Biography – Searching Out Loud

Jimm Chanson: A Panegyric

This is not an obituary or a discography or some abstracted highlight reel to showcase the lucid brilliance of James T. Erickson (1962-2025), pen name Jimm Chanson. This is one friend’s appreciation. And there’s no mistaking the size of my gratitude with any proportionality of completeness in the writing of Jimm’s story.

The closest I’ll come to a definitive framing here is that Jimm was the superbrain. An encyclopedic recall coursing through the imagining of plausible fictions. And in the evidentiary world, the reckonings of a relentless polemicist.

If his body was the home of his soul on earth, it could be said that he really lived full-time in the attic, wandering out only to get to the office and occasional family visits. Most of us surround ourselves with other people, chores, appointments, and what we do to get by. We’re the casting director of the event calendars we keep. Little of this concerned Jimm. He was mostly surrounded by a vault of literature and history and his own illustrious pages.

Jimm retreated into his own library stacks. Certainly, much of that immersion was spent in the service of feeding his superbrain appetite. Another reason could be the need to stockpile the patience he’d reserve to engage in routine interactions. It was not always natural for Jimm to break down his arguments in a size digestible for less-than-voracious intellects. His humility was not always a given, and was likely tested in the catering of affairs outside his mental neighborhood.

That didn’t make him a snob or a hermit. He was an awesome teacher to his colleagues. He was generous with his legal counseling. He not only tolerated but applauded the many helping hands that were required when his health faultered. When Charlie Nieland, J.M. Dobies and myself visited him earlier this summer, he was proud to salute his country of choice. And her name was California. His magnanimity extended to the team play in his workload. Even when commanding his firm’s lion’s share of cases, one surmises its portfolio was more a reflection of James T. Erickson’s billable hours than by the collective experience of the other attorneys.

He’s… (So Reclusive)

Jimm lived nearly every day and night at a second floor walk-up on the outskirts of the Santa Clara University legal program he graduated from in 2006. There was no community outside of work. But he was solitary by choice. And there were few if any unresolved matters attending his attention to others, or even his own rock operas, novels, and poems.

There was no to-do list for putting such ephemeral affairs as song titles or play lists in order. But that’s where the satisfaction of closure ends. The unfinished pages of Jimm Erickson could fill several lifetimes of entire creative teams. He was weary from the compromises of an artist doing the bidding of a full-time attorney. His body would not let him forget the neglect inflicted for living in that mental attic of his all these years.

But he fought and wrestled and swore through his sagging teeth and halting breath that he wanted more of this life. The very one he would have continued to live free of cirrhosis, tumors, and bodily eviction notices: you maladies work things out amongst yourselves. I’m just going to plunge into the out-of-print section of my reading piles.

Learning Jimm (Student Edition)

I didn’t bump into Jimm. We were never properly introduced. Rather I was lured into an aura by a song. He was singing with his dorm room door open as if he was listening to his own soaring voice for the first time. Jimm was shot into Hampshire College out of a canyon of his own gleeful creation. The classroom had been impervious to his superbrain appetites for rarefied knowledge. Now in the wilds of self-directed discovery, he was freed from the demands of mandatory course loads. Jimm was ebullient. His muse was in full command. He was surrounded by other contrarians, misfits, and his own whimsical intuitions. Formal education had no claims on Jimm’s first semester.

The Answer was the cannon ball that Jimm pointed at the blank canvas of posterity. The Answer was a band of underdeveloped musicians that performed his unfolding songbook with varying degrees of accomplishment. The recording was equally unrefined and every overdub was served up with generous backdrops of tape hiss. Core to the project’s grandiosity: the premise that simple exposure to the band’s sonic elocution by chart-bound talent scouts would lead to that first recording contract. And as for band chemistry? We had never actually played together. We promised to rehearse more once some offers could be entertained.

The audacity of it all was fueled by three things: (1) our reverence of the musical heroes we were targeting with these Maxell 90 cassettes, (2) Jimm’s surging song catalog, and (3) the nascent arranging and recording chops of Charlie Nieland, our lead bassist, guitarist, and chief Jimm collaborator. What did we all hear in the uniform silence to our “unsolicited demo?” That is a testament largely to the raw creative gumption of untested youth.

