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When Jim entered the basketball court he was twelve years old and alone. There were no television broadcasts yet that exploited adolescence, nor greedy writers passing themselves off as maladjusted children for money. Jim was a talented white David among black Goliaths, a kid trapped between the strict Catholic laws on one side and a libertine world of excesses on the other. A few steps away from the clear church of St. Mark's on the Bowery and the dirty facades of the houses along the Lower East Side of Manhattan, where Jim was one of those who waited for his man with the famous twenty-six dollars clutched in his hand. Even before Lou Reed sang the wild side of the street, Jim was there knocking to burn out on heroin and frantically write about his young life.
When Jim emerged from the tunnel he was thirty and had a lot of friends from the rock scene: Patti Smith, Allen Lanier, Lenny Kaye, Tom Verlaine. By 1980 the time of the basketball diaries was long gone but he still had stories to tell and a new medium to make them travel: music. Dirty ballads made of dry and ruthless rock like life in the vicious and romantic slums of the Big Apple.
The New York that Lou Reed would sing about nine years later was already in the grooves of "Catholic Boy": the lesson of the Television and Patti reinforced through ten edgy tracks that wander without hypocrisy through the seediest neighborhoods with their fauna of whores, pimps, and junkies. Jim's sharp voice loaded with perverse accents grand rock frescoes like "Wicked Gravity," nihilistic anthems made of hard guitar riffs like "Nothing is True," punk quickies with a nursery rhyme rhythm like "Three Sisters," big riffs that get tougher in "It's Too Late" (...it's already too late to fall in love with Sharon Tate) or again broken rhythms à la Verlaine/Television of the title track.
But basically, as in all desperate stories, there's always a need for tenderness, for the melody that penetrates a sweet ballad like "Day and Night" or "I Want the Angel," which appropriates the style of the CBGB's gypsy, Willy De Ville. And when the seven minutes of "City Drops into the Night" arrive with the sax of the Stones' session player, Bobby Keys, enveloping with an epic aura a track that could dissolve from the night of rock New York like that of new wave London, then you realize that Jim with this album has gone beyond music to hit emotions.
And this time, taking a walk on the wild side of the street, there are no mythical characters from the New York fauna narrated by Lou Reed like Holly who turns into a drag queen, Candy who gives blowjobs in the backroom, little Joe who sold himself for money, or Jackie completely loaded with amphetamines. Jim's friends in "People Who Died" don't walk anymore; they are the childhood friends he watched die. The four fast chords of punk rock to tell us without rhetoric about Teddy, who at twelve falls off a roof high on glue, Judi who throws herself onto the subway tracks, Sly who gets shot in Vietnam, Eddie stabbed in the jugular in a dark alley.
Who knows, Jim, maybe without your troubles you would have become a great basketball player. If that had been the case, maybe I wouldn't have even admired your talent in action. But it's better that it turned out this way, I can surely listen to what's contained in an album that's still on the shelf dedicated to favorites today.
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