Forty years ago, the Jim Carroll Band unleashed its stunning debut album
Catholic Boy upon the world. (Wikipedia states that the disc was released in January 1980, but that seems awfully early. At any rate, I don’t remember reading anything about the band until late 1980, and Mr. Robbins’ review didn’t appear until the January 1981 number of
TP.) “Horrible, pretentious tripe from a semiliterary New York street survivor who fallaciously imagines his tales of degradation and urban insanity to be of interest to anyone else,” Terry Rompers proclaimed of the band’s first two platters in
The Trouser Press Guide to New Wave Records. Those tales were, however, most assuredly of interest to my fifteen-year-old self; indeed,
Catholic Boy remains one of my Top Ten favorite albums of 1980. By the time of the second
TP Guide’s release, Carroll, along with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, Suzanne Fellini, and other innocent victims, had been purged from the book entirely.
Carroll received strong notices in
Musician and
Creem—a journalist for the latter magazine described the artist, if I recall correctly, as “looking as if he’d stepped out of a William Burroughs novel”—but the great writers at
TP definitely didn’t appear to be fans. (“A poet, perhaps,” Mr. Robbins allowed. “A rock ‘n’ roller? Not really.”) Carroll always seemed to me to be an archetypal
TP artist, but he was obviously moving into the void left by the then-recent retirement of Patti Smith, so perhaps that rubbed folks the wrong way, or maybe he just got on people’s nerves in general. Junkies have a way of doing that, even “semiliterary” ones. Nevertheless, I was a fan.
“Carroll’s sing-speak is as convincing as the acting in a high-school play,” Rompers complained, but—for the teenaged, middle-class me—this
poet maudit’s dark visions seemed intensely felt. His lyrics are memorable enough to have lodged themselves inside my skull for the last four decades, although sometimes Carroll’s attempts to force his poetry into the confines of a rock song lead to syntactical awkwardness. The stanzas of “Nothing Is True” and “I Want the Angel,” however, glitter and cut like diamonds on glass. (These Covid days, whenever I sanitize my hands, I remember the “Nothing” protagonist who “cleans her skin with a krypton laser.”) “People Who Died”—which Mr. Robbins called “a heinous bit of juvenile nihilism”—manages to be both contrived and funny as hell, and the song rocks like a demon. In 1980, I was besotted with David Bowie, Gary Numan, Roxy Music, and Talking Heads, but Carroll was my gateway drug to such artists as the Velvet Underground, a group that actually deepened my understanding of, and my appreciation for, those great English and American art-rockers. Carroll’s degradation-and-urban-insanity tales chronicle the disintegration of society to such a degree that
Catholic Boy (even though it arrived afterwards) could easily serve as a prelude to the dystopia of the Heads’
Fear of Music, as well as to the nightmarish narcotized world imagined in Tubeway Army’s early songs. His characters are broken, atomized individuals whom one can easily imagine being ground into dust by the inevitable totalitarian takeover, when people will get their sleep through tubes in their arms.
Of Carroll’s original album trilogy, only
Catholic Boy and 1983’s
I Write Your Name have been reissued on CD, though selections from 1982’s
Dry Dreams appear on 1993’s essential
A World Without Gravity retrospective. His poetry remains in print (
Fear of Dreaming is an excellent introduction), and his posthumous novel
The Petting Zoo, although seriously flawed, is well worth reading. (I couldn’t get the book out of my head for a week or so after I finished it, and lord knows I'll never think of JFK's assassination in quite the same way again.) I’ve never, for some reason, read
The Basketball Diaries, or seen the film adaptation. Perhaps, deep down, I prefer my junkies in small doses.
Robert Christgau, who awarded
Catholic Boy a B+, also attacked Carroll as “a phony—a moral weakling who’s been charming suckers ever since he ran away from home.” The “moral weakling” indictment could be leveled at any number of similar drug-addicted rockers, from Bowie and Lou Reed to Richard Hell and Johnny Thunders, so I’m not sure why Christgau felt the need to single out Carroll. But no matter. From the perspective of miserable 20(/)20, the Jim Carroll Band’s debut disc offers a chilling soundtrack for our disease-ridden and revolutionarily nihilistic times. We won’t be redeemed through joy, it appears, and we may not even be redeemed through pain. As for me, I want the angel that never loses.