While the bidding war to sign The Answer never ensued, the desire for acclaim and recognition shadowed Jimm throughout his life. There were never any benefactors, agents, or licensing arrangements. The practical business side of Jimm was seemingly walled off from his industrious muse. Speakeasy, one of his crowning achievements, was an historic novel about police corruption that never would have made it to press without the diligent assistance of his brother, Bill.

In 2013 JM Dobies, another former bandmate, a.k.a. Mal Thursday, pitched the notion of a catalog re-creation with an assemblage of session hands who could give Jimm’s melodies, chord structures, and middle eights the polish justified by the quality of his songwriting. Jimm wrote back that Mal’s intentions resonated with that same hunger for recognition:

I imagined Bob Dylan phoning Elvis Costello and saying, “WE both were inspired by Gravity [Suicide, the Novel, whatever] — this poor guy is completely unknown — let’s get some other people who were into it [here, name anyone I admire], and record a tribute album!” And I was able to sleep, ha ha, visions of sugar plums and so on. So that was a random thing, and the next day you [JM] wrote.

The Art of Remembrance

The biggest challenge for paying tribute is not about parsing an artist’s complexities, time-stamping their inventories, or crediting their authorship. It’s not in the curation of a collection. It’s in the excavation. The deeper soul dive that unearths and preserves the essence of birthing the artist’s own creations.

I first experienced this in forming a memorial scholarship fund to honor my mother, Ruthellen Pollan. How do we keep her memory alive? We do it in the service of supporting young artists that come through the program she spearheaded.

With Jimm there’s no interviews to transcribe, paintings to hang, or film to screen. But there is the writing and the music, as half-finished in its capture as it is rich in its composition. There is the vast reserve of a restless dynamo. There may well be a dormant community yet to live through this realization of Jimm’s creative experience. Jimm even fancied cutting a future profile as a cult figure. Who’s to say his obscurity is set in stone?

The raw building materials for this are exemplified by a gentleman named “Nelson.” Now I don’t know Nelson. Nelson isn’t sure he ever met Jimm. But from a brief introduction, it sounds like Nelson nurtures some wanderlust for stumbling onto Jimm’s sub rosa empire of unscratched gemstones. Here’s how another former band mate John Lebhar describes Nelson on the periphery of that excavation:

After I shared the news of Jimm’s passing he [Nelson] had heard so many things about Jimm that he felt he knew him although they never met. As he put it, everyone I ever played music with in the [Pioneer] Valley had a story about Jimm. It’s true that his musical legacy is bigger than life and certainly bigger than it ever manifested itself into as recordings and more importantly shareable media. I hope all of his friends can help to make that happen. Thinking about all the heavy hearts and for some reason Jimm’s crazy ripped up bell bottoms!

We all did have our one agenda item for that last visit in June. Mine was in crediting Jimm as the lightning rod for aligning our respective destinies into a creative path that carried well past our time together at Hampshire. For Jimm it was the pride he felt for gracing his signature to our personal copies of Speakeasy. That signature serves as an engraving for all things worthy of our collective debt implied in the treasuring of Jimm’s creations.

Returning again to the not-small-matter of incompleteness, I hope this early foray into the consequential nature of Jimm’s life might inspire other friends and his family to broker a broader understanding of The Jimm story on their own terms.

The ease of delivering this invitation does not always resonate with the most welcoming of memories, as former school chum, neighbor, and bandmate, David Karlin can attest. Hopefully the estrangement takes a backseat to the outstretched role that the Erickson household played in shaping Jimm, as well as his oldest friend. Some historians are determined to get to the bottom of the dilemmas they unearth. This one seeks a resolution.

Reconstructed Works (A First Stab)

The richness of his legacy was reflected in his writing discipline. He was able to meet his own self-imposed deadlines if not the broader social moments he was addressing through his illustrious excursions into…

Hot Rhetoric, Cold War: Me and God at Yale (1988): Jimm’s third of five rock operas and the only one memorialized through the studio recordings of The Answer’s first and last band reunion in 1988. A diatribunal laying siege to the underhanded smugness of W.F. Buckley with an unapologetic shout-out to Gore Vidal. (Collection alert: You can access the complete opera through Charlie’s Dropbox folder here).

