[Deathwatch] Jim Carroll, Poet and Punk Rocker, 60

[Deathwatch Central]

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.

Many thanks to Deathwatch Central for posting this obituary