Carroll Who Died

One of the last of the downtown NYC underground stars to make a record, a poet by trade who was first noted in his teens by the surviving Beat poets, joined the Andy Warhol Factory crew and wrote The Basketball Diaries, Jim Carroll, has just died at age 60. Not a shock in the sense that he always looked somewhat dead in large part due to a heroin habit, but certainly an inevitable irony considering that the one song he'll always be remembered for is, in fact, "People Who Died," which starts like this:

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
They were all my friends, and they died...

NYC in the late 60's and through the 1970's was rife with danger and death, self-inflicted, crime-inflicted, overdoses being a big factor. Carroll's song was a litany of grotesque two-line tableaus mainly spoken within a rollicking rock 'n' roll number, the two or three hooks good for a lifetime of repeat listening. The song came on the radio a few months ago and still had that have-to-turn-it-up feel, before it gets away from you.

Back in college we used to play the song over and over and goof on it as well, satirizing the tidal wave of bad news and lines with way too many syllables jammed in. But you could still dance to it.

The passing of Carroll, like the deaths of Joey and Johnny and Dee Dee Ramone, the closing of CBGB and the inability of Talking Heads to regroup is just one more nail in the coffin of the psychotically vibrant mid-to-late 1970's New York City punk rock scene. Many of the scene makers had their roots in Warhol, others came from the boroughs or the burbs, but it was sharp, spiky, oppositional, original and thrilling. I'm not sure where the next one is going to happen. Beijing?

Here's what appears to be the music video for the movie version of The Basketball Diaries, which starred a young Leonardo DiCaprio in the autobiographical Jim Carroll roll and features the album version of "People Who Died" although an older Carroll than when the song was originally released, by about fifteen years:



I guess with the passing of Jim Carroll that, in the metaphoric rather than literal sense, "I salute you brother."