Porn Industry Intimacies: Weak and Willing (1993): The one screenplay of the collection features the sin wages of a male sex worker in the pioneering days of the early eighties, preempting PJ Anderson’s Boogie Nights and the birth of Viagra by three and five years respectively. I recollect sharing the manuscript with Garo, another lifelong chum and Doubleday literary editor. Let me tell you: nothing surfaced Jimm’s mercurial tendencies faster than the marked up rewrites of a detached editor.

Thirty Wild Songs from Fame, Fleas, and Fox Sisters: Typhoid Mary Sessions (1997-98): Jimm’s last collection of songs were unsparing and explosive in their long-form exhaustion. One cut, The Typhoid Mary Sweepstakes (Ship of Fleas) runs 10 minutes without a refrain. Most of us fans can’t help but reflect wistfully on his songwriting retirement at age 35. Jimm shared not this sense of longing and lost interest in most music once he stopped composing. (Collection alert: Charlie has the tapes and will revive these recordings digitally in the coming months).

From Milwaukee’s Streets to Jim Crow’s Heartland: Speakeasy (2011): Jimm’s seminal work and manifest gift to the field of historical fiction features Judson W. Minor (Milwaukee’s first black police officer) as its protagonist, hero, and upholder of the virtuous dragnet inside the corruption and counter-punches of the city’s Gin Alley district. (Collection alert: You can order on Amazon or Strand Books).

Domestic Unrest Through Radical Spyglasses: The Center of Attention (2016) An espionage saga told by gold coast hippies. Pay phones, roach clips, muscle cars, and the ghost of Dennis Hopper set the stage for Jimm’s own unique re-staging of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. A bulging bill of federal offenses handled in the true William Kunstler tradition. (Collection alert: To be released as an e-book by Bill in the next year or so).

Unrequited Rejection: Eros and Thanatos and So On (2020-22) This project arose from the deep funk that corralled Jimm when he developed long haul Covid at the onset of the pandemic. Much of this outpouring is inspired by his unresolved reflections on past relationships. The collateral damage of these romantic incursions are not for the feint of heart, intellect, or levity of spirit.

New Collection: (2024-2025) Jimm composed 37 additional poems in between medical interventions and hospital visits. Mostly grappling with mortality and the smouldering embers of his unfinished pages. Here is his last, presented as grand master ironist, in its original form:

PANEGYRIC

I will sleep with myself tonight
as though I were at once a beautiful woman,
witty and intelligent; loving towards
me too.
I will sleep with myself
tonight as though I were a “raging”
genius, whatever that is, in a white
heat of anger and paranoia.
I will
sleep with myself tonight as though
time were not passing, and I
were a ghost, observant and communicative,

tapping on tables to give warning of my

resentment at the quick, who never know
quite what to say in response. I will sleep
with myself tonight as though I were
a poet, too precious for words (so goes

the cliché, the cliché that comes

to mind), my mind focussed on things
like whether I begin too many lines
with conjunctions or … what else
is it I avoid? I will sleep,

I know I will, with myself
tonight, as though it
were tonight, as though
it were over, which it is.
Jimm Chanson,
February, 2025

The Bucket List of Frank Marchand

Introduction

I know Frank Marchand because he has been my plumber and neighbor for many years. He has always had a soft spot for going the extra distance. Now after eight continuous years of working and fighting stage four colon cancer full-time, he’s bringing his community into that same extra distance. Frank conceived, wrote, directed, and starred in Now I Can Die Happy, an original performance that Frank summoned to life at the Shea Theater in Turners Falls MA on August 30th. Too close to home to be theatrical. Too elevated a theme to be slice-of-life. Now I Can Die Happy is lived out on the most personal terms in the most revealing of ways.

Frank doesn’t say. But I imagine he was first visited by the idea of a one man autobiographical show in a long, contemplative moment. Perhaps during chemo?

