Text and Drugs and Rock 'n' Roll

by Simon Warner

  Further, we should stress the volume of work that Smith has achieved in her own right in the subsequent decades – on record, in book form, on tour and on film. There might be a counter-argument, based on that imposing creative résumé, that the Beats, since Smith’s mid-1970s rise to critical and international acclaim, eventually had more to gain by their associating with her than vice versa. We might well propose that by the 1990s, as Ginsberg and Burroughs entered their final years and Smith re-appeared in New York after her home-centred and reclusive 1980s in Detroit, the younger artist’s reputation as multi-faceted writer-performer was now one that the older novelist and poets coveted, to some extent, and it was she who would add to their credibility quotient. Smith’s appearance in the Kerouac Big Sur documentary which raised, as we have seen, a certain disquiet among web critics came, of course, long after the deaths of those two key Beats, so her contributions could hardly be seen as a concerted bid to curry favour with a literary grouping long shorn of most of its key participants (although Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Michael McClure did also make an appearance in the film in question).

  Perhaps we could best complete this consideration by citing the thoughts of a woman and a poet who is often seen as a vital bridge between the original Beat caucus and the artistic spirit that has followed and survived in its wake. Anne Waldman, of a younger generation to Ginsberg, Burroughs and co., was nonetheless a close associate of the principal Beats, director of the St. Mark’s Poetry Project from 1968–78 and therefore a crucial conduit between old and new, a sponsor of young New York voices like Smith and Jim Carroll, and a founding figure in the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado, that saw Ginsberg bring his literary ideas and spiritual energy to an educational venture with deep Buddhist roots, from 1974.

  What does Waldman makes of these debates? How does she see Patti Smith against the backdrop of the Beat community? She comments: ‘Patti came up through a different trajectory, adjacent to these worlds and dropping in and out of them – her own amalgam of romanticism, Rimbaud (where every poet starts) and Blake – heroes of us all – siphoned thru Allen (later), and her increasing public stature which allowed her to recalibrate and invent herself in relation to various cultural icons and literary movements. She was not inside the Beat literary movement or culture in the early days, except thru encounters at the Chelsea much later that were not particularly literary. But yes, she’s in the post-Beat pantheon. She takes what she can use (like Dylan too). Like all of us poets she’s a magpie scholar.’

  Notes

  1The Patti Smith Group, live performance, Plug, Sheffield, 24 May 2007.

  2There are numerous Beat references in Smith’s memoir, Just Kids (London: Bloomsbury, 2010).

  3Joseph Jon Lanthier, ‘One Fast Move or I’m Gone: Kerouac’s Big Sur’, ‘Movie Review’, Slant magazine, 11 October 2009, http://www.slantmagazine.com/film/review/one-fast-move-or-im-gone-kerouacsbig-sur/4504 [accessed 20 July 2011].

  4Lydia Kiesling, ‘One Fast Move or I’m Gone: A review’, ‘Screening Room’, The Millions, 6 November 2009, http://www.themillions.com/2009/11/one-fast-move-or-im-gone-a-review.html [accessed 20 July, 2011].

  5Bill Morris, ‘Will you Beat hagiographers please be quite, please?’, The Millions, 28 December 2010, http://www.themillions.com/2010/12/will-you-beat-hagiographers-please-be-quiet-please.html [accessed 20 July 2011].

  6Max’s Kansas City was a bar located off Union Square in New York. Opened in January 1966 and named by the poet Julian Oppenheimer, it became a major hang-out for artists and subterraneans, then a live venue, during the later 1960s and early 1970s. See Sukenick, 1987, p. 203 and p. 217.

  7Victor Bockris, Patti Smith (London: Fourth Estate, 1998), p. 1.

  8There is an interesting consideration of Burroughs’ debated status as poet in Oliver Harris’ ‘Burroughs is a poet too, really: The poetics of Minutes to Go’, first published in The Edinburgh Review, 114 (2005), republished by RealityStudio in August 2010, http://realitystudio.org/scholarship/burroughs-is-a-poet-too-really-the-poetics-of-minutes-to-go/ [accessed 29 June 2011].

  9Patti Smith with Lenny Kaye, February 10, 1971, CD (Mer Records, 2006).

  10Wylie would become a leading literary agent in the years that followed.

  11Bockris, Patti Smith, 1998, pp. 4–5.

  12See Bockris, Patti Smith, 1998, pp. 63–4, p. 249.

