Jim Carroll at The Iron Horse
Northhampton, MA, 2 December 1996
Review by Norman Kee
The Source (Albany, NY)
Starting with the publication of his first collection of poetry, Living at the Movies, in 1973, Jim Carroll has amassed a body of work respectable by any measure, commercial, artistic, or otherwise. But in a live situation, Mr. Carroll reveals and revels with his secret weapon, his voice. In his own words, “My voice has a quiver. A quiver is where you keep arrows until you shoot them.” His voice set up the many wonderful dichotomies of his Monday, December 2nd spoken word performance at the Iron Horse in Northhampton.
Making mention that his late arrival by train and rush to get there had put him in a “funk”, Mr. Carroll dived into ‘A Day at the Races’, a prose piece from Forced Enteries, the sequel to The Basketball Diaries. [He made reference to the film version, saying it wasn’t bad, but it “had nothing to do with the book.”] ‘A Day at the Races’ tells a charming story of love and crab infestation (really), and stuck close to the version included on Praying Mantis, his outstanding 1991 spoken word recording. The luxury of knowing the story of the piece allowed me to indulge in the other aspects of his delivery. The angularity and variable speed of his timbre almost belies his seemingly effortless rhythm and the stunning beauty of his words. It also seems paradoxical that a man possessed with such grace and beauty in his words and speech could seem so physically awkward. His left hand moved as if it belonged to a marionette at the mercy of an irregular metronome. Like Angus Young’s stage stomp and stamp, it was keeping some rhythm, but not his.
After several more prose entries, Mr. Carroll moved into some new poetry, largely unpublished. He read his great and moveing ‘Eight Fragments for Kurt Cobain’, recently run in the New York Times Magazine, that encourages empathy for Mr. Cobain while also making the listener appreciate that Jim Carroll is one who has survived. ‘Dancefloor’ is one of the few pieces that truly captures the kinetic club energy which flourishes and feeds on itself and seems to exist independent of all else. ‘Like Virginia’ was short, sweet and pleasantly blunt. He also read the lyrics to a hilarious and witty song inspired by a gold paint-faced huffer he saw on COPS, which is to appear on the soundtrack to Gummo, a forthcoming flick coincidentally inspired by the same incident.
Perhaps the most transcendent aspect of his work is Mr. Carroll’s extreme care of word choice and their placement, and its powerful and diverse impact. With just 20 syllables, he conjured the image of an Italian cabinet maker dead at his place of work, and each and every listener could vividly picture a lush and similar apparation, palatable with smells, light and feel. Then with even fewer words, by staking out the relationship between the words but not defining it, every listener had pitched their own complex mental tent to encompass these stakes, no two alike. Such distinct abilities, not usually found in the same place, were in stunning full force.