They Were All My Friends

Of all the obits, I wasn't expecting to see Jim Carroll's in the New York Times this morning. Dead at 60, Carroll carved his name in rock with one massively cool contribution, his anthemic "People Who Died" from 1980's Catholic Boy album.

More importantly, he fostered poetry and writing. He was published at age 16, and his best-known work, The Basketball Diaries, came out in 1978. That was amid the nascent New York punk scene, featuring his friend and comrade-in-poems Patti Smith. The two became darlings of the CBGB scene, and Smith went on to success. Carroll's limelight flickered after Catholic Boy, even when The Basketball Diaries was made into a film in 1995. He returned to writing poetry and spoken word performances, occasionally composing for the likes of Boz Scaggs and Blue Oyster Cult, and notably eulogizing Kurt Cobain on MTV. Carroll made a comeback - sorry, return - to rock in 1991, and again in 1998, but his heart forever lay in the cadence of spoken and written word, a man of letters in the most literal sense.

His death is the latest in a series that have had an unsettlingly personal effect on me this summer - John Hughes and Ellie Greenwich were the two others. They seem so young to go so early; all three made their reputations as the voice of youth. Yet perhaps that's the answer, that they left this life so they'd never grow old.