Clear-eyed for the first time in a decade, he fell in love and got married. His new wife, a law school student at Stanford, took him to New Wave shows in San Francisco, and divine inspiration struck again.
“People had encouraged me to do rock ‘n’ roll for a long time,” he said upon the release of Catholic Boy in 1981, a vast understatement. New York City seemed insistent that Jim Carroll have a career in music, even if he was not. He “had never listened to much rock after the Velvet Underground split,” he said in an NME article from the time, but he was impelled into collaboration by pals like Patti Smith and Blue Öyster Cult’s Allan Lanier. Lanier needed lyrics. Smith convinced him to open for her with her backing band, even though he missed a show after a drug bust landed him in jail overnight. When she worked at Scribner’s books on 5th Avenue, she saved him from an overdose, walking him around until he came to.
Compared to the readings he’d done all over the city, performing onstage felt vital and raw, a way to connect with people outside the incestuous, erudite New York poets’ circle. “I didn’t like the negativity of punk,” he said, “but at least I saw how I could get past my technical limitations, because you didn’t have to sing well. And after publishing poems all those years and having a very esoteric audience, the prospect of this other audience seemed nice.”
It was in Bolinas, on the beach with the dogs, that he’d become the frontman of his own band. There, he met some members of a local group called Amsterdam, and convinced them to soundtrack one of his readings. Soon after, the new Jim Carroll Band were polishing material at Bay Area clubs until they finally won over the scene’s youths. This was by design: “I wanted kids to like it,” Carroll said, “kids into heavy rock and hot guitars.” Doors opened quickly for Carroll, as they tended to do. On a trip to New York in 1979, he inked a deal with famed music mogul Earl McGrath at a party.
If Catholic Boy is for the kids, it’s a specific subset of them: precocious, kinetic, and traumatized. The breakneck pace of punk rock is perfect for outrunning what haunts you. A louche hybrid of New York Dolls-style glam rock and ’80s gloss, the album is an emblem of the national transition from downtown punk squats to cocaine penthouses and Reagonomics. It’s a bridge between the Ramones and the Cars, a yarn that ties together two decades and two cities.