Let's start a new file and call it "songs about dying" and file this song "People Who Died" in it. I'm not sure why, but since I was a little kid I was always fascinated by people who would sing about someone who died in their songs. It seemed so weird and odd to me then. This song is the wham-doozy of death songs as it graphically lists a full 13 friends of his who died urban NYC deaths, some harrowingly (check out the lyrics online). But this is a great song. It is edgy and punky and ominous, and I always loved it. The first year that I moved to NYC I finally got the chance to see Jim Carroll. He did some spoken word to music at a show (that also included Deborah Harry of Blondie) at The Rubin Museum of Art. I was lucky to get the chance to see him, as he himself died just 2 short years later.
James Dennis Carroll was born on August 1, 1949 and spent his childhood NYC's Lower East Side. He grew up in a working-class Irish family. His father owned a bar. From 1955-1963 he attented Catholic schools. After his family moved uptown to Inwood he won a basketball scholarship to attend an elite Manhattan Upper West Side Catholic high school, the TrinitySchool from 1964-1968. Throughout those years Carroll was a star basketball player, but led a secret life as a heroin addict and hustler in Times Square to support his habit. At Trinity he also discovered his love of writing and nurtured his poetry writing by spending time at New York's St. Mark's Poetry Project in the East Village. His poems were published in their magazine, The World in 1967. While hanging out there he became quite fond of Allen Ginsberg and Frank O'Hara.
In 1967, while still in high school, he published a limited-edition pamphlett of poems, Organic Trains, and 1970's 4 Ups and 1 Down which won him a cult following and attracted the attention of NYC's literati, especially when excerpts from his journals were published in The Paris Review in 1970 and when his poems appeared in Poetry magazine.
Carroll published an autobiographical collection of diaries he kept from the ages of 12-16 detailing his life as a teenager in NYC including his basketball playing and drug use and sexual experiences and called it The Basketball Diaries (1978).
According to the New York Times, "His life was colorful. Hailed by Ginsberg, Berrigan and Jack Kerouac as a powerful new poetic voice, he became a fixture on the downtown scene. After briefly attending Wagner College on Staten Island and Columbia Universtiy, he found his way to Andy Warhol's Factory, contributing dialogue for Warhol’s films. Later he worked as a studio assistant for the painter Larry Rivers and lived with singer Patti Smith and photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. He wrote a continuing autobiography covering his early adulthood in NYC's art and music scene, and his efforts to kick his drug habit and called it Forced Entries: The Downtown Diaries 1971-1973. He was considered to be a poet in the outlaw tradition of Rimbaud and William Burroughs."
According an article in Slate Magazine by Gerald Howard, who edited his 1980 works The Book of Nods (1985), and Forced Entries (1987) at Penguin during the 80's, "Jim was a vivid presence in any setting. He was a classic and now vanishing New York type: the smart (and smartass) Irish kid with style, street savvy, and whatever the Gaelic word for chutzpah is. In the '30s they would have cast him immediately as a Dead End Kid—he certainly had the unreconstructed accent for the part, an urban rasp that was sweet music to my aboriginal ears. He was a fully paid-up member of New York's hip aristocracy, Lou Reed's peer, Patti Smith's lover, Allen Ginsberg's acolyte, Robert Smithson's friend, permanently welcome in the Valhalla of Max's Kansas City's back room."
In 1973, after kicking his heroin habit, Carroll moved to Bolinas, an artistic community north of San Francisco, California for a fresh start. In 1978 he married Rosemary Klemfuss. His music career started after Patti Smith brought him onstage to read his poetry with her band providing backup. The response was encouraging, and Smith urged him to start a band of his own. Shortly thereafter he formed a new wave/punk group called The Jim Carroll Band consisting of: Steve Linsley (bass), Wayne Woods (drums), Brian Linsey and Terrell Winn (guitars) and Carroll on vocals. They caught the attention of Keith Richards of The Rolling Stones who arranged a 3-record deal for them with Atlantic Records. They released 6 albums in all. Their first album Catholic Boy debuted in 1980 and "People Who Died" became the hit single from that album. The title of the song was inspired by a Ted Berrigan poem. The song also appeared in a 1985 movie called Tuff Turf which featured James Spader, Robert Downey Junior and Kim Richards of Nanny and the Professor and Real Housewives of Beverly Hills reality program. The Jim Carroll band also appeared in the film performing the song "It's Too Late". Here's a clip (Robert Downey is playing the drummer in this clip):
Carroll also wrote lyrics for other bands such as Blue Oyster Cult (see 80's quest post of February 2nd) and Boz Scaggs (see 80's quest post). Carroll published more poetry collections Fear of Dreaming (1993) and Void of Course: Poems 1994-1997 (1998) and released several spoken-word albums.
