a midway bikelog

(uncredited photo from If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger)

It’s too late/to fall in love with Sharon Tate/and it’s too soon/to ask me for the words i want carved on my tomb.

I don’t remember how i first found Jim Carroll, whether it was a copy of the Basketball Diaries or the Catholic Boy album. I discovered him early in college, which was the late ’80s for me, and it’s just as likely that i would have found his album while flipping through the bins at Cheapo as finding the book at some little shop somewhere. Either way, whichever one i had first, it wasn’t long before i bought the other.

I read The Basketball Diaries at a good time. I was way into punk rock, even though i was just on the young side to see the 2nd wave of SST-generation bands play live before they all dissolved, i was a big fan. Unlike the psychadelic world-traveling stories of William Burroughs, reading Carroll’s story was immediately relatable for a half-irish, writing-oriented, music-loving (thought not as drug-prone) kid just a couple of years older than Carroll was at the end of the book. That book took the romance of the wild street life, of drug use and freedom and pulled it askew, like moving a refrigerator to see the layers of crap hiding beneath. It fascinated me but also snapped me out of the idea that there’s any sort of romance to a junkie’s lifestyle.

As much as i loved the music, it always seemed like a sort of hidden gem to me. Even among my fellow musician friends, few listened to them or even heard of the Jim Carroll band, by that point 10 years past their last album. His band was killer, putting interesting twists on pretty straight-ahead garage rock albums that spoiled me for the more common metronome-sounding punk bands. Any comparisons to Lou Reed of Carroll as frontman are good ones, both in the (high) quality of the lyrics and the (low) quality of the singing. In this way though, he was totally punk rock in the best DIY/Minutemen sense of it: he was just a regular person with something to say, doing his damndest to say it. It’s not the kind of musical package that’s going to move units, but rather spawn a thousand bands, and that it did.

I don’t know where my copy of Catholic Boy went, but i still have Dry Dreams on vinyl, just nothing to play it on. Likewise, i don’t know where my copy of Book of Nods is, or if it’s even on my shelves at the moment, i haven’t read him for several years now. But in the recent list of celebrity deaths (MJ, Walter Kronkite, Ted Kennedy, etc), i have to say that i feel this loss the most this year.