Jim Carroll at Aladdin Theater
Portland, OR, 2 October 1999
Review by Craig Giffen
At the box office, the Aladdin Theater had a printout of upcoming shows with ticket prices & description of show. It was “The Jim Carroll Band”, …. the first appearance in Oregon in 15 years. I can’t remember if it was meaning Jim Carroll as a band, or as Jim himself. (I know it wasn’t THE Jim Carroll band)
The Willammete Week (weekly alterna newspaper) ran a quick capsule:
http://www.wweek.com/html/musiclist.html [link no longer works]
JIM CARROLL
Latter-day Beatniks and Lower East Side wannabes, look alive. The rough-hewn poet of punk ’70s New York totes whatever musical amalgam he rolls with these days out to the less-edgy coast. Carroll is probably not to blame for giving Leonardo di Caprio the lead in Basketball Diaries–even if he can be linked to that incident, his too-infrequent contributions to rock and poetry absolve him. (ZD)Aladdin Theater, 3017 SE Milwaukee Ave., 233-1994. 8 pm Saturday, Oct. 2. $15.
Anyway:
– MUCH to my surprise, there were probably only about 100-150 people there, in a venue that holds 2-4 times that. Then I realized it is because the NXNW conference is going on and there are 300 bands in town, otherwise there would have been a large turnout.
– During the spoken word part of the show, Jim reached down to drink some water. He held the bottle up to his mouth but nothing came out. A guy came out and opened the bottle for him, Jim drank the water, then chuckled…”Man, and they want me to run something on the Internet”.
– They played a cover of Del Shannon’s “Runaway”. Jim forgot the lyrics towards the end of the first verse. The band stopped, then Robert Roth (the guitar player) reminded Jim what the lyrics were.
– A very large and very very very drunk woman got on stage. It was a seated venue, but a lot of people were standing in the open area dancing (below the front of the stage). This woman crawled up on stage, was kind of rolling around for awhile. She got up, but some sort of handkerchief on the guitar player, then some guy managed to get her off to the side of the stage, the argued with him. Before she walked off the stage, she turned and walked right towards Jim, yelled something into his ear for about 10 seconds, then eventually left the stage. Jim looked a little befuddled by the experience.
– Like I said, I can’t remember the setlist, but I remember Wicked Gravity, People who Died, City Drops in the Night, Runaway, Catholic Boy, and a few others. I don’t have the third Jim Carroll album, but Jim said “Here’s a song from the third album, it’s called [‘Freddy’s Store’]”.
I gotta get to bed. It was a nice evening, and break from all my Computer Science classes.