THE BALLAD OF JIM ‘N’ WILLY

Maybe your correspondent was a bit slow on the uptake, or maybe the man’s passing was under-reported, but it was a full week before I learned of the death of poet, spoken word performer, autobiographer and musician Jim Carroll from a heart attack at the age of 60 on September 11.

I first heard of Carroll was when I was about 12 and my father, a post office clerk, brought home copies of Creem that had been abandoned in the dead letter office. One of those issues contained a review of the Carroll’s second album I Write Your Name. Here was a case study of how the punk revolution was far more eclectic in its remit than most retrospectives and revivalists acknowledge: Patti Smith, Richard Hell, Lynton Kwesi Johnson, John Cooper Clark – a through-line from the Beats to the brats.
Ginsberg and Burroughs knew it too: the latter provided a glowing blurb for Carroll’s 1978 memoir The Basketball Diaries, a raw and real account of downtown delinquency begun when he was barely into his teens. The follow up, Forced Entries, published in the late 1987, remains a compelling document of the early 70s Max’s/Warholite scene. His finest musical moment, now his swansong, was the bristling ‘People Who Died’ from the Catholic Boy album, covered by everyone from John Cale to Pearl Jam.
Carroll’s death was preceded by that of Willy DeVille in on August 6, from pancreatic cancer. Both men had much in common: CBGBs regulars plagued by heroin addiction, striking-looking individuals whose luminous features were eaten away in their middle years until they resembled skull-faced sons of Chet Baker. DeVille was straight out of Carlito’s Way, carried himself with a gutter romantic swagger not dissimilar to Phil Lynott in his prime. Mink DeVille’s biggest hit ‘Spanish Stroll’ took Lou Reed’s sleazy strut and Latinised it. DeVille had a something of a comeback in the mid-80s with the Miracle album, and right up until last year he remained a vital live performer – log onto YouTube and marvel at the interpretive skills manifest in his Spanish-flavoured version of Warren Zevon’s ‘Carmelita’. But then, he’d lived the lyric.
DeVille died at the age of 58 in a New York hospital. Carroll died at his desk, working on a novel entitled The Petting Zoo.
In the words of ee cummings:

Buffalo Bill’s
defunct
who used to
ride a watersmooth-silver
stallion
and break onetwothreefourfive pigeonsjustlikethat
Jesus
he was a handsome man
and what i want to know is
how do you like your blueeyed boy
Mister Death