Wow, this is very sad. Catholic Boy is one of my favourite albums of all-time.


[www.nytimes.com]

OK, I'll say it:

Add his name to the list of "People Who Died!"

Don't know if was unintentional, or meant to be ironic, or what the deal was, but I always found the sheer joyousness with which he performed People Who Died to be very funny. I love that track.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2009-09-14 16:38 by tatters.

Keith performed it with Jim at TRAX in NYC when it came out--the place was packed (we could not get in)

I interviewed him when I was in college - he was very cool - we were backstage before he played and a second after this picture was taken he asked if I'd go buy him a pack of Marlboro reds - I could not get to the store and back fast enough

[www.facebook.com]

Not so OT after all:



From [www.waynewoods.com]

RIP Jim .... God bless you and safe journey



ROCKMAN



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2009-09-14 03:11 by Rockman.

sad to hear. saw him at a small club in eugene, oregon shortly after the release of that debut...recorded the show, too...

this is sad news.
reading the basketball diaries blew my mind - a teenage kid wrote this! holy @#$%& !
saw jim open for the j. geils band in '82 - haven't seen too many double bills that topped that one.

Quote
Edith Grove

I can not say it sad news to me.............................I don't know this guy............great song though

Can some one tell his story?

__________________________

it said he had a heart attack while working - not sure where he has been lately but this image from '07 seems to suggest he may have been ill - he appears very frail here

[commons.wikimedia.org]

from the same event
[commons.wikimedia.org]

Awful news. Catholic Boy is a great record.

love and light to him

New York punk legend. We salute you Jim. At least it wasn't 25 reds and a bottle of wine!

Very sad. 'City Drops Into The Night' is one of my favourite songs (as well as 'People Who Died'). I've got a poor quality cassette recording of Keith playing 'People Who Died' with him.
He always stuck me as a kind of male Patti Smith. I am surprised he never broke bigger.

Thats really sad, although that Jim reached sixty after his crazy youth is an achievement in itself. Its quite a shame he's not better known, as mentioned above Catholic Boy is one of the great NYC records, and Basketball Diaries is pretty much up there with Catcher In The Rye as a teenage classic.

R.I.P Jim

Sad indeed.
I'm re-visting Catholic Boy right now - hadn't heard it for ages and it's better than I remembered it.

R.I.P. Jim Carroll

Sad news!

Somehow he never really made it.
I think he was on R.Stones Records too.

I remember some nice writing about him spending the day with Keith before his/their gig. (From S. Booth' Rythm Oil . . ?)

the stones helped him sign with atlantic, i believe - but, no, he wasn't on rs records....

With all he went thru, I'm surprised he lasted this long (same with Keef).

I saw him perform at Buffalo State College in a student cafeteria in the very early 80s. Catholic Boy had just been released and there was a buzz about the band. He lived up to the buzz and more. One of the best shows I have ever seen my anybody. Raw, fun, wild, original.

RIP

I listened to Catholic Boy today for the first time in ages and it holds up remarkably well. Hell, it's even better than I remembered. What a fantastic album. RIP, Jim Carroll.

I’m really surprised that nobody has posted about the passing of Jim Caroll . He past away on 9/11/09 . I remember that the Stones, maybe Keith help get him signed to a recording deal . He never recorded on the Rolling Stones label but I think he was on Atco which was a part of Atlantic.

From the New York Times
By
WILLIAM GRIMES
Published: September 14, 2009



Jim Carroll, Poet and Punk Rocker Who Wrote ‘The Basketball Diaries’, Dies at 60


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, was born Aug. 1, 1949, and 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.

I was able to see Jim on his first tour at JB Scotts ,a small venue in Albany ,NY . His performance was masterful . His band was great and despite critics putting down his singing abilities ,I rate this show among the best I have ever seen. All of his discs are worth having . I have always hoped that he would record music again. Rip Jim.

maybe your search missed it because the original thread spelled his name right?
[www.iorr.org]

love & light to him

Thanks sssoul. Adding that second R would help !

Tommy and the boys!

Sad news. Catholic Boy is a great record, has all the NY Patti Smith Lou Reed Television John Cale Rolling Stoney thing going on. I remember reading the book Basketball Diaries and like a week later Catholic Boy came out and played heavily. Learned Wicked Gravity and Three Sisters inside out. Jim and his band were on Tom Snyder Tomorrow Show and Fridays during that peak. They sorta had two rythm / lead guitarists not unlike Some Girls era Keith/Ronnie. One of them had the same setup as me: SG Standard thru a twin so I could get exactly the sound as the band.

Jim was almost on Rolling Stones records but it never happened. There are a few boots of the band on Dime in high quality. Jim played all the big cities and college towns the year Catholic Boy came out and a lot of them were FM broadcast. I have the Boston, Long Island ( My Fathers Place ) and the San Francisco shows.My favorite is the Long Island show as it is shorter with couple of duds dropped out of the setlist.

RIP Jim.

i recorded a show of his in eugene in late 1980, shortly after john lennon's death...jim included a line about john's death in his signature song. not a bad recording, either - was in circulation amongst traders a few years back.

it didn't surprise me that jim didn't make the jump into stardom - although he crafted some good songs and had a killer band with him for a time, jim was not comfortable on stage (very awkward stage presence) and was a VERY limited vocalist...and that's being kind.