  13Ibid.

  14There are certainly examples in Smith’s work where we encounter litanies of praise to named individuals: the spoken section ‘Dedication’ on February 10, 1971 or the song ‘Piss Factory’ (1974) on her debut single are peppered with such tributes. Ginsberg is an inveterate namer of names also: see the essay by John Muckle, ‘The names: Allen Ginsberg’s writings’, The Beat Generation Writers, edited by A. Robert Lee (London: Pluto Press, 1996), pp. 10–36.

  15Interestingly Gregory Corso is quite a regular presence in Smith’s own 2010 memoir Just Kids.

  16See, for example, biographies by Charters (1974), McNally (1979) and Turner (1996).

  17Nick Johnstone, Patti Smith: A Biography (London: Omnibus, 1997), p. 1.

  18Ibid., p. 38.

  19Ibid., p. 120.

  20Ibid., p. 123.

  21Various Artists, Kerouac: Kicks Joy Darkness, CD (Rykodisc, 1997).

  22Bockris was a child émigré to the US.

  23US editions of the work are subtitled An Unauthorized Biography and the title is co-credited to Roberta Bayley.

  24There are inconsistencies in a number of names of key Burroughs texts. Junky/Junkie (1953), The Naked Lunch/Naked Lunch (1959) and The Soft Machine/Soft Machine (1961) are common, titular anomalies in the author’s published catalogue.

  25Bockris, Patti Smith, 1998, pp. 50–1.

  26Ibid., p. 153.

  27Burroughs quoted in Bockris, Patti Smith, 1998, p. 72.

  28Bockris, Patti Smith, 1998, p. 197.

  29Quoted in Bockris, Patti Smith, 1998, p. 209.

  30Ibid.

  31Philip Shaw, Horses (New York: Continuum, 2008), p. 30.

  32Amy Gross, ‘Introducing rock ’n’ roll’s Lady Raunch: Patti Smith’, Mademoiselle, September 1975, cited in Shaw, 2008, p. 75.

  33Shaw, 2008, p. 98.

  34For instance, poems in Arthur Rimbaud’s 1873 collection Une saison en enfer.

  35T. S. Eliot’s 1922 poem ‘The Waste Land’ offers an example of the Anglo-American writer’s technique.

  36Shaw, 2008, p. 130.

  37Ibid., p. 130.

  38Ibid., p. 25.

  39Ibid.

  40Joe Tarr, The Words and Music of Patti Smith (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2008), p. 3.

  41Smith interview with Paul Lester, ‘Icon, me?’, The Scotsman, 7 April 2007, cited by Tarr, 2008, p. 3.

  42Tarr, 2008, pp. 3–4.

  43Tarr, 2008, p. 84.

  44A full list of correspondents, in respect of this chapter, appears in the ‘Personal communication’ section of the Bibliography on p. 498.

  45Smith, 2010, p. 123.

  46Cohn’s principal point is not disrupted by the fact that Patti Smith was born 30 December 1946, so would then have been eight years old; Anne Waldman was born 2 April 1945, so would have been ten years old at the time; and Bob Dylan was born 24 May 1941 and would have been 14 years of age when ‘Howl’ was read for the first time on 7 October 1955.

  47As Joyce Johnson, she published The Voice is All: The Lonely Victory of Jack Kerouac (New York: Viking) in 2012.

  10 JIM CARROLL, POETRY PRODIGY, POST-BEAT AND ROCKER

  It was, in contemporary terms, a relatively short life. But it was an extraordinary one. And one longer than many might have predicted when one of the great teen literary prodigies wandered on to the downtown New York scene in the heart of the 1960s. Jim Carroll, who died aged 60 on 11 September 2009, created a biography that extended across several key sections of the cultural underground. Because he began so young, the luminous moments of his career stretched from
the height of Warhol’s Factory around 1966 to the emergence of grunge at the turn of the 1990s and even beyond.

  He was an adolescent who came to prominence during the early days of the St. Mark’s Poetry Project on the Lower East Side and, 20 years later, he was still a leading player in that part of the new wave movement that valued the marriage of punk rock energy with dazzling street lyricism, short, sharp songs wrapped around vivid accounts of a life lived at the edge. He was, too, a bridge between Manhattan’s art and music explosion centred on Pop Art, the Velvet Underground and the Exploding Plastic Inevitable, the fertile Lower East Side verse scene, with Allen Ginsberg its unofficial laureate, and the incandescent music that would erupt from Max’s Kansas City, the Mercer Arts Center and, most importantly, CBGBs, from the early to mid-1970s.

