Jim Carroll Band "Catholic Boy" [1980]

Another in a long line of desperate attempts by the music industry not to be completely crushed by the weight of disco, Atco Records managed to shake famed former teenage reprobate Jim Carroll out of his heroin-induced stupor long enough to fake a Graham Parker & the Rumour-style album, complete with pedestrian nasal vocals and nondescript bar-band arrangements. But the joke was on all of us; Carroll was apparently confused which decade he was in and thought Max's Kansas City was still a relevant venue -- either that, or he'd been holed up in his Manhattan tenement for so long after writing "The Basketball Diaries" that he'd finally gotten around to discovering punk rock. And this was after the Ramones were already off dicking around with Phil Spector and Blondie was cutting disco singles. The most remarkable thing about Carroll is that he was still relatively upright in 1980, which was a lot more than could be said for Tom Verlaine or Richard Hell at the time, but all he could manage to do with his newly-found career was apparently try to find out how long it was going to take everybody to finally get bored with his exploits about copping dope and staring up at the stars. That he couldn't really cut it as a rocker should surprise nobody; he outlived his uselessness upon exploiting the deaths of seemingly everybody he grew up with, then releasing it as "Catholic Boy"'s first single.