Weather | Sports | Forums | Comics | Classifieds | Calendar | Movies
Writer Jim Carroll has combined his love of words and music for decades. In a performance Friday, he will stick to the spoken word while local band Ashes of Grisum contributes the music.
By GINA VIVINETTO, Times Pop Music Critic
© St. Petersburg Times, published October 31, 2002
Forget everything you know about poet Jim Carroll from The Basketball Diaries, the movie starring Leonardo DiCaprio that was based on Carroll's book of the same name.
The book chronicles Carroll's life as a teenage prodigy poet and high school basketball star in New York. Carroll became a heroin addict in his early teens and supported his habit by street hustling. Of course, Hollywood took liberties with the movie, and Carroll, 52, has been off heroin for decades, but many still think of him as a street-prowling junkie.
Carroll is actually a heck of a nice guy, and he'll be in town Friday for a spoken word performance that will include a short musical set with local alternative band Ashes of Grisum.
Yeah, Carroll also had a rock star stint in the punk heyday of the late 1970s and early 1980s when he was living with the Godmother of Punk herself, Patti Smith, and her pal the late photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. (Smith introduced Carroll onstage in the 1970s as "the guy who taught me how to write poetry.")
Carroll says he loved the rock 'n' roll, but his is a writer's demeanor: He's an observer, a bit reclusive and kind of shy.
"I'm really not an entertainer," he says by telephone from his New York digs. "I stopped doing rock 'n' roll when I started to feel like I was losing that sense of vulnerability, when I was thinking too much about being an entertainer and coming up with stage moves and things like that."
The Jim Carroll Band did score an underground hit in 1980 with Catholic Boy and the single People Who Died, which was featured in a crucial scene in Steven Spielberg's E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial.
Did Jim Carroll, tough guy of the streets, cringe when he saw the flick?
"I loved it!" Carroll says. "It's the scene where E.T. goes into the home. They're playing the song on the radio, and the mother is like, (upset voice) 'Oh, what are kids listening to nowadays?' It's the first song E.T. hears on Earth."
Carroll also likes receiving royalty checks from the famous flick.
"The first time they showed E.T. on network television, I guess there was a real bidding war between the networks to buy the movie," he says. "It was pretty expensive. After they showed it on TV, I got a check in the mail for $10,000! It blew my mind! I thought it was a typo."
Carroll continues to be a critically praised poet and fiction writer, penning the lauded Forced Entries and Void of Course. He has also been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize.
And Carroll is still enamored of rock 'n' roll. In 1995, his elegiac 8 Fragments of Kurt Cobain was printed in the New York Times. He continues to collaborate with musicians influenced by his work, including Pearl Jam, Rancid and Sonic Youth. Carroll also counts among his friends young Hollywood directors such as Harmony Korine, director of Kids and Gummo. "He's just such a genius," says Carroll, who is considering a proposed screenplay collaboration with director Atom Egoyan.
Early in his writing career, Carroll was lauded by beat generation writers Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. Ginsberg, who died in 1997, became a mentor.
"Allen was so smart and so generous," Carroll says. "When he died, I was really sad. I still think about him all the time. I always wonder what he would think about everything, like 9/11 and stuff. What would Allen have to say about it all? He just had such an intellect, and he talked about everything with anyone. Allen was really the first rock 'n' roll poet." For Friday's performance, Carroll says he will read from The Petting Zoo, his novel-in-the-works, as well as from Void of Course and short humorous pieces. Carroll has never met members of Ashes of Grisum, but they have discussed by telephone several songs of his that the band will perform. There won't be much time for rehearsal, but Carroll promises People Who Died.
As for heroin addiction, Carroll says it makes him sad when he meets creative young people who romanticize drugs.
"Heroin tricks you into thinking you're witty and clever," he says. "At first you use it to write or to create. Then after you get a minimal habit, you use it not to write. You feel like you don't even need to write. You start acting like, 'My life is my art.' "
Carroll says his heart was broken several years ago when he read a national magazine's chronicle of heroin's re-emergence with young people. "A young girl they interviewed had read my books. She said she thought to be young and hip and tell witty stories, you had to do drugs."
Heroin was a learning experience, Carroll says.
"Of course," he says, "I would have been learning a lot more at the time if I hadn't had that experience of having to get off heroin."
Jim Carroll with Ashes of Grisum and Irritable Tribe of Poets, 8 p.m. Friday, State Theatre, 687 Central Ave., St. Petersburg. $15. (727) 895-3045.