  Carroll was also aide and friend to various of the names who would light up the last quarter of the artistic twentieth-century. He knew fellow poet and rock star-to-be Patti Smith, the great photographer Robert Mapplethorpe and Sam Shepard, the most lauded of US playwrights since Arthur Miller, and Allen Lanier, the lyricist with the band Blue Oyster Cult. He worked in Warhol’s film studio and he was an assistant to the painter Larry Rivers, whose magnificent The Athlete’s Dream so aptly adorned the cover of the seminal Penguin Modern Classics version of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, and whose work is also a centrepiece in the foyer of the legendary Chelsea Hotel.

  But, above all, and this is most pertinent to this piece, Carroll was a creator of poetry, prose and memoir that would mark him as one of the most important of the writers emerging in the wake of the Beat Generation. We can comfortably, I think, even though this is a contested category, consider him to be one of the principal post-Beats. Like a number of the original Beats, Carroll walked a very dangerous line between the experiment of living dangerously and the dire consequences of over-indulgence. By the time he was in his mid-teens, he had succumbed to the lure of the street and a taste for drugs.

  Yet this was no ordinary story of a low life, teen hoodlum drifting into bad company and worse habits. Carroll had been born, in 1949, in the Lower East Side in modest circumstances. But his sporting skills and Irish spirit propelled him to a scholarship at an upper Manhattan private school called Trinity. His basketball skills were immense – he made the national High School All Star game and seemed destined for a rewarding sporting life. However, it wasn’t only a youthful connection with the drugs scene that would mark this athlete as unusual. He was also a budding writer and one with definite potential. The schizophrenic life he led as star-sportsman-in-waiting and apprentice junkie provided the raw material for diaries that would eventually become the core of his most celebrated publication, The Basketball Diaries, in 1978.

  By 1966, Carroll made his initial contacts with the new St. Mark’s Project, a former church in the run-down Bowery area of the city, which would become the most significant crucible of the new poetry scene in New York City. Before very long, he had attracted the attention of Allen Ginsberg and other important writers were noting the presence of a prodigy. When Ted Berrigan, Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs read the boy’s adolescent output they predicted great things. Kerouac, another one-time college athlete who chose a literary course, said of him: ‘At 13 years of age, Jim Carroll writes better prose than 89 per cent of the novelists working today’. Burroughs dubbed him ‘a born writer’.

  By 1967, his first collection of poems, Organic Trains, had appeared. Three years later a second, 4 Ups and One Down, would follow. But it was the appearance of passages, of what would eventually become Living at the Movies, in the pages of hallowed literary magazine The Paris Review that the buzz around Carroll became louder and insistent. Yet Carroll, ex-basketball rookie and now part-time heroin addict, was caught in a caustic cycle of remarkable levels of acclaim for his writing talents and the terrible physical fixation of junk. In 1973, he decided to escape the drug corners and shooting alleys of the island of Manhattan and run to California.

  The switch was significant, not just geographically but personally, too, as he joined a community of artistically inclined individuals in Bolinas, north of San Francisco. He would marry his wife Rosemary Klemfuss and when Patti Smith asked her old friend to join her at a live music gig – she was now the premier purveyor of the rock poetry form with a hot group for company – Carroll charted a fresh future. Inspired by what he had experienced, he formed the Jim Carroll Band and, from 1978, carved out a reputation as a poetic voice with sharp rock ’n’ roll tendencies. His early songs ‘People Who Died’ – a striking, if chilling, overview of the human loss that walked hand-in-hand with the threats and danger of the heroin world – and ‘Catholic Boy’ earned him a renewed reputation.

  His poetry and his prose had already won him much admiration; his musical reincarnation allowed his intense and fierce lyricism to reach larger audiences, accompanied by the power of amplified guitars and drums, frequently a compelling chemistry on stage and on record. Yet some may argue that his efforts to maybe emulate his long-time associate and one-time lover Patti Smith, a raging one-off who had moved from stand-up poems in bars to rock stadium gigs around the world, was conceivably a mistaken one. Perhaps his stark and confessional verse work stood better alone, without the furious kinesis of electricity and power chords.

