Poet-Rocker Jim Carroll Dead

Poet and punk rocker Jim Carroll died from a heart attack on Friday in Manhattan. Sixty-year-old Carroll earned a cult following for his poetry—he began publishing pamphlets in his teens—long before the 1978 publication of The Basketball Diaries, a journal he kept in high school as he descended from basketball-scholarship student at a Manhattan private school to hustling in Times Square for heroin. The book became widely popular on college campuses, and Leonardo DiCaprio played him in a 1995 film adaptation of the book. Singer Patti Smith met Carroll in 1970 and encouraged him to read his poetry while Smith's band played background. He then formed the Jim Carroll band, and with the help of Keith Richards he scored a record deal. The band's first release, Catholic Boy, in 1980, is considered by some to be the "last great punk album."