Jim Carroll is poet for the 20-somethings
By Aaron Beck
Columbus Dispatch, 10 Nov. 1997
Twenty-somethings are constantly badgered by the Andy Rooneys of the world for being apathetic and having short attention spans. Had the Rooney clique been in Little Brother’s for a night of spoken word with Jim Carroll, it would have witnessed a striking feat of endurance by an audience rivaled only by witnesses of the Lincoln-Douglas debates.
Carroll took the stage 50 minutes after his expected 10 p.m. starting time Saturday and held the standing-room-only crowd’s attention for the next 90. With a shaky voice one part Bobcat Goldthwait, one part William Burroughs, Carroll read poems about Brazilian train surfers and venereal disease, sang-spoke lyrics and read a large chunk of an unfinished novel about a young New York painter on a spiritual quest.
The rock club provided the perfect environment for a Carroll reading. The sinewy, sunken-cheeked author, lyricist and diarist is known primarily for The Basketball Diaries, an autobiographical account of Carroll’s perilous coming of age in Lower Manhattan’s social netherworld. But in the early 1980s, Carroll sang and wrote lyrics for the Jim Carroll Band.
The 47-year-old looked professorial in round-rimmed, mottled glasses, longish red-orange hair parted in the middle and a sleek black blazer. After a nervous shuffling of papers, Carroll started with a story from Forced Entries, his follow-up to The Basketball Diaries. Its frank subject matter — crab lice were the main characters — presaged the rest of the night’s fare.
Though Carroll tended to ramble a bit — especially when he read from the untitled novel — the crowd never let on. Everyone clapped and hollered after everything he read.
Carroll later ditched the blazer, quickly becoming “Jim Carroll, Rock ‘n’ Roll Poet.” That’s when he found his groove. Sing-speaking the song, I Want The Angel, from the Jim Carroll Band’s first album, Catholic Boy, the 6-foot-4-inch Carroll lurched around the stage, exhibiting more confidence in his delivery than he showed all night. Holding a microphone in his right hand, he rolled his left through the air to jibe with the cadence of his choppy words.
One of the last pieces he read, Eight Fragments for Kurt Cobain, found the one-time heroin addict lamenting the early departure of the Nirvana front man: “Pressure, that’s how diamonds are formed . . . But why won’t we ever hear another riff, another feverish line? . . . That’s what I don’t understand . . . That’s what’s always kept me alive.”
The chronically crotchety Rooney no doubt would have whined about the non-primetime material that embodies Carroll’s work. He would have been impressed, though, by the lack of stone-faced slackers one sees at most rock ‘n’ roll events these days.