Jim

A Facebook friend messaged me last week to ask my thoughts on Jim Ellison, the singer/guitarist/songwriter of the Chicago band Material Issue, who took his own life in 1996. Seeing or hearing Jim’s name always makes me uneasy. I paged through a rather short series of memories, landing on one in particular that produced a mix of regret, shame, and deep sadness. I decided these feelings deserved a deeper look.

I met Jim in July, 1987, at a Chicago near-North side dive bar called Batteries Not Included. I can’t remember if Jim promoted the Lemonheads show or worked the door or what, but he was hanging around in some official capacity for the Chicago stop on our first tour behind their debut album. I’m sure we made a terrible impression on pretty much everyone we met that tour.¹ Evan and I were barely 21, while Ben and Jesse were 19 and 20, respectively. We inhabited our own world; everything became an inside joke. With a solid foot still in hardcore punk, we kinda wanted to piss everyone off.

Hardly anyone came to the show, par for the tour. Jim was dressed up like in his video, pomping around, in our eyes, like some kind of wanna-be rock star. It was clear he didn’t like us; our worlds were smaller back then. Material Issue existed as a band but wasn’t popular outside Chicago, or perhaps even within the city limits. Their debut EP came out that year, but they had a big hill to climb to real rock stardom. These realities didn’t seem to phase Jim’s sartorial pose or attitude.

Jim had this otherworldly gorgeous young girlfriend by his side the entire time, which obviously caught our attention. Twenty people in the club at most, and this supermodel walking around with this strange rock dude, both looking like they’d walked off a music video set. Evan couldn’t resist taking his shot with the girlfriend.

Pre-fame Evan used to flirt with practically every woman he met. He didn’t have any real amorous interest in the vast majority of these women - he just wanted to know he could pull them. He’d turn on that megawatt charm, focusing all his attention on his target until he saw he could proceed, then he’d usually move on to the next distraction. It was amazing but humbling to witness - he was SO good at it. It annoyed his bandmates, but we always admired his confidence and bravado. I used to sit back and watch for those who outright rejected him, and then I’d try to find a more subtle way to strike up a conversation. Man, did that used to make him mad. He’d always circle back and give it another go. Reminder, we were just kids.

Jim didn’t appreciate Evan’s moves at all. When Evan turned his attention to the girlfriend, things turned icy. The girlfriend seemed more like some sort of accessory than a life partner, and his reaction was more like how someone would behave if someone touched his motorcycle than if they threatened something near-and-dear. My friend Ken Kurson wrote a stirring eulogy following Jim’s 1996 suicide describing Jim’s litany of girlfriends as “uniformly moronic,” so I guess I sized it up correctly.

I ran into Jim a few more times over the years after Material Issue got signed and launched onto the national scene. We played on a couple bills together and he was never friendly towards me. Although we probably had a lot in common and we definitely had mutual friends, I guess we’d made our mind up about each other. I didn’t care for him personally, and I studiously ignored his band. I generally disliked people in music who acted like preening rock stars, especially ones who I felt hadn’t earned that status. It wasn’t part of our culture.

I’m not proud of these superficial, knee-jerk, and largely inaccurate conclusions. I had lots of opinions back then. Music was tribal, and if something seemed outside of our little bubble, we tended to ignore or, more likely, trash and ridiule it. It wasn’t cool in our world to desire success in music. Of course, I desperately desired success in music; I just pretended like I didn’t. The off-putting thing was acting like a rock star before it happened. Or after it happened, for that matter. Jim didn’t seem to think that way; he played the part of the rock star long before it was in any way his reality.

The last time I saw Jim is the memory that haunts me. I was on tour with The Lemonheads, July of 1994. We played a festival in New Orleans called Zephyrfest, a hot, muddy slog that featured some of the biggest “alternative” bands of the day, The Offspring, Better Than Ezra, and similar acts of the moment. We played in the late afternoon and the backstage vibe wasn’t great, so I decided to bail early and spend some time exploring the city.

Material Issue played earlier in the day. When I boarded the artist transport bus, there was Jim. He sat alone on the back bench of the van, wearing shades. Just the two of us and the driver. I looked right at him and nodded, but he slowly turned away and started out the window. I sat down on the first bench and we rode in silence for the half-hour drive. When the driver stopped at my hotel, I turned and said, “Alright, Jim, see you later.” He just sat there in his shades and didn’t say a word, didn’t look at me. I thought, man, what a dick.

