V02-T10 Sweet Jane

.....We lost Jim Carroll last year. The fact that he died on September 11th in Manhattan means that he may have been overshadowed in the electronic media, where lazy and sensationalist editors no doubt had video retrospectives of the 2001 attacks prepared weeks in advance, if not left over from the year before. It was in all the papers, though.

Volume 2: "WE'RE ALL GOING TO JAIL FOR THIS, AREN'T WE?" track 10

• 4:11 "SWEET JANE" (Lou Reed)
• performed by Jim Carroll
• original source: LP I WRITE YOUR NAME Atlantic 80123-1 (US) Jan. 16th, 1984
• and my source: CD I WRITE YOUR NAME Atlantic 80123-2 (US) [no date; 1991?]

.....I promise, this will be the last cover tune for this volume of the series.

.....Jim Carroll knew Lou Reed personally when the Velvet Underground first recorded this song (notice how the name 'Lou' is used in this version where the name 'Jim' is used in the original). Carroll was a teenaged junkie poetry prodigy at the time, often in or around performance spaces in New York. About that time, in 1968, Valerie Solanas tried to murder Velvets patron Andy Warhol, prompting him to reverse his earlier relatively-open-door policy at The Factory. Warhol's prior willingness to host a large number and broad range of eccentrics resulted in these people playing off of and energizing each other. When he closed the doors, that flow of creativity he had cultivated couldn't just stop. It came out of the basements and occupied the clubs. Carroll and Reed were both productive creatively before meeting Warhol, but in the 1970's they had an audience beyond the Factory that they didn't have before.

.....The album that this comes from is the last one entirely of music from Carroll. He continued playing with bands but those recordings were released on various artists collections and hybrids of music and spoken-word performance such as POOLS OF MERCURY.