Jim Carroll at Shim Sham Club
New Orleans, LA, 7 February 2001
Review by Herman Snell
With years of dream excitement building to this 71 degree night, in front row left I sat with my backpack filled with books and notebooks, with the crowd ecclectic @ my rear. Standing room only. A sell out. A stranger and I ,anticipated & eager furthered our meaning from his “hard to find” Jim Carroll Band records.
The Bar Maid was serving us well down front, we only knocked over 1 bottle I believe. John Sinclair & The Blues Scholars started the event. John was the manager for MC5 until he was arrested in 1969. And released 3 days after John Lennon , Allen Ginsberg, Jerry Rubin & 15,000 had a protest/concert to free him in 1971. He now lives in New Orleans & performs his story prose with music accompaniment. The crowd was mostly unfamiliar & pleasantly suprised & arroused from the movement of his message which is the closest thing to Ginsberg you’ll find alive today.
After & drunker, waiting for Jim. I complain to our Bar Maid. “Dont forget about us down front.” She didnt want to come down while he was performing the small house. She loosened & started bringing us drinks 2 at a time. Jim’s words reach a place untamed & spent on hookers in my soul. The ethereal buzz of the sound of the words & seconds later their meaning come on like some tribal & secret language that Burroughs, Rimbaud, Andre Breton & I share. Pure sensation. I stood fixing my brain as Jim came on.
The crowd. We knew this place. This place that rides us in the languid & awkward rhythm of otherness. We all connect through his slow just woken smoking assalt words in the aftermath of being a Prisoner of War of your own mind, released.
Ashed on a cigarette. We see lain before us the places he’s been. In the bed of a lover in New York City, or perhaps California. He tells us he wished he’d brought the print in the 14 point font he’d printed so he wouldnt have to wear his “stupid glasses” and later looses his place, forgeting what he wanted to read next. He pauses, flipping pages from the podium until something catches his fancy.
Jim has a way of expressing himself , exposing his soul to the block reveal, when he stands untucked AND when he reads. The crowd knew this was something personal to be witnessed. Every eye meeting his face. To that part of us that can’t NOT write.
He connects to that place in each of us that’s streamed borne living through living.
In all its imperfections. Inventing .
That somehow the flow & sound of the words will restore what we’ve lost in this world.
Herman Snell
Shim Sham Club 2/7/2001