Jim Carroll: Playing Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon with the life of poet, musician and novelist Jim Carroll will bring you very quickly to Patti Smith, Leonardo DiCaprio, Steven Spielberg, Jack Kerouac, Andy Warhol, The Velvet Underground and Keith Richards. From his remarkable journal The Basketball Diaries to his current beat as spoken-word artist, Carroll's career makes for a fascinating counter-culture study.
Born in New York in 1950, he was both a star basketball player and promising student in his early teenage years until a heroin addiction intervened. At 15, he was to be found writing poetry and attending classics at St Mark's Poetry Project, from where he came to the attention of and was feted by the likes of Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs. During the 1970s, he continued to write, publish collections like Living At The Movies and hang out (he seemed to do a lot of this, even turning up on The Velvet Undergound's Live At Max's Kansas City album) before heading to California.
There, not only did he kick his smack habit but he started to toy with the idea of forming a band. An impromptu support slot with old mate Patti Smith led to The Jim Carroll Band and a deal with Atlantic Records followed rave notices from new-found fan Keith Richards. Three albums were released: Catholic Boy (1980), Dry Deams (1982) and I Write Your Name (1984) from which one remarkable song, People Who Died, emerged as something of an anthem, even being used by Spielberg to score the opening sequence of ET.
Carroll returned to writing but it was the influence of his earlier work which continued to make waves. Authors Irvine Welsh and Danny Sugerman cited him as an inspiration, while the 1995 film adoptation of The Basketball Diaries (starring Leonardo DiCaprio as Carroll) and the fact that new rock idols like Pearl Jam, Rancid and Screaming Trees were fans of his, brought him to the attention of a whole new audience. The crowds continue to flock to see him, delighted to be able to hear the guy once described as "the Dylan of the 80s". Both audience and artist seem happy with their lot.
And, to save any possible confusion, the Jim Carroll who wrote this piece has absolutely nothing to do with the Jim Carroll you've just read about.