Cornell University, 3 March 1997
Review by Jade Chang, Cornell Chronicle
Musician and author Jim Carroll sings one of his self-penned rock songs, with accompaniment from guitarist Lenny Kaye, at Statler Auditorium on March 3.
Author, poet, musician and spoken-word artist Jim Carroll, best known for his autobiography The Basketball Diaries, spoke to a full house in Statler Auditorium March 3. Expecting a lecture, the audience was instead treated to a poetry and prose reading, interspersed with anecdotes and followed by a segment with Carroll speaking and singing and rocker Lenny Kaye on electric guitar.
Clad in a black leather jacket and boots, with the sunken face and lingering tremor of a heroin survivor, Carroll strode onstage and emptied his satchel of books and papers before turning to the audience and launching into his first poem, “A Day at the Races.”
Even while holding forth hilariously on a topic probably never before mentioned from the Statler stage — Phthirus pubis crabs — he managed to riff on Vladimir Nabokov’s butterfly-catching days at Cornell, setting the tone for the rest of the evening.
Wandering from the melodic prose-poetry of “A Fragment for Kurt Cobain” to the Dr. Seuss-like nursery-rhyme hilarity of poems like “Fat Bat,” Carroll displayed his beautiful word-sense and wide-ranging intellect.
Carroll touched often on his intimate relationship with New York City. (“He writes the City,” William S. Burroughs once said of him.) Carroll is one of the most resilient artists to remain from the glittering, drug-drenched New York City of the 1970s: city of Andy Warhol and Max’s Kansas City, of Allen Ginsberg and Bob Dylan and the Velvet Underground. Carroll knew them all.
From a novel he’s working on about a hot-shot young painter rising on the New York City scene, Carroll read, “There would be taller buildings, of course, but none of them could ever touch the majesty, prophecy, history within limestone, of the Empire State Building.”
In the middle of reading from this as-yet unfinished novel, Carroll looked up unexpectedly at the audience and said, softly, “You’re always on stage in this city, man.”
Lenny Kaye, who has performed with Patti Smith and Waylon Jennings, bounced onstage for the second half and provided an electric backbeat to Carroll’s voice. Unfortunately, audience response to Carroll’s singing was poor.
“I guess we’ve proved the dictum that a good song can stand up under any arrangement to be wrong,” Carroll said.
Though Carroll has musical experience with the Jim Carroll Band, he was obviously more comfortable speaking than singing, and the spoken-word pieces were received far more enthusiastically.
Carroll ended the performance with a question-and-answer session, in which students asked about the college basketball championships (“UCLA will be the dark-horse winner”), cocaine (“the most demonic drug of all time”), God (“I’m not being sarcastic when I sing ‘I’m a Catholic Boy'”) and books he’s reading (The Dead Sea Scrolls and The Origin of Satan).
When asked what he thought of the film adaptation of The Basketball Diaries, Carroll responded with a groan, “Oh, that question? I have a lot of gripes with it. I liked a lot of the performances; it just didn’t have anything to do with the book.”
His visit was sponsored by the Cornell University Program Board.