Text and Drugs and Rock 'n' Roll
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Yet Carroll was also closely associated with the Downtown scene in Manhattan at the start of the 1970s, which would eventually give rise to the club CBGBs and the emergence of punk, new wave and no wave. In time, he immersed himself in rock music, too. Carroll was thus a bridge between the art and music scene of late 1960s New York – exemplified by Andy Warhol and the Velvet Underground – and the frenetic, raw-toned, urban expression that grew out of it. His was poetry to be recited in the bar, and inspired by the sidewalk, rather than the rarefied verse of the academy. He was a true heir to Allen Ginsberg and the Beat tradition.
As the 1960s ended, and the pre-eminence of Warhol and the Factory gave way to a new cultural milieu premised on proto-punk and performance venues such as Max’s Kansas City and the Mercer Arts Center, Carroll, along with other growing literary talents such as Patti Smith and Sam Shepard, was one of the young and shining stars. His streetwise style and life-on-the-edge experience gave him credibility from his early teens. But it was his writing that was the key to his reputation. He was unquestionably a prodigy.
Born on the Lower East Side of New York, he won a basketball scholarship to Trinity, an elite Manhattan private school. His sporting prowess, which owed something to his lofty ranginess, seemed destined to propel him to athletic stardom – he featured in the High School All-Star game in his chosen sport. Instead, he became engrossed in writing and enmeshed in the New York drugs scene. These experiences would form the basis of the notebooks that would eventually appear in print as The Basketball Diaries.
By the end of the 60s, after brief attendance at Columbia University, Carroll was working in Warhol’s Factory and then in the painter Larry Rivers’ studio, and he was well acquainted with other junior talents on the scene. He shared accommodation with Smith, with whom he had a relationship, and the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe.
But his abilities as a poet and writer were, by now, attracting attention from influential quarters. He became attached to the St. Mark’s Poetry Project in the East Village from as early as 1966 and then became known to Ginsberg, the Lower East Side’s unofficial laureate. Inspired also by Frank O’Hara, the young writer drew praise from figures such as Jack Kerouac and Ted Berrigan.
Carroll had already published teenage work through small presses: his first collection, a limited edition pamphlet, Organic Trains, was issued in 1967 when he was 16. In 1970, 4 Ups and One Down followed, but it was the appearance of sections from a work-in-progress in the Paris Review that cemented his youthful reputation. Those extracts would be issued in the volume Living at the Movies (1973).
By then, Carroll’s descent into drug addiction had led him to leave New York and settle on the west coast, in Bolinas, north of San Francisco, in a bid to kick his heroin habit. In 1978 he married Rosemary Klemfuss, but the relationship ended in divorce. After appearing on stage and reading with Smith’s band, he formed a group of his own. The Jim Carroll Band had early success with songs such as ‘People Who Died’ – a litany to the singer-poet’s deceased friends – and ‘Catholic Boy’, which touched on his Irish-American heritage (both from the group’s 1980 debut album Catholic Boy).
His work as a poet-novelist and rock performer continued into the 1980s and 1990s, although the early glittering promise was never quite realised. Perhaps his decision to diversify into rock music distracted from his primary skills as a writer. His poetry came to take second place and his music, while always retaining a dedicated cult following, never really achieved mass acceptance or sales.
The New York poet Sharon Mesmer, who appeared on bills with Carroll on several occasions, commented: ‘He brought a beautifully visceral poetic sense to prose, and a focused, hard, diamond-like quality to poetry via his lyrics. He really did rock.’
Steven Taylor, Ginsberg’s guitarist for 20 years, remarked of Carroll: ‘He spoke with the voice of a New York City street kid, as one would expect the son of Irish bartenders to sound. But he was very thoughtful and gentle in his manner, which came off as an odd combination. Everybody I know was very fond of Jim.’
He is survived by a brother, Tom.
James Dennis Carroll, poet, writer and musician, born 11 August 1949; died 11 September 2009.
11 ALL CUT UP? WILLIAM BURROUGHS AND GENESIS P-ORRIDGE’S BEATNIK PAST
I have known Genesis P-Orridge over a period of years and I consider him a devoted and serious artist in the Dada tradition. He instructs by pointing out banality through startling juxtapositions
WILLIAM BURROUGHS, AUTHOR NAKED LUNCH1
Genesis has the same spirit of humanism as the Beats in the fifties, and there’s a great sense of humour there as was true of the Beatles and Rolling Stones as well. That sense of irony and fun
TIMOTHY LEARY, HARVARD PROFESSOR/AUTHOR2
Genesis P-Orridge, the British-born, New York-based poet and performance artist, rock ’n’ roll renegade and art terrorist, has spent most of the last four decades expressing his transgressive codes through an extraordinary range of art-forms and media. As writer, painter, sculptor, choreographer, actor, installation artist, director of happenings, video producer and recording engineer, he has assumed a multitude of roles in the hinterland of radical creativity. Few performers have attempted so many practices and personae: as master/ mistress of masquerade, as purveyor of subversive outrage, his output may not be equalled.
But his most significant mark, in terms of public profile, has been left through his two rock bands – Throbbing Gristle, also referred to as TG, a group who dissolved in 1981 but actually played a final farewell gig in the UK in 2004,3 and Psychic TV, his ongoing ensemble, who first emerged in 1982. His inspiration to the contemporary industrial music scene is widely acknowledged. Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails and Marilyn Manson are just two prominent figures who have paid tribute to P-Orridge’s rock legacy. More left-field activists – Ministry, Coil and others – are almost direct beneficiaries of his artistic inheritance, keeping the TG flame burning bright. In 2004, his production work with cutting-edge New Yorkers the Yeah Yeah Yeahs continues to place P-Orridge at the heart of rock’s avant garde.
In 2002, Painful but Fabulous: The Lives and Art of Genesis P-Orridge, a book that was neither autobiography nor biography rather ‘the equivalent of a retrospective catalogue’,4 a volume that certainly crossed all those terrains but carried the distinct mark of its subject’s creative hand, was published. It provided a potent reminder – in text and visuals, interviews and commentary – of P-Orridge’s eclectic portfolio, drawing on his writings, ideology, artworks and music to support a series of essays by Douglas Rushkoff, Carl Abrahamsson and Richard Metzger among others. Although, in essence, a celebration of P-Orridge’s many and varied manifestations, it was not mere hagiography. The quotations carried in the preface to the volume balanced high praise with utter condemnation, a pattern of reception that has followed in the musician-artist’s wake.
Yet, if P-Orridge’s reception has been often entangled in headline-grabbing controversy and frequently searing antipathy, his determination to break new ground, test the bounds of convention, has never dimmed, not since, as an adolescent, he took slips of paper, each featuring single words, onto the streets of his respectable, boyhood town and invited passers by to re-assemble them as haikus, drawing the mystified attentions of his local newspaper,5 right up to his present pursuits at the pioneering boundary of the visual and performing avant garde.
This piece is concerned with a number of entwined strands in the P-Orridge extravaganza – his own influences, specifically the Beat Generation and the friendships and collaborations he forged with William Burroughs and fellow cut-up pioneer Brion Gysin, and how experimental literature and innovative approaches to creating text have shaped his own rock and spoken word output. But it will also consider his latest project as artist, involving cut-up of a more extraordinary variety – a project to pursue a state he refers to as ‘pandrogyny’. His body art concept, pursued through surgical reconstruction and re-shaping, will see
him and his wife and partner, collaborator and fellow Psychic TV member Jackie Breyer, aka Lady Jaye, both adopt a shared and ambivalent fe/male identity.