Many chemo trips removed from the original diagnosis, Frank has outlived many of the crew in the same Cooley Dickinson treatment program. This includes former teachers, customers, and local folks that had been receiving their infusions alongside Frank.

This prompts Frank’s insertion of the “why me” directed to a higher power. You don’t need religion or infusions to appreciate the pay grade above where this question lands.

Frank answers back his why me voice without anger, guilt, defiance, or passive acceptance. His response is an ardent and clarion call to action. He has given himself over to the world of need. A world that defines tangible need as the privileging of one’s own concerns.

Big Digs in Own Backyards

Here’s the Frank I knew in B.C. (“before cancer”) times: A guy who took his professional calling seriously. Himself? Not so much. His work ethic was insatiable. Big jobs, small jobs. His answering machine played the same steadfast loop for decades: “I pick up my messages every hour.” He promised to return every new request by the end of each work day. Didn’t matter how overbooked he might be.

On the job, he was a swirl of activity and patter. The channeler of once troubled waters into the basin of stability. A chatterbox of wisdom. Behind every valve and fitting – a story and sometimes… a lesson.

The dedication, the range of problem-solving, and the self-effacing humor all conspired to build trust that Frank would unscramble whatever our steeply-pitched 150 year-old Victorian home could spray his way. It was a down payment. Not for curb appeal but infrastructure. Now our rickety Victorian would see an engine room facelift. Preventative medicine. Newly assembled sets of permeating radiators and plumbing bones. Nothing much had stirred under its floorboards until Frank descended into the foundation. Now our matronly manor was going to see another fifty years.

He emerged weeks later, a six foot mole caked in the abrasions of his craft. Our own bonafide big dig under Chestnut Plain Road, adjacent to the recently relocated Whately Milk Bottle edifice and neighbor Frank’s home. It was a pathway adjoining the 19th to the 21st centuries over the protestations of the accumulated neglect of past owners. Of course I wrote that check to Frank. Of course it’s the biggest check I ever wrote to another individual before or since. I took his word on every itemized entry in that invoice. And why wouldn’t I? I trusted the iron works and the PVC in the architectural details to the master cobbler of heating systems. My friend and neighbor, Frank.

Divorced Dads Night Out

Fast forward to 2000. Frank and I are sharing some bowls of All You Can Eat popcorn in South Deerfield before the waitress at Wolfie’s appears with our orders. We both find ourselves in the league of divorced dads with visitation weekends. It’s not exactly in our respective road maps of where our lives were once headed in the sleepy hamlet of Whately Center. Frank tells me of another neighboring family that’s split since: “Must have been in the water,” he reckons.

It was that hazardous backstretch around the turn to forty. So, so many marriages never make it past those bends. We see the stranger across the table from us and what have we got besides our vows, debts, and a shared history? The empty miles that distance us from the future we once called family.

Years later Frank tells Karen Brown that it was his ability to correct misbehaving water flows at the age of 12 which drew him into plumbing. Ms. Brown is both a Frank customer and an NEPM reporter whose radio portrait of his survival saga goes viral on national NPR. However, this form of troubled water was nothing Frank could fix. I clinked his beer glass to reaffirm my own limitations in this area. We go back for popcorn refills. Our unwritten chapters are no longer blank slates.

Full-time Schedule

I’ve been remarried, twice actually, since our last dinner date. My fourth marriage in 2015 coincided with Frank’s cancer diagnosis. He delivered this news the following year when I rang him in to prep a bathroom for the pending sale of my wife’s home. I can’t say it surprised me at all that Frank was dug in for the fight of a lifetime. What threw me off at first was the realization he was fighting what sounded like a war on two fronts.

At first I didn’t understand how his trade was actually an ally in this battle. Rather than attempting to protect his marshaling forces, he refused to draw any distinction between Frank the plumber and Frank the cancer patient. Others may have retreated into the shadows, of rejection and denial, or an even wholesale withdrawal from the business of living. Frank doubled down on it. His greatest nemesis wasn’t the disease or the prognosis. It’s the number cancer does on an idle mind preoccupied with the harm-seeking disruptions that lie ahead.

