Jim Carroll at Little Brothers
Columbus, OH, 8 November 1997
Review by Craig Fitzgerald
My sister and her husband Jim and I drove 130 miles to see Jim Carroll on the raining Saturday night. Jim was to read at a small but well known Columbus club. We arrived at eight when the doors opened. the back stage area was so dim that you couldn’t see anyone’s faces. We picked a nice spot off to one side where we could sit above the crowd when it filled up. Jim was scheduled to come on at 10PM. He arrived about 10:15 and came onstage at 10:45. By the time he came on the bar was really uptight and packed. The fact that there was no opener made for a boring wait. Jim came onstage and proceeded to rearrange every thing. He was really struggling to unwrap the cord from the podium mike stating “they do this just to fuck with me.” He started off with “day at the races.” Then he started on a part of his new novel about a famous painter who realizes that his painting don’t have a spiritual quality about them. The painter begins to lose his sanity. In a break to set up another pice of that novel he tells the Veal and JFK story from memory then moves back into the novel.
I have read Jim carroll and heard his spoken word work but have never heard him talk without reading. He is a great writer and an incredible reader. But his speech free form is tough to take as he jumps from place to place and adds important info he forgot to share earlier when in was pertinent to the story.
He then did a ton of prose, poetry and songs including a story about his no name cat, dance floor, for virginia, 8 fragments of kurt cobain, the gold paint sniffing song, buddha gets in free, father’s last words, I want the angel, the beast within, and ending with I am the river phone message. There was a lot more stuff but I don’t remember it all. He was reading incredibly, and after almost two hours he said goodnight to thumderous applause. As the announcer said after Jim left, “That is what I call genius.” It was better than I ever expected. Unfortunately the person who bought the tickets and got me into Jim Carroll couldn’t go because he was in florida. Thanks, Eric.