Jim Carroll at The Cotton Club
Atlanta, GA, 13 April 1996
Review by Michelle Webb
My friends and I arrived a little after 9 pm for the Jim Carroll/Viva laDiva show at the Cotton Club – I wanted to be sure that we got a good seat. For some unknown reason, the opening band did not come on until after Carroll’s set, so around 11 pm the crowd was starting to get a little restless. There was a collective sigh of relief when Carroll took the stage around 11:15 (had the opening band played, Carroll’s reading would have been pushed to around 1 am).
Carroll seemed relaxed and in good spirits. He also looked healthier(and younger) to me than the last few times I have seen him. Before he began to read, he joked around a little with the audience, and politely requested that the lighting technician turn down the stage lights slightly because they were “tanning” the back of his neck (if you’ve never seen Carroll up close before let me tell you he is paler than moonlight).
Carroll began his set with the “Opening Night” and “Terror in theLobby” entries from Forced Entries. Relying more on his memory than on notes and books, he gave the expanded version of the life and times of an abscess (which seemed to be the junkie equivalant of a scarlet “A” in Carroll’s eyes). Next, Carroll read “8 Fragments for Kurt Cobain,” and the crowd got so quiet you could hear a pin drop. This is such an intensely honest and personal poem, the first time I read it I felt like someone had punched me in the stomach.
Maybe it’s because he has so much new material, but Carroll seemed to rely a lot less on his earlier works this time around. I don’t recall him reading anything from The Basketball Diaries. He read a coupleof selections from The Book of Nods and Fear of Dreaming, including “To the National Endowment for the Arts” which received a loud ovation and cheers from the audience.The audience, including myself, really seemed to like his new poems (maybe we have a new book of poems to look forward to, in addition to that novel he’s been working on). A poem about the tragedy in Bosnia seemed to strike a chord with many people in the crowd. “Our Desires” and “For Virginia” also received an enthusiastic response.
Carroll’s last two readings were of songs he had written. “I Want the Angel” is from Catholic Boy, and “The Beast Within” is a song he wrote for the soundtrack of The Basketball Diaries , which unfortunately did not appear on the soundtrack. Carroll paced back and forth across the stage, microphone in hand, and chanted the lyrics as we sat, mesmerized. It is disappointing that “The Beast Within” was not included on the soundtrack. Personally, I can think of a song or two that I would have cut in order to be able to include this new Carroll song on the soundtrack.
Afterwards, Carroll signed books backstage. Security people lined us up and we filed in one by one to get books/cd’s etc. signed. I was too embarrassed to take more than one book, so I divided them up among my friends and told them that for book signing purposes their names were “Michelle.” I still have one more book that I would like to get signed, but it will have to wait until the next reading.