For the next couple years I didn’t think about Jim or his band. I didn’t follow their story enough to know they’d had hard times in the business. Then in the summer of 1996, while on tour with The Lemonheads in Europe, I learned about Jim’s suicide. It hit me hard. I couldn’t stop thinking about Jim sitting alone in that van. I felt guilt, shame, and regret in how I’d read his distance. Could I have handled that differently? Thinking about his struggles, I realized that one of the reasons I didn’t like him was because he embodied things I didn’t like about myself. He and I probably had a lot more in common than I realized. He accomplished so much from his force of will and work ethic. He came off as so cocky and arrogant, but all that was on the surface. If there’s anything I’ve learned over the years, it’s that people who come off as brash and self-confident to a fault are always masking insecurity. Like all of us, he was out there playing a part. I didn’t know the man, and my assumptions said more about me than him.

The Facebook friend reached out because she’d seen the recent Material Issue documentary, Out of Time. I immediately watched it. I can’t recommend it as a great work of cinema, it’s fine - it’s mostly about the band’s rise to (relative) fame and its ultimate failure to break and loss of a record deal. It ends with a series of interviews with Jim’s friends, collaborators, relatives, and bandmates about the tragedy of the loss, and what a shock it was. Nobody could process it, nobody could make any sense of it. It’s really sad, but it offers precious little insight. Interviews with his bewildered parents were particularly heartbreaking.

Of course I know I couldn’t have made any difference in his outcome. Probably nodoby could. As evidenced by the film, his struggles were private. I learned that in the summer of 1994, Material had recently released its third album for Mercury Records, Freak City Soundtrack, produced by Blondie producer Mike Chapman. The band and producer felt they’d nailed it, that it would be the breakthrough album. But it landed with a thud, and resulted in the end of the band’s relationship with Mercury. Lemonheads were riding high in that moment, enjoying the peak of our success. I understand why he wouldn’t want to chat about his career.

I’m no mental health expert, so I won’t speculate as to Jim’s mental state. However, the obvious conclusion is that mentally healthy people don’t commit suicide. Some of the interview subjects in the documentary speculated that the band’s relative failure led to the outcome. They speculated that Jim couldn’t imagine a life of not being a rock star. When the album failed and the label deal ended, he simply couldn’t stand to go on living. Others speculated that the end of a romantic relationship led to his feeling of hopelessness. It was probably all of that and a lot more. Maybe he felt he had nowhere to turn because he’d built his image as a successful person. Maybe he saw success and failure as binary. I’ve made that mistake before. In possibly the hardest to watch moment in the film, Chapman describes messages from Jim attempting to chart a parth forward, which Chapman ignored. He breaks down in tears of regret that he wasn’t there for his friend. I think that is the moment we should all focus on.

Those mid-to-late 90s years were difficult years for me as well. I believe most of us living that life of insecurity struggled with our mental health. Two of my former bandmates in Blake Babies (there were only three of us) have written memoirs about their own mental health struggles. We spent years together in vans and on stages, but I never knew their struggles and they didn’t know mine. It wasn’t something anyone talked about. I’ve since learned that so many of us had depression, anxiety, substance issues, and others have passed away far too young. Losing friends to suicide is something I’ve grappled with in my own creative work, it’s truly hard for me to fathom. I didn’t even like Jim when he was alive, which is why it’s so confounding that I grieve his loss.

I thought about Jim more often when I had to face the end of my own musician career, around age 30.² I totally felt like a failure, and I had no idea what my future held. I never thought about ending my life, but I thought about how that dark headspace can lead you there. I’d spent my teenage and adult years working hard to build a career as a musician; after experiencing some real success, I felt I had very little to show for it. Going back to school as I did felt like crushing failure. It breaks my heart to think that sort of dark mental path could make someone feel so desperate and hopeless that they’d take their own life. That is to say, I understand it far too well.

I’m confident that if I’d pressed a little and struck up a conversation in that van I could have brightened his day, maybe had a chance to change my the impression I had from nearly a decade earlier. Sure he was a jerk, but then again so was I. It’s a reminder for present-day me to shelve my ego when I meet people, and to always remember that on some level, everyone is struggling.

I went back and listened to all of Material Issue’s music, and it’s good. Their music was a high-energy, reverent tribute to an earlier era of music, 60s and 70s pop rock and power-pop that I enjoy. They did it pretty well, sometimes very well, certainly well enough to continue to make a living to the present day. I hope that times have changed to the point that someone in a dark place like that could find help, whether from their friends and family or professional resources. It’s a reminder that those of us who work with creatvie people need to be mindful of the struggles and insecurities that those who do this work carry around. Rather than playing out how I should have handled myself that day in the van, I’ll reflect on how I can do better going forward.

1. For example, my future best friend Ed Ackerson - a friend of Jim’s - worked sound for us at 7th Street Entry later that week. He found us insufferable.

2. Jim passed away at age 32.