Tag: Hampshire College

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: