Poet recorded last great punk album
Sydney Morning Herald
Friday September 18, 2009
JIM CARROLL, the poet and punk rocker, was in the outlaw tradition of Arthur Rimbaud, the poet and libertine, and William Burroughs, the writer, painter and opiate addict.Carroll, who has died at his home in Manhattan from a heart attack, at 59, chronicled his wild youth in The Basketball Diaries.As a teenage basketball star in the 1960s at Trinity, an elite private school in Manhattan, 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 won him a cult reputation as the new Bob Dylan.The diaries began, innocently: "Today was my first Biddy League game and my first day in any organised basketball league. I'm enthused about life due to this exciting event." By the end of the book, 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. "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 1980, became enormously popular. In a film adaptation in 1995, Leonardo DiCaprio played the part of Carroll.The writer's good looks and flair for drama made him ideal raw material for rock stardom. In the late 1970s, with encouragement from the singer Patti Smith, he formed the Jim Carroll Band, whose first release, Catholic Boy (1980), is sometimes called the last great punk album. Keith Richards, of the Rolling Stones, arranged for Carroll a three-record deal with Atlantic Records.James Dennis Carroll, the son of a bar owner, went to Catholic schools in Manhattan, before winning a basketball scholarship to Trinity. Discovering a love of writing, he spent time at the St Mark's Poetry Project in the East Village.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) won him acclaim and a wider audience.Hailed by Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac as a powerful new poetic voice, Carroll became a fixture on the downtown scene. After briefly attending Wagner College and Columbia University, he went 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 Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe, the photographer. He chronicled this frenetic period in Forced Entries: The Downtown Diaries, 1971-1973.In 1973 Carroll left New York to escape drugs. He settled in Bolinas, an artistic community north of San Francisco, where he met and married Rosemary Klemfuss in 1978. The last of several more volumes of poetry, Void of Course: Poems 1994-1997 came in 1998. Carroll's marriage ended in divorce. He is survived by a brother, Tom.
© 2009 Sydney Morning Herald