OTR: The Jim Carroll Band - Catholic Boy

[illusionofjoy]

If you say the phrase "punk rock poet" to me, I'll usually blurt out, "Patti Smith!" She's an obvious answer, I'll admit, but not the only one; her friend Jim Carroll also qualifies for the descriptor. Released in 1980, two years after The Basketball Diaries was published (and fifteen years before that book was adapted into a film), Catholic Boy was The Jim Carroll Band's debut album. To be fair, it does sound much like a Patti Smith LP, but one can also hear The Clash, The Boomtown Rats and The Jam in there (if those groups hadn't been British, mind you).

Like most people, I first became aware of Jim Carroll's musical offerings via the unforgettable "People Who Died." Perhaps too dark to make it any higher than #73, where it peaked on the Billboard Top 100 in 1981, this song gets into the head of whoever is lucky enough to hear it and never leaves again. I first head the song either on the internet or via Sirius Satellite Radio - either way, Catholic Boy got added to my wishlist and eventually a friend bought me a copy.

While I still enjoy "People Who Died" for how happily morbid it is - being, literally about those who prematurely joined the choir eternal - it's tied for being my favourite with side B opener "City Drops Into The Night." The saxophone on the song dates it immediately, but I really don't think the song would be as effective without it. In fact, I think it's time to bring saxophone back into popular music. This instrument, perhaps the only one which effectively paints a sonic portrait of gritty streets and run-down, drug-soaked apartments, has been unfairly maligned and ignored by 1980s revivalists. The sawtooth synths and drum machines have come back, but where is the sax? It's criminal, I tell you.

Like so many albums of the era, Catholic Boy is a quick listen, it's ten songs having a cumulative duration of only 38 minutes and 26 seconds. It's just so infectious though that once the title cut closes out the set, you just want to flip the record over (or press "play" on the compact disc player) and start again with "Wicked Gravity." That the album is listenable over and over again, to me, is a testament to the strength of the songwriting. While Jim Carroll has credit for penning all ten tracks, seven of those songs have co-writing credits with other members of the group (all four Carroll's bandmates give some sort of input somewhere throughout the course of the album).

The Jim Carroll Band lasted for three albums, fulfilling their contract with Atlantic Records before calling it quits. Carroll himself put out two more records of spoken-word poetry in the mid-1990s before dying of a heart attack at the age of 60 on September 11^th, 2009.