Rather than catastrophize, Frank chose to inhabit the solution-seeking sanctum of his problem-solving nature. He opted as Paul Simon described in song, “to dominate the impossible in his life.” That chemo treatment was another slot to fill in an already answered-for calendar of running toilets, clogged pipes, and vanity installations.

But the jammed calendar was never just to remain in motion. In “I Can Die Happy Now,” Frank implores us to step back from our own autopilots. He wants us to absorb the bigger picture so we can take in what’s truly life affirming in our daily practice. There’s nothing stoic or guarded or kept in reserve for later going on here. But the pep talk isn’t coming from fevered piety of sweeping judgments. That’s what we’re used to: Painted on thick with the broadest of brushes.

Smiling Statues

On a summer evening, my wife and I went to see Frank’s show at the Shea Theater. It stars its director, writer, and stage manager Frank. It co-stars Frank’s secret friend. There is no show program. But if there was, it might have been a single urgent message: Spend down our emotional debts.

As my Uncle Stephen Pollan wrote in Die Broke: A Radical Four Part Financial Plan, the last check you write should be to the undertaker. And it should bounce. From very different angles, Frank and my Uncle are imploring us to empty our pockets of regrets. But emotional debts, come again? These are the I.O.U’s that carry us through our daily graces. We come to know this as the kindness of strangers. Paying it forward. But Frank turns the tables. What if we’re the strangers and the kindness must come from us?

Frank isn’t evangelizing from his throne. He’s locked in battle. We’re the ones fleeing the scene and he’s the one calling unsolicited attention to this. Our strength as a community comes from engaging, from the providing and receiving of kindness and empathy. Not the protective shell we often grow to seal us in from the suffering all around us. Not the veneer of privacy that insists on scheduled interventions only.

Frank’s not having that. He pushes on the margins of emotional availability. On its fringes labors the panhandler who carries the shame of pity over the unfilled isolations that hold the awkward dread between the haves and the what-have-you-gots: I admit it, Frank. I haven’t any more to give.

And yet. And yet!

Knowing the pulse of gratitude that brims over Frank, we sense a towering waterfall of connection. A reservoir of feeling waiting to be shared. “Waiting for what exactly?” the man at stage four for the last eight years is asking us. As if we’re asking for our souls back from the places we’ve been hiding them. We can’t hide from Frank at center stage.

The Curtain Comes Down

The crowd is one part sorry-it-had-to-be-you, Frank, and another part frozen smiling statues. That’s when Frank goes one step further. He introduces back to his secret friend, a.k.a. alter ego that’s arrived to comfort and cajole him through the trials of his life. The secret friend has seen Frank through the perils of his solo missions. In the first act, the friend provided a comic foil when young Frank couldn’t get out of his own self-imposed obstacle course.

The friend is also cast as the keeper of Frank’s own bargaining with his maker. It’s an existence of light and energy that can only be shaped into action and outcomes in the fleeting expanse that this natural force inhabits a human body. The desire to bend events in our favor requires the gripping of hands, the stepping of legs, and the flexing of muscles commanded through our vast neurological circuits. Where our heart stops is not a curtain call. It’s not a thunderous ovation. It’s musical chairs where the music cuts out. That’s the theme song of Frank’s requiem.

Frank is not engaging us around the protective custody of angels and bugle corps. He’s bargaining with us where we live. At ground level. That’s where we leave no sincere praises on the table. We spend lavishly and don’t wait for Frank’s funeral. Or our own.

Think about it. The eulogy is off-limits to unkind words. There’s safety in the protection of legacy. It’s as timeless as the keeping of the flame. But what would happen, I hear Frank saying, if we let these praises escape through the mundane discourse of an ordinary day? Then we wouldn’t wonder if the dead could hear because they would bear actual witness to the appreciations they inspire. They would actually come to know the meaning of the lives they’ve touched in these overlapping lifetimes.

That is a world we can share. This is the do-it-yourself instructions for saving your own soul. No waiting is required. You can go right in. And thank you, Frank Marchand, for helping me to see and live that.