It seems as if the notion of cut-up is an enduring pulse in much of what this performer does. He takes words and re-constructs them in his own semi-mystical language; he takes sound textures and samples and re-orders them in manners that are often dissonant, disorientating and disturbing; he takes his own life, his own flesh more accurately, and re-sculpts it in a fashion that almost satirises the contemporary Western obsession with plastic surgery – the quest for youth – but subverts it by adopting the sexual characteristics of the female – swollen breasts and narrowed waist – without claiming the slightest tendency towards transexuality. Rather P-Orridge and Breyer, his wife of nine years, are playing games with their own physical identities in the name of art alone. Pandrogyny, sometimes P-androgyny – an obvious play on androgyny, a melding of pan, as in the Greek for all, but surely in the mischievous puckish sense, too, and also aner, Greek for man, gune for woman6 – is the manifesto he has penned and subscribes to, at times becoming androgen in his own lexicon as he inserts a reference to himself in this adapted, corrupted version of the term.7
At the heart of this academic enquiry are two further threads – one personal, the other professional. In summer 2004, I met Genesis P-Orridge, a boyhood neighbour in an English suburb of Birmingham, for the first time in nearly 40 years. The interview I conducted with him, at this time, raises questions about the connection between different modes of creative expression – the interplay of music and written texts, the ambiguity of sexual identity in a rock context – but also about the relationship between objective research and intimate association with a subject.
In the middle of the 1960s, at the height of the UK’s domination of the global rock scene, Neil Megson and I were at very different stages in our development. Megson was a loner teenager with existential tendencies, on the cusp of adulthood; I was a child, a pre-pubescent, eight-year-old primary school kid only just awakening to the power and possibility of pop music. In the same suburban street in Solihull, a dormitory town on the edge of England’s second city Birmingham, Megson and I lived one house apart.
Divided by a family of Christian Scientists (who one day informed me, casually yet quite callously, that my innocent use of the quaint English phrase ‘blimey’ was a call on God to ‘blind me’), this unlikely pairing, teen and child, made some contact with each other in the years between 1964 and 1966. My parents knew the Megsons – we were all from Manchester, refugees from our North West England homes, pulled to the Midlands by the father’s work in each case. But why should a small boy find connection with an adolescent, dark-eyed, mysterious and distant? The answer was a train-set, a miniaturised, magical, electrified world housed in Neil’s parents’ loft.
In there, on a few isolated occasions, Neil would show me this transfixing little world of rails and papier-mâché mountains, tiny figures on train platforms, fir trees on mountain-sides, rolling stock and passenger carriages. ‘Whether my teenage host saw this as an unwarranted intrusion I can’t remember, but he seemed polite and welcoming enough.’8
By this time, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones had begun to carve up the pop kingdom. I knew the Beatles, of course, and had been bought my first single in 1963, ‘She Loves You’, a gift from my mother for accepting, without complaint, the fact I needed to wear spectacles. On the day I was to receive my reward (I must have asked for a 45rpm record), my mother and I stood together in the cramped listening booth in the store. First the assistant put on ‘Not Fade Away’ by the Stones, then the Beatles’ song. Then my mother asked me which one I preferred but definitely, if gently, pressing me to choose the Fab Four, which I did.
Around this period, I also temporarily broke rank from the media-inspired Beatles versus Stones fracas. I briefly followed a much less fashionable, far more transient, fad, genuflecting not to Lennon and McCartney but to the drummerled Londoners, the Dave Clark Five, also trail-blazing America on the wave of the British Invasion, ahead, it should be said, of the Stones in 1964. But it was, undoubtedly, the Beatles who would ultimately capture my favour, not to mention that of the broader constituency, as Beatlemania grew from a whisper to an ear-tearing scream. Even my parents – modest, Christian, respectable, conservative – liked the Fab Four: their vibrant pop and Merseyside manner – quick-witted, bright-eyed, jocular boys-next-door – combined traits in the great tradition of northern English entertainment, a sub-music hall manifestation of melody, on record and on-stage, and mirth, off-stage, talented music-makers with a comic touch.
Meanwhile, the Rolling Stones were seen as the bêtes noires of the new British scene, the dishevelled disreputables fathers would instinctively protect daughters from, or so the mainstream press would have it. Longer of hair, rougher of dress, coarser of music, the Stones took American amplified blues and R&B and re-shaped it in a gutter-ish and urchin fashion, their London vowels emphasised and exaggerated, a working class assault on English as it should be spoken, all the stranger as lead vocalist Mick Jagger had enjoyed a middle-class upbringing and endured a period of study at the prestigious London School of Economics.
