The 1994 St Marks Poetry Project Holy Soul Jelly Roll celebration continues from here
Ed Friedman introduces Jim Carroll and Lenny Kaye
EF: Next to perform are a pair quite familiar to us at The Poetry Project. One of them is about to have his teenage years appear as a major motion picture, The Basketball Diaries, and the other is a guitarist, music-critic, and member of some of the greatest bands that have ever played in New York, Jim Carroll – and Lenny Kaye.
JC: Lenny.. Lenny’s got to get his stuff ready so.. I have a bad cold that I.. My ears are all stuffed up so.. (I) sound a little Donald Duck–ish. We’re going to do…well, we’re going to do two songs, one, a..well a newish song actually which we’ve never done before which I really do (have) trepidation (it sounded great in the studio after forty takes and I copied the vocals for about eight hours or so, but.. and now we’re gonna do an old song. It’s called “The Beast Within”, this song – (“Let me unlock your door, open the window and let you see..”.. “Some say it’s a lie, some say it’s a sin/ Do you know how it ends if you won’t let it begin?/ You feel it waking now beneath your skin/ You can’t live without the beast within…”) – (Editorial note, the version performed here differs significantly from the subsequently recorded version) – Jim and Lenny also perform a similarly spare and unusual version of Jim’s “People Who Died” (“Teddy sniffing glue he was 12 years old/Fell from the roof on East Two-Nine..”… “Those were people who died, died..”)
These performance can be heard here, (beginning at approximately twenty-two minutes in and concluding at approximately thirty-four minutes in)
Here‘s Lenny Kaye and Jim Carroll in another performance of “People Who Died” (December 27,1997, at Coney Island High, New York City, on the occasion of Lenny’s 51st birthday
EF: I thought this might be a good moment to mention that the box-set Holy Soul Jelly Roll is available for sale here tonight and we have the first edition boxset, it’s getting ready to go into the second edition for you collectors out there. It’s fifty dollars for this 4 CDs and forty dollars for the four cassette tapes and it’ll be available all evening in the back corner over there.
to be continued