PEOPLE WHO DIED: JIM CARROLL

Genius is not a generous thing
In return it charges more interest than any amount of royalties can cover
And it resents fame
With bitter vengeance

Pills and powders only placate it awhile
Then it puts you in a place where the planet's poles reverse
Where the currents of electricity shift

Your Body becomes a magnet and pulls to it despair and rotten teeth,
Cheese whiz and guns

Whose triggers are shaped tenderly into a false lust
In timeless illusion

Jim Carroll, poet, punk rocker, all-city basketball player, former hustler and drug addict died Friday in New York City. Famous for writing "The Basketball Diaries," Carroll was part of the New York art and punk scene in the 1970s, and a friend of Patti Smith, Warhol, Larry Rivers and Robert Mapplethorpe.

“I met him in 1970, and already he was pretty much universally recognized as the best poet of his generation,” the singer Patti Smith said in a telephone interview with the New York Times on Sunday. “The work was sophisticated and elegant. He had beauty.”


The guitar claws kept tightening, I guess on your heart stem.
The loops of feedback and distortion, threaded right thru
Lucifer's wisdom teeth, and never stopped their reverbrating
In your mind

And from the stage
All the faces out front seemed so hungry
With an unbearably wholesome misunderstanding

From where they sat, you seemed so far up there
High and live and diving

And instead you were swamp crawling
Down, deeper
Until you tasted the Earth's own blood
And chatted with the Buzzing-eyed insects that heroin breeds


The Jim Carroll Band perform "People Who Died"

Jim Carroll, with Patti Smith, back in the day

"Catholic Boy" by the Jim Carroll Band. Push the button.


Jim Carroll interview 1/18/91 Cleveland Ohio



You should have talked more with the monkey
He's always willing to negotiate I'm still paying him off...
The greater the money and fame
The slower the Pendulum of fortune swings

Your will could have sped it up...
But you left that in a plane
Because it wouldn't pass customs and immigration

If only you hadn't swallowed yourself into a coma in Roma...
You could have gone to Florence
And looked into the eyes of Bellinni or Rafael's Portraits

Perhaps inside them
You could have found a threshold back to beauty's arms
Where it all began...

No matter that you felt betrayed by her

That is always the cost
As Frank said,
Of a young artist's remorseless passion

Which starts out as a kiss
And follows like a curse


--excerpts from "8 fragments for kurt cobain" by jim carroll


On Dennis Miller, 1992

SOME OFFBEAT SUMMER SONGS

These squares are having a great beach party but soon a giant squid will pull them into the sea and the REAL party can get started! Here are some strange summer songs from off the beaten path.


"Summer Cannibals" by Patti Smith, film by the legendary Robert Frank


"Summertime" by Janis Joplin--Cheap Thrills recording session. Janis never had the band she deserved, but she was a blues goddess.


"Summer Days" by Bob Dylan at Madison Square Garden. This worn-out riverboat gambler is as good as he's ever been, and that's saying a lot. His band is killer.

NEW YORK CITY: SURVIVING THE 70S

New York City was broke and dirty in the seventies. It begged Washington for help, but Nixon pardoner Ford refused to lend a hand. NYC toughed it out.

The music that came out of 1970s New York embodies that survivor spirit. The city adds grit and soul to anything it touches, including the post-punk sounds that exploded from a grimy little club on the Bowery, CBGBs. For some reason, that dive spat out the Ramones, Television, the Patti Smith Group, the Dead Boys, Talking Heads, The Dictators, Richard Hell & the Voidoids, Misfits, and Blondie. There were no rules but one, to play the venue the bands had to write their own songs.



Free-form beat poet and punk godmother, Patti Smith was the first of the CBGBs gang to land a recording contract, even beating the Ramones to the punch. "Horses," her first album, was a powerful combo of poetry and rock that sounded like the Shirelles on acid. Patti cast herself as the missing link between Mick Jagger and Arthur Rimbaud, firing the DIY aesthetic in a million pink bedrooms and garages nationwide, and spitting in the eye of conventional definitions of what it meant to be a female performer. Primitive and sophisticated, she was a contradiction in boots with a Keith Richards' haircut and a volume of William Blake's poetry. Songs of Innocence and Experience. She wrote "Because the Night"--her biggest hit--with Bruce Springsteen. I interviewed her in Portland when this record came out, and up close she was charming and charismatic, not at all the enfant terrible, not the arrogant rock star but more like the girl who scrawls poems in her PeeChee, and I took a couple photographs, too, and she helpfully tossed in a scowl and snarl which seemed to be equal parts art and act. Desire and hunger is the fire I breathe.

