he grew up on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. He had established himself as an emerging poet by the time he was 17 or 18 years old. He was in the right place at the right time. Or was it the wrong place at the right time? Either way, he impressed the likes of Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac. Most of what he wrote was about his life in New York, his friends and his addiction which he maintained by prostituting himself. This became widely known after his1978 memoir, “Basketball Diaries” was published. It was made into a film starring Leonardo DiCaprio in 1995.
Despite his troubles, he was an extraordinary artist.
“Living at the Movies” his subsequent book surpassed the first. On the back cover of the Penguin edition it reads: "In these poems, all written before the age of twenty-two, Carroll shows an uncanny virtuosity. His power and poisoned purity are reminiscent of Arthur Rimbaud, and, like the strongest poets of the New York School, Carroll transforms the everyday details of city life into poetry. In language at once delicate, hallucinatory, and menacing, his major themes--love, friendship, the exquisite pains and pleasures of drugs, and above all, the ever-present city--emerge in an atmosphere where dreams and reality mingle on equal terms...." The collection earned him a Pulitzer Prize nomination before the age of 22.
Jim Carroll was found dead in his Manhattan apartment at the age of 60, September 11, 2009. The apparent cause is a heart attack. On the front page of Catholicboy.com on September 13th (the day his death was announced), it was stated that he “was at his desk working when he died.”
RIP
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