  But the age in which Carroll came to maturity was too loud, too frenetic, too distracted, for mere words, it seems. Many of the poets who may, in earlier times, have carved a status as wordsmiths rather than singer-poets, took the rock road. The pulse of the music, exciting and instantaneously gratifying, outweighed the more cerebral notions of quiet contemplation. Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen, Henry Rollins and Lydia Lunch, all possible heirs to the literary crowns that urban bards such as Ginsberg and Gregory Corso had worn, chose music to accompany their stanzas. And, of course, so many of the core Beats themselves – from Burroughs to Ferlinghetti and McClure – were drawn to work with rock artists, too. So Jim Carroll was, we might conclude, merely infused by the attractions and intoxications of the Zeitgeist.

  So what did those individuals attached to the Beat movement and its wider circle make of the Carroll phenomenon? Poet Anne Waldman, long-time director of the St. Mark’s Poetry Project and co-founder with Ginsberg of the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado, commented: ‘I saw Jim as a poete maudite, in the tradition of Villon, Rimbaud, not that he was dogged and cursed, but he did live somewhat outside society and the professionalisms and careerisms of poetry. He was the “real deal” – a true natural, an aspiring kid with a genuine yen for imagination in lyrical language, from his first setting foot in the mandala of the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s, to his forays out to the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa where he taught classes in the “Socratic rap” mode, initiated by Gregory Corso.’

  Steven Taylor, Ginsberg’s guitarist for his last two decades of the poet’s life, also provided accompaniment to Carroll on occasion. He remarked: ‘Jim struggled, as they say, with heroin addiction for years. I went to see him play at Mabuhay Gardens in San Francisco with Ginsberg at one point. The Jim Carroll Band were great live. Jim seemed dizzy on stage, and said something about being sick, Allen bellowed “What?! – he was supposed to have moved to California to kick” ’.

  He added: ‘Later, Jim sometimes taught in the annual Summer Writing Programs at Naropa. I recall him playing records for the poetry students. I feel he was the best poet among the rockers. He had a wonderful poetic eye and ear. He should have been famous for his poetry alone. His loss comes as a terrible shock.’

  Levi Asher, founder of the leading Beat website Literary Kicks, said this: ‘I liked him best for “People Who Died”. I liked his plaintive voice and simple emotion. I saw him perform twice, once with Allen Ginsberg at the Bottom Line night club in Greenwich Village. That was a very special night. In a way I felt that Carroll was the “straight man” to Ginsberg’s loopy wonderment. He was so sincere, so likeable.’

  He went on: ‘I then saw
him perform again with Richard Hell at a Central Park Summerstage reading in the mid-1990s. I got a sense that his best contributions to the poetry scene (the scene that I think was closest to his heart) were contained within his mutually supportive friendships with other poets – that he was a person who made the scene warmer and more believable. He seemed satisfied and peaceful but I don’t know if he ever seemed happy.’

  Jim Carroll’s funeral was held at Our Lady of Pompeii Roman Catholic Church on Bleecker Street in the West Village, at 9.30 a.m. on 16 September 2009. Steven Taylor shared this eye-witness account: ‘There were about 100 people scattered in fives and sixes about the old Italian Baroque gaudiness. I recognised Rosemary Carroll – Jim’s ex-wife and long-time attorney, and her husband, Danny Goldberg, as well as a number of poets, Simon Pettet, Brenda Coultas, Anselm Berrigan, and several generations of the staff of the Poetry Project. I went with Anne Waldman and her husband Ed Bowes.’

  After the mass proper, and maybe a quarter of the crowd had communion, the priest invited anyone to speak, and Patti [Smith] and Lenny Kaye got up and did “Wing”. And it was beautiful. Then the priest gestured for any other speakers, and Rosemary indicated that was it, and the priest blessed the long pale oak box, long and pale as the poet ever was, and a girl sang the In Paradisum, like to pierce your heart, and then we followed him out to the grey hearse in the cool morning occasional drizzle.’

  OBITUARY 2

  Jim Carroll, ‘Poet and punk musician who documented his teenage drug addiction in The Basketball Diaries’

  Jim Carroll, who has died of a heart attack aged 60, was a New York poet whose work and life linked several moments in the history of the US counterculture and its various literary expressions. He was one of the most important of the post-Beat generation writers, and became known to a wider public through The Basketball Diaries (1978), an account of his teenage years filmed in 1995 with Leonardo DiCaprio in the central, autobiographical role.