The man praised by punk priestess Patti Smith as “the best poet of his generation” was much better known as the drug-addicted street hustler in “The Basketball Diaries,” a book-length chronicle published in 1978.
The author, Jim Carroll, is dead at age 60, reportedly from a heart attack.
Carroll, who died Friday, according to The New York Times, was much a part of the boiling New York art scene of the 1970s, putting him in the company of Smith, artists Andy Warhol and Larry Rivers, and controversial fine art photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, among the other characters who moved in and out of the rough-riding mix. Carroll lived with Smith and Mapplethorpe for a time.
The Basketball Diaries, made into the 1995 film starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Mark Wahlberg, tells the tale of Carroll’s double-life while attending the elite Manhattan private school, Trinity, on a basketball scholarship. An androgynous waif who began experimenting with drugs at 13, he was addicted to heroin and supplied his fixes by hustling gay men when not attending school and fantasizing about mass murder.
But by the time the memoir was published, Carroll had already been recognized as a poet. The first serious attention was paid to his slim collections “Organic Trains” in 1967 and 1970’s “4 Ups and 1 Down,” both written when Carroll was still a teenager.
“I met him in 1970 and already he was pretty much universally recognized as the best poet of his generation,” Smith told The Times. “The work was sophisticated and elegant. He had beauty.”
Beat poet Allen Ginsberg praised his raw and streetwise poems, and his music with the punk rock Jim Carroll Band led to a friendship with Rolling Stones guitarist and death’s-head Keith Richards, who got the band its first recording deals.
While working at Warhol’s fabled Factory, Carroll collaborated with singer-songwriter and underground scene-ster Lou Reed, as well as with Warhol on some of the pop-artist’s films.
A primal influence in underground rock and punk, Carroll found his biggest hit in the 1980 album “Catholic Boy,” featuring the litany for dead friends, “People Who Died” – included on the soundtrack of director Steven Spielberg’s ET: The Extra-Terrestrial.
Carroll had moved to the San Francisco area in 1973 for a time to break with the New York drug life, and there met Rosemary Klemfuss, who he married in 1978. They divorced about 10 years later. It was Klemfuss who told The Times that Carroll died Friday at home in Manhattan.
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