In his interview with Thomas Gladyz, Carroll talks about the time Ted Berrigan took him to Maine to meet Jack Kerouac. Carroll says: “it really didn’t go well except that he had read The World,” the St. Mark’s literary magazine that had published Carroll’s early work. Carroll sent Kerouac the manuscript of The Basketball Diaries sometime before 1969, then met Kerouac again shortly before Kerouac died. Kerouac wrote him a letter of introduction which provided the blurb, “At 13 years of age, Jim Carroll writes better prose than 89% of the novelists working today,” which appears on the back cover of the first edition of The Basketball Diaries. Carroll says, “He thought I was carrying a torch, and in a spiritual sense, I was.” The poem “Highway Report” in Living at the Movies is dedicated to Kerouac. In 1997, Ryko released the multi-artist Kerouac tribute album Kicks Joy Darkness; Carroll reads/sings Kerouac’s poem “Woman” accompanied by Lee Ranaldo, Lenny Kaye, and Anton Sanco. In 2003 Carroll performed on Doctor Sax and the Great World Snake, a dramatic reading of Kerouac’s previously unpublished screenplay.