A quick eulogy

Sad to see Patrick Swayze pass away. He was in one of my "guilty pleasure" movies-Point Break, the rest of the stuff didn't really capture my fancy.
Perhaps in the jetwash of his passing the media missed out on the death of poet/musician Jim Carroll. Most semi-hipsters have seen The Basketball Diaries but how many have actually read the book? Not for the faint of heart, Jim was a heroin addict at a very young age and a male hustler to feed his habit. Eventually he kicked the drugs.
Known more in the late 70's for his poetry he morphed into a musician eventually. His first stab at commercial success was Catholic Boy. It still sounds fresh to me today. It's just a great album of hard rock and his dead pan talking/singing prose over it. I suppose the closest analog would be Patti Smith and her early albums. It did spawn a small hit with People Who Died, likely as more of a novelty/one hit wonder kind of deal but the rest of the album is really solid. Not chainsaw Ramones type stuff or ventures into Television type guitar jams but somewhere as an amalgam of both but really not copping either one's style to the point of being a ripoff.
There were a couple other albums after that and Jim does a short guest spot on a Rancid song from Out Comes the Wolves but his music output was pretty sporadic after that.
So it goes, Jim Carroll, dead of an MI at age 60.