Blondie. Guilty pleasures...I confess I liked "Heart of Glass." Sure it was slick and commercial and they ran it into the ground, but as a lad I was powerless to resist the charms of icy robot Debbie Harry, even if I knew better. New Wave meets frozen disco--forget about punk--Sold out? Maybe. But nobody ever listened to her first band, The Stilettos, and this was a number one hit. This is when people who were too cool to dance thought, well, okay, maybe. Let's dance on the left of the dial.

tom verlaine and patti smith

Television was brilliant. They looked like French criminals, Patti Smith said. I can see that. Breathless era crooks, skinny as junkies, with eyes glittering like desert mystics. They were city poets, which in a way is criminal.



Marquee Moon is one of the greatest albums from a great year, 1977. No, from any year! Tom Verlaine and Richard Lloyd played these intricate guitar figures in perfect counterpoint and created something shimmering & beautiful but with enough NYC grit to keep it real. It was punk or post-punk but it was worlds away from the basic 3-chord variety...these were virtuoso guitars. A guitar solo! And poetry. Before "punk" got narrowed down to a brand name and a rigid set of guidelines (Green Day, anyone?) there was still room for poets and criminals to remix and reinvent rock any way they wanted. They created a new sound.

It's nighttime in the city. You've had a few drinks and you're sweaty from dancing but you're outside in the cool night air and the skyline is twinkling. The band is on break. A yellow cab swooshes by. Someone is yelling in the street. You hear those chiming guitars and you know the band is back onstage and you're surprised to be face to face with a world so alive. That sound.

PEOPLE HAVE THE POWER

Patti Smith Group. A song of hope.

THE TIME IS NOW!

People say you never forget your first crush (sure you do). People say lots of things. I interviewed Patti Smith for an underground rag when I was just twenty-two and she was this young punk rocker poet. The backstage area was filled with parasites, and the stage manager was all coked up and cranky, but Patti was sharp and funny and maybe I was a little smitten. Remember, this was before "punk" became such a marketing ploy (Green Day, anyone?) and long before Patti was coronated Queen Grandma of Punk, Emeritus, and the scene was still pretty fresh. At that point, there was still room for experimentation and beat zen poetry as well as Fender guitars, at least in small shitty clubs that stank of beer. Most people didn't get it, and it would be years before they claimed they did. It came as a shocking, healthy reaction to all the overproduced stadium rawk clogging the arteries of America with Fleetwood Mac-and-cheese, and Eagles Easy Listening, at a time when the spark and rebellion of rock and roll had turned into formulaic poses for unadventurous sheep. To appreciate it, you must first wash all that out of your hair, and throw away decades of MTV crap, Ramones T-shirts at the Gap, yuppies with timid gel spikes in their hair playing air guitar in the boardroom. Give it a good toss. Turn back the hands of time, time, time. People say time is on your side. People say lots of things.

Dedicated to my cousin Gerard Rizza, a young New York poet who was crazy about Patti Smith and a great many other things.

HILLY KRISTAL -- 1932-2007

Back in 1974, Hilly Kristal opened CBGBs, the original New York punk and hardcore club on the Bowery, providing a dirty, greasy home for the likes of the Dead Boys, the Dictators, Television, Blondie, Talking Heads, the Ramones, and Patti Smith Group, among others.

Patti Smith: "All who passed through the portals experienced, as Arthur Rimbaud would say, 'new scenes, new noise'. He offered us artistic freedom and his gruff yet unconditional love. We evolved,we left and went out into the world like prodigal children. When we returned he always accepted us with open arms."

Like it or not, punk rock came along like a brat with a baseball bat to whack the bloated pinata of overblown, overproduced stadium rock. In the days of highly processed cheese like Fleetwood Mac and the Eagles, Punk Rock brought music back to the basics, three chords and a howl.

In 1977, "the year that punk broke," I interviewed Patti Smith Group and the Ramones for a newspaper in Portland. I was nearly decapitated by a flying chair during Smith's encore. This was definitely not the Eagles. The Ramones played triple speed garage rock like surfin' birds with their tails on fire. They seemed certifiably insane. Patti Smith wailed like the Shirelles on acid, infusing Nuggets electric guitars with Beat poetry. Her guitar player, Lenny Kaye, had in fact produced "Nuggets," the influential anthology of psychedelic garage rock. An appreciative crowd threw folding chairs and shoes and "gobbed" the band with spit. These days it's hard to believe, now that you can find CBGB T-shirts at Gap for Kids, what a riot punk rock was in the early days. Thanks to Hilly Kristal, it had a place to be born.