by Shannonn Kelly
8:21AM, EST Monday September 14, 2009

Jim Carroll, writer, poet, punk rocker, died of a heart attack in his Manhattan home this past Friday. He was 60.

Carroll is best known in the mainstream for his book “The Basketball Diaries,” published in 1978, about his drug addled, teenage life as a basketball star and heroin addict at an elite Manhattan private school in the 1960s.

Re-printed in 1980, The Basketball Diaries quickly became a huge hit with the college crowd. That popularity spawned the film adaptation in 1995, starring  Leonardo DiCaprio as Jim Carroll.

Between sports and drugs, Carroll was a successful published poet by the age of 17 with a loyal following by the likes of Patti Smith, Allen Ginsberg, Ted Berrigan and Jack Kerouac.

Carroll was a star in “Biddy League” at 13 and participated in the National High School All Star Game in 1966. While playing basketball, he was a heroin addict who turned tricks to support his habit. During this time he was also writing poems and attending poetry workshops at St. Mark’s Poetry Project in the East Village, selling his first poem collection called Organic Trains in 1967.

A follow up, Carroll penned 4 Ups and 1 Down in 1970, which The Paris Review published excerpts from his journals in 1970. In 1973 Living at the Movies was published and this won him both acclaim and a wider audience in the mainstream.

According to William Grimes of The New York Times:

The writer’s good looks and flair for drama made him ideal raw material for rock stardom. “When I was about 9 years old, man, I realized that the real thing was not only to do what you were doing totally great, but to look totally great while you were doing it,” he told the poet Ted Berrigan in the 1960s. In the late 1970s, with the encouragement of Ms. Smith, he formed the Jim Carroll Band, whose first release, “Catholic Boy” (1980), is sometimes called the last great punk album.

His life was colorful. Hailed by Ginsberg, Berrigan and Jack Kerouac as a powerful new poetic voice, he became a fixture on the downtown scene. After briefly attending Wagner College on Staten Island and Columbia University, he found his way to Andy Warhol’s Factory, contributing dialogue for Warhol’s films. Later he worked as a studio assistant for the painter Larry Rivers and lived with Ms. Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe, the photographer. He chronicled this frenetic period in “Forced Entries: The Downtown Diaries, 1971-1973.”

In 1973 Mr. Carroll left New York to escape drugs. He settled in Bolinas, an artistic community north of San Francisco, where met and married Rosemary Klemfuss in 1978. The marriage ended in divorce. He is survived by a brother, Tom.

Mr. Carroll’s music career started by accident when Ms. Smith brought him onstage to declaim his poetry with her band providing background. Encouraged by the response, he formed his own band. It caught the attention of Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones, who arranged a three-record deal with Atlantic Records.

The critic Stephen Holden described Mr. Carroll in The New York Times in 1982 as “not so much a singer as an incantatory rock-and-roll poet.” Like Lou Reed, he had a mesmerizing power, evident on songs like “People Who Died” from “Catholic Boy,” a poetic litany of his dead friends that became a hit on college radio and part of the soundtrack for “E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial.”

The group’s next two albums, “Dry Dreams” (1982) and “I Write Your Name” (1984), caused much less stir. After writing lyrics for Blue Oyster Cult and Boz Scaggs, Mr. Carroll returned to the studio in 1998 to record “Pools of Mercury.”

Mr. Carroll published several more poetry collections — “The Book of Nods” (1986), “Fear of Dreaming” (1993) and “Void of Course: Poems 1994-1997” (1998) — as well as releasing several spoken-word albums.