"People Who Died" poet Jim Carroll releases debut album

The Jim Carroll Band : People Who Died

[Purchase]

On January 3, 1980 The Jim Carroll Band released its debut album, Catholic Boy. Two years earlier, Carroll had published his legendary memoir, The Basketball Diaries, recounting the years between 12 and 15 when he was both a basketball star and a heroin addict. The six foot three poet stopped playing basketball but he didn't give up heroin. 

In 1973 Carroll moved to California get a fresh start, and with the encouragement of former girlfriend Patti Smith, to whom he'd be often compared, he formed a rock band with Steve Linsley (bass), Wayne Woods (drums), Brian Linsley and Terrell Winn (guitars). Keith Richards was an early fan who helped the band get a record deal with Atco.

The best known song on the debut album is "People Who Died", a list of friends who died from drug overdoses, disease and by accident.

Life turned on a dime for Carroll. The song helped make The Basketball Diaries a best-seller and he became a heroin-chic celebrity.

"When I came back to New York, it was such a joke, because I was always referred to as the pure young poet who wasn't in it for what he could get out of it," he later told New York magazine. "And all of a sudden, the pure young poet comes back... and I'm hanging out with the Rolling Stones." 

In 1981 the ABC version of Saturday Night Live, "Fridays",  had the Jim Carroll Band on the show to perform "People Who Died" and "It's Too Late", which opens with the line "It's too late/ To fall in love with Sharon Tate". You'll have to fast forward through the show to see the performances. ( at 28:00 and 41:00) Carroll looks like a red-headed version of Bowie. He's not much of a singer. The band doesn't play with much imagination. But the lyrics are incisive and street wise:

Teddy sniffing glue he was 12 years old
Fell from the roof on East Two-nine
Cathy was 11 when she pulled the plug
On 26 reds and a bottle of wine
Bobby got leukemia, 14 years old
He looked like 65 when he died
He was a friend of mine

Catholic Boy was met with mostly unenthusiastic reviews. In a three star review for Rolling Stone Ken Tucker :

The Jim Carroll Band play like a well-rehearsed New York Dolls–blunt, loud and catchy, but lacking that late, great group's vehement humor and spontaneity. Yet what's most striking about their debut album, Catholic Boy, isn't the music but the words. There are reams of them, and they flood almost every line with endless detail. Unifying metaphors, even when they're overwrought, are exhaustively and exhaustingly sustained.

Robert Christgau gave the album a B+ writing :

He's got a great eye, a great memory, great connections. He knows how to put himself across. And he wrote "People Who Died."

The band made the strange decision to appear in the 80's film Tuff Turf starring James Spader and Robert Downey Jr who plays drums with Carroll's band in the scene above. There were more albums and books before Carroll died of a heart attack at the age of 60.