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Carroll excelled as a teenage basketball player in a private school on Manhattan's Upper West Side, yet he was leading a double life since the age of 13, experimenting with heroin and supporting his addiction by hustling gay men, he wrote in "The Basketball Diaries" of 1978, which became the subject of a 1995 movie of the same name starring Leonardo DiCaprio.
It was his raw and fiery poetry, both in his diary writing and his lyrics for the Jim Carroll Band, which quickly earned him a reputation as a new Bob Dylan.
"I met him in 1970, and already he was pretty much universally recognized as the best poet of his generation," singer and poet Patti Smith told the Times Sunday.
"The work was sophisticated and elegant. He had beauty."
Carroll spent time with and around some of the most acclaimed poets, musicians and other artists of his and other generations: Smith, Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards, and Beat poet Allen Ginsburg, who lauded the younger man's poetry and occasionally performed with him.
In the 1970s Carroll worked with Andy Warhol at his famous Factory and contributed to the pop artists's films, collaborated with the likes of the Velvet Underground's Lou Reed and lived for a period with Smith and the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe.
In music Carroll had an outsized influence on underground rock and roll and punk, and his 1980 album "Catholic Boy" is widely considered a punk classic.
The album's biggest hit, "People Who Died," was a litany of his friends who had passed away, many of drug overdoses or murder, and was featured on the soundtrack to the Steven Spielberg blockbuster "E.T: The Extra-Terrestrial."
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It was his raw and fiery poetry, both in his diary writing and his lyrics for the Jim Carroll Band, which quickly earned him a reputation as a new Bob Dylan.
"I met him in 1970, and already he was pretty much universally recognized as the best poet of his generation," singer and poet Patti Smith told the Times Sunday.
"The work was sophisticated and elegant. He had beauty."
Carroll spent time with and around some of the most acclaimed poets, musicians and other artists of his and other generations: Smith, Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards, and Beat poet Allen Ginsburg, who lauded the younger man's poetry and occasionally performed with him.
In the 1970s Carroll worked with Andy Warhol at his famous Factory and contributed to the pop artists's films, collaborated with the likes of the Velvet Underground's Lou Reed and lived for a period with Smith and the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe.
In music Carroll had an outsized influence on underground rock and roll and punk, and his 1980 album "Catholic Boy" is widely considered a punk classic.
The album's biggest hit, "People Who Died," was a litany of his friends who had passed away, many of drug overdoses or murder, and was featured on the soundtrack to the Steven Spielberg blockbuster "E.T: The Extra-Terrestrial."
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