I remember first hearing “People Who Died” on some late night radio station when I was in 8th grade in 1980, but didn’t catch the name of the band responsible. The next day at school, I approached my classmate Zachary T. – the grade’s resident coolster – and asked if he’d ever heard of the song. Without hesitation, Zach slipped into a back-arching a cappella rendition of “People Who Died,” before feverishly extolling the merits of the artists behind it, namely the Jim Carroll Band. Dutifully informed, I went out in search of the LP, entitled Catholic Boy, the very next day.
Sounding incongruously jubilant for what is essentially a lament, “People Who Died” rarely leaves its listener indifferent. Punctuated by Jim Carroll’s dizzyingly detailed lyrics and breathless, rapid-fire delivery, the song is a colorful laundry list of casualties who meet their respective ends in manners both tragic and absurd. Though popularly perceived as pitch black humor (sort of the punk rock equivalent to Edward Gorey’s “Gashlycrumb Tinies”), I’ve never doubted the sincerity of Carroll’s narrative, earnestly exhorting the passing of his fallen comrades as some sort of high-volume catharsis. Some of the characters cited in the song appear in Carroll’s more celebrated memoirs “The Basketball Diaries” (later made into a frankly forgettable film starring Leo DeCaprio and Marky Mark Wahlberg) and “Forced Entries.” Swapping the solemn cadence of a funeral dirge in favor of a hiccupy, adrenalized rhythm and frantically strummed electric guitars, “People Who Died” may sound flippantly tasteless – like much of the more sensationalized punk rock of its era -- but it also singularly captures Carroll’s mournful rage at the hopelessness and destruction that surrounds him. It may sound funny, but it remains an exorcism.
Not everybody hears it that way, of course. I vividly remember playing the track one night on my college radio station (WDUB 91.1 FM in Granville, Ohio) and a girl in my sociology/anthropology class found it so offensive that she actually stopped talking to me the very next day. Meanwhile, I think the biggest shame about “People Who Died”—as great a track as it is -- is that it’s leant Carroll a rather unfair one-hit-wonder status. Beyond that celebrated “novelty hit,” Catholic Boy is a classic album, rife with lesser-celebrated but equally visceral songs like “Three Sisters,” “It’s Too Late,” “Wicked Gravity” and the title track. Later Jim Carroll Band albums weren’t quite as punchy (although I liked their cover of the Velvet Underground’s “Sweet Jane” on 1983’s I Write Your Name), but my point is that there’s always been so much more to Jim Carroll than “People Who Died.” One would also do well to track down Carroll’s excellent spoken-word album from 1991,Praying Mantis.
Anyway, one more time with feeling…..
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