Carol being Carol (Dec. 8, 1996)

December 8, 1996

Jimmy likes to play innocent when it comes to Carol

But we all know how he tends to make goddesses of women, and how disappointed he gets when they don’t live up to expectations.

Some women like Ginger come the closest – although in some ways Carol was exactly the opposite of his ideal.

She was a vamp, and a troublemaker, and as attracted as he was to her he was always wise enough to know she could never make him happy in the end.

Ginger and Carol had met at Boonton High School, after Carol moved from Verona for her senior year.

Jimmy teased Carol, a cat and mouse game that went on for years, until she faded out of the rock and roll scene and lost that edge for which she had become famous. She moved to Europe, got married and took up a respectable job.

And yet, in my mind – since she teased me as much as Jimmy teased her – she has become the icon of what we all were in those early days of the band, a dynamic force that created the tension and allowed the band to take out their rage in music.

Much of this started in 1970 when I was still on the West Coast and on the run from the police – she worked with Ginger at some rich people’s Park Avenue flat, taking care of rich people’s kids, while Jimmy and John stayed over when the parents were away.

The family valued Carol and Ginger enough to put up with Jimmy and John.

Sleeping arrangements didn’t always coincide with the band’s schedule, and there were times when Jimmy and John wandered across the Hudson River at very late hours, finding the two aupairs too weary to play, and so often were told they could sleep on the couch.

Jimmy was not that kind of house guest. And so when rejected from Ginger’s bed, he crawled in the bed Carol usually slept in.

She was not there at the time, but came in a short while later, and demanded to know what Jimmy was doing. He told her he was trying to sleep.

She ordered him out. He refused. She then asked where she would sleep, and he told her she could sleep on the couch or crawl in with him. Carol being Carol hopped into the bed with Jimmy.

John, who technically was dating Carol at the time, happened to come in a little later that night and found his girlfriend sleeping with Jimmy – an incident that reverberated in band life for years.

None of us know if anything actually happened between Jimmy and Carol – although Jimmy claimed innocence.

Carol, also being Carol, refused to say one way or the other, especially to John.
And though that might have been the start of things, it was not the last incident, Carol being Carol.