On September 2009 Jim Carroll (age 60) was at his desk working at his home in supper Manhattan when he died of a heart attack. His wake was held at a funeral home on Bleeker Street, and his funeral mass was held at the Our Lady of Pompeii Roman Catholic Church on Carmine Street in Greenwich Village. His former editor, Howard, recounted that "after the priest led us in prayers, Jim's ex-wife, Rosemary, invited people to share their thoughts and memories. New York rock legend Lenny Kaye gave a moving mini-eulogy that touched on Jim's gifts as a raconteur and evoked his sweetness, ending with the famous line from "People Who Died:" "I salute you, brother." Two members of the original Jim Carroll Band, Terrell Winn and Steve Linsley, reminisced about hooking up with Jim in Bolinas, where he'd retreated to get clean, and crafting the triumph of punk sound and poetic sensibility that was the album Catholic Boy. Richard Hell marveled at the early arrival of Jim's gifts and expressed his admiration and astonishment. I spoke of just how much fun it was to be Jim's editor, fun being about as easy to experience in publishing these days as smoking in Mike Bloomberg's New York, and remembered the best Fourth of July of my life, when I played basketball in the Village all afternoon, showered, got good and ripped, and saw the Jim Carroll Band tear it up at the Ritz in their first New York appearance a few days after Scott Muni had unveiled "People Who Died" on WNEW-FM.
And then Patti Smith got up, her star power dialed down, and told a simple funny story about her first encounter with Jim, who had proceeded to recite for her a long section of Whitman from memory until he ... nodded ... off ... for about half an hour. Patti, "because I was a polite girl," sat there patiently until Jim awoke, and then he picked up exactly where he'd left off. This perfect vignette perfectly delivered, Patti turned to the casket, laid her hand on it gently, and and said, "Jim, when you get up there, say hello to Allen, and to William, and to Gregory, and to Herbert [as in Ginsberg, Burroughs, Corso, and Huncke]. And to all our friends." That's when we all cried. "
Lyrics:
Teddy sniffing glue he was 12 years old
Fell from the roof on East Two-nine
Cathy was 11 when she pulled the plug
On 26 reds and a bottle of wine
Bobby got leukemia, 14 years old
He looked like 65 when he died
He was a friend of mine
Those are people who died, died
Those are people who died, died
Those are people who died, died
Those are people who died, died
They were all my friends, and they died
G-berg and Georgie let their gimmicks go rotten
So they died of hepatitis in upper Manhattan
Sly in Vietnam took a bullet in the head
Bobby OD'd on Drano on the night that he was wed
They were two more friends of mine
Two more friends that died / I miss 'em--they died
Those are people who died, died
Those are people who died, died
Those are people who died, died
Those are people who died, died
They were all my friends, and they died
Mary took a dry dive from a hotel room
Bobby hung himself from a cell in the tombs
Judy jumped in front of a subway train
Eddie got slit in the jugular vein
And Eddie, I miss you more than all the others,
And I salute you brother/ This song is for you my brother
Those are people who died, died
Those are people who died, died
Those are people who died, died
Those are people who died, died
They were all my friends, and they died
Herbie pushed Tony from the Boys' Club roof
Tony thought that his rage was just some goof
But Herbie sure gave Tony some *****en proof
"Hey," Herbie said, "Tony, can you fly?"
But Tony couldn't fly, Tony died
Those are people who died, died
Those are people who died, died
Those are people who died, died
Those are people who died, died
They were all my friends, and they died
Brian got busted on a narco rap
He beat the rap by rattin' on some bikers
He said, hey, I know it's dangerous,
But it sure beats Riker's
But the next day he got offed
By the very same bikers
Those are people who died, died
Those are people who died, died
Those are people who died, died
Those are people who died, died
They were all my friends, and they died
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