I doubt my parents had the slightest knowledge of the group’s sources – Muddy Waters, Willie Dixon, Bobby Womack and Bo Diddley covers featured in a repertoire that was virtually all borrowed in the early years – but they had every suspicion of their output. Sexual, salacious, sordid, I recall disapproving tuts if Jagger and co. appeared on the minute, black and white TV that sat quite inconspicuously in the corner of the sitting room, on new UK teen shows like Top of the Pops and Ready Steady Go, which celebrated a rampant, fertile surge in indigenous popular culture. While the Stones’ deeper, darker meanings were quite unrecognisable to this young boy, I now assume that it was Jagger’s long-haired coiffure, voluminous lipped-pouting and its feminised ambiguity, that was particularly challenging to the values of the day.
So when we heard that the Megsons, father Ron and mother Muriel, daughter Cynthia and son Neil, were heading off to see the Stones play live, I recall that the whole matter utterly surprised and confused me. If my Mum and Dad saw something so demonic about the group, why would a similar parental pair be joining their two teens at such a performance? I could not work it out but never explored the matter beyond my own mind.
But for Neil Megson, an outsider who had earlier left his secondary school in Manchester in 1964 to enrol at Solihull’s minor public school9 and had quickly become the target of ostracism and bullying because of his northern accent,10 the live sighting of the Stones would be transformational. At the Redifusion TV studios in Birmingham where Thank Your Lucky Stars, then a widely viewed rival to Top of the Pops screened on Independent Television, the BBC’s commercial challenger, was taped, Megson not only saw his favourite band play on stage; he also had the good fortune to meet the group in person in the studio café between takes. The experience, possible because his father had a cleaning contract with the TV operation, would have a Damascene impact on the 16-year-old youth in that month of March 1966. The teenager was drawn to the rebel rowdiness of the Stones, to their music and their attitude, but he found one member of the band totally magnetic. Brian Jones, who would die in 1969, became his beacon, his model, his inspiration, for subsequent decades to come. Sitting drinking coffee in the canteen with his heroes, he recalls the moment in the extended liner notes to his Psychic TV album, Godstar: The Director’s Cut:
What E do remember very, very clearly is how Brian Jones looked and how he looked at me. He seemed translucent, not fully materialised as if in an unguarded momeant when he wasn’t fully focussed on being present, your hand might pass through him. It was as if thee particles that were intended to give him substance and represent thee physical body known as Brian Jones were dancing too freely, making it hard for him to maintain a human form. He was more apparition than person. Neither male nor female.11
GP-O continues:
It was an auspicious encounter, one that would shape his artistic and psychological future. The fact that the 2004 album, from which these remarks are drawn, was subtitled ‘A film soundtrack based on thee life and times ov Brian Jones’, tells its own tale of tribute, even if the movie, planned during the 1980s, was never made for lack of finance.
To these revelations, I will return, in due course, but my own personal connections with the evolving Megson would be cut short, not long after he enjoyed that highly affecting meeting with Brian Jones, for, at this point, in May 1966, my family uprooted and left Solihull to return to Manchester for my father’s new job. It would be some time before I would become aware of Neil again. In fact, the author recalls the re-discovery in his Pop Matters ‘Anglo Visions’ column of March 2003:
More than a decade later as I was completing my university studies, my mother contacted me to say that her friend Muriel Megson had been in touch and that Neil was now making a success in the rock world. As someone who, by now, was avidly consuming column miles of the music press each month, I was a bit shocked that I couldn’t immediately place this new, young star. It soon transpired, however, that the adolescent Megson had taken on a fresh persona, and that the individual dubbed Genesis P-Orridge, and leader of a band called Throbbing Gristle, was the adopted alter ego of the teen who had long before offered me a guided tour of his model railway.13