"Day and Night" - Jim Carroll
I had meant to comment on the passing of punk poet Jim Carroll earlier in the month. The Times has an article about him today and his struggle to produce a novel before his death on September 11 at the age of 60. I read Carroll's Basketball Diaries in 1978, the year it came out, when I was a senior in high school and aspiring basketball player and hipster. (I can't say I ever made the varsity in either endeavor.) It's a pretty amazing tale -- young hoops prodigy, Catholic boy, heroin addict, and sometime street hustler in the New York of the 1960s. Carroll seems like a Lou Reed invention in the book. (A very spooky looking dude too - 6'3", impossibly thin, pale, blue-eyed and red-haired.)
His 1980 musical debut, Catholic Boy, from which this song is drawn still sounds pretty amazing today. I am not overly fond of this version -- the female singer overwhelms Carroll, the non-singer. On the record, the voices are much more equal, with the female voice slightly distant and wispy, appropriate to the wistful, romantic quality of the song:
Day and night . . . the shadows move too slowly
From dark to light she promised she could know me
Remember when . . . I watched her on the stairway
She was drinkin' wine . . . and she told me what the
stars say . . .
Some destinies, they should not be delivered . . .
But in her eyes I saw a thousand reasons
Day and night
I feel her skin . . . it's thin and white as pressed milk
I closed my eyes and she vanished just like burnt silk
And what remains was like some fallen thunder
And my lips were chained; they were filled with empty wonder
But the stars tell lies, it blinds the only warning
And when darkness dies, there's nothing left but morning . . .
Just day and night
This is from the short lived show "Fridays," ABC's early Eighties effort at imitating Saturday Night Live. I remember little about the show other than its stellar and cutting edge musical guests -- the Clash, the Jam, Graham Parker and the Rumour, Devo, and Rockpile, among others -- although Larry David and Michael Richards were among its regular cast members.)
R.I.P. Jim.
