Latest / Booked On Rock with Eric Senich / Rhythms to Ruin: The Shocking Downfall of Rock's Greatest Drummer, Jim Gordon [Episode 195]

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Rhythms to Ruin: The Shocking Downfall of Rock's Greatest Drummer, Jim Gordon [Episode 195] · Booked On Rock with Eric Senich

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All right, So, on this episode of Booked on Rock, author Joel
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Salvin talks about his new book, Drums and Demons, The Tragic Journey of
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Jim Gordon. Jim Gordon has been called the greatest rock and roll drummer of
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all time by the world famous musicians who played with him, John Lennon,
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George Harrison, Eric Clapton, Tom Petty, Franks, Zeppa Steely, Dan
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Ringo, Starr, Harry Nilsen, Joe Cocker, and many more. They
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knew him for his superior playing, extraordinary training and technique, preternatural intuition,
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perfect sense of time, and his big fill the mathematically precise clatter that exploded
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like detonating fireworks on his drum breaks and as best selling author and award winning
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journalist Joel Sullivan reveals the story of Jim Gordon is the most brilliant, turbulent,
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and wrenching rock opera ever. The very chemicals in his brain that gifted
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him also destroyed him. His head crowded with a hellish gang of voices screaming
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at him demanding obedience. Gordon descended from the absolute heights of the rock world,
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playing with the most famous musicians of his generation, to working with a
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Santa Monica dive bar band for thirty dollars a night. Then he committed the
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most shocking crime in rock history, with full cooperation from the Lake Gordon's family,
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and based on his trademark extensive detailed research, Joel Salvin's account is at
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once an epic journey through an artist, monumental musical contributions, a rollicking history
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of rock drumming, and a terrifying downward spiral into unimaginable madness that Gordon fought
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a valiant but losing battle against. One of the great untold stories of rock
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is finally being told. Here is Joel Selvin. Joel, Welcome to the
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podcast. Good to be here. So I want to set up my first
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question by reading an excerpt from your book. You write quote. After his
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crime, Jim instantly became a pariah. Nobody visited him in jail, nobody
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came to his trial. His traumatized daughter cut off all communication all around him.
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Eyes averted. In a music community incredibly forgiving of and accommodating to drug
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casualties and alcoholics, these people had no idea what to do with someone who
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was genuinely crazy. Nobody looked beyond the deadly assault to the years of torment
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and intense struggles fighting the disease. The whole thing was too traumatic, even
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for the casual observer. Jim simply went away and nobody looked back. So
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Jim, at one point was considered to be the greatest drummer in rock and
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roll, But after being sentenced to prison for killing his mother in nineteen eighty
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three, nobody wanted to go near his story, certainly not with any empathy
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or an open mind. Yet you did, and Diversion Books got behind it
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as well. So with that, I'm wondering, One, was that what
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inspired you to write the book? And two? What kind of challenges did
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you face when deciding to write about Jim Well. I was attracted to the
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story from the moment I read the newspaper headlines and wondered what would possibly be
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behind such a horrific fall from grace? And thirty years ago, it was
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a discussion a cub with an editor in New York publishing house i'd done a
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few books with. He said, your next book should be about rock and
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roll and crime, and Jim just popped up in my head immediately. Thirty
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years before, I'd met a couple of people who had Jim's cooperation on a
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biography, and they'd conducted a bunch of interviews with him in prison, maybe
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like eighty eight, eighty nine. I ran across them in like ninety three,
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ninety four, and they were splitting up. They'd given up the project
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and one was moving to Montana and the others moving to Texas. I mean,
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you know what he'll want. But at that time I tried to acquire
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their research, and they were no, couldn't do it. You know,
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one was okay with it, the other was just too personal. Well,
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thirty years later I found one of them again and bingo, I was able
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to acquire this research. So I had this nut, the stack of prison
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interviews with Jim Gordon and some of associates, a people associated with the law
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case, and I was like, I knew I could make a book out
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of it. From there on, it was like a nut that I can
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make the whole thing grow from. Were people afraid to talk about Jim?
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I mean that this is obviously a difficult subject to address, and where people
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were just kind of kept an arm's length from it. Because in this book
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there is there is empathy. There is a force field that was around Jim
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because of the nature of his crime, and people didn't want to touch it.
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They didn't want to deal with it. When I started contacting people to
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do interviews and ask about Jim, a lot of people were perfectly, oh
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my god, Jim, he was the greatest. But there was a lot
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of pushback, a lot of no way, I can't talk to you about
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that. So and initially that was the reaction of the family, was they
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weren't going to participate in this at all. It took Jim's death for them
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to come around and realize that it was going to be okay to talk and
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that a book would actually be a good idea. I believe it was.
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What a year ago. He passed away March of twenty twenty three, YEP,
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after thirty nine years in prison. After going into prison when he was
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thirty eight years old, a friend of mine was telling me a friend of
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mine at work, Chris, was telling me that there was one inmate where
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Jim was that wrote a book about his experiences with Jim? Is that true?
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Do you know anything about that? I'm not familiar with that. I
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talked to people who served with Jim. Everybody knew that they were in the
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joint with Jim Gordon, you know what I mean. But he was a
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remote figure. He had royalties from LAYLA, so he didn't have to have
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a job and work in the prison laundry or something like that. He had
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all the cigarettes he needed at the commissary, and he didn't really belong to
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any prison band. He's sad and occasionally to you know, just be cool,
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but mostly he stayed away from other people. And you know, I
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mean he went to prison. It doesn't cure you. He was still mentally
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ill. He knew that too, right, He didn't want to get out.
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I think he was comfortable there. I think he knew that that was
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the way of minimizing the whole deal. Schizophrenia is crazy erica. I mean,
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it's super common. It's one in one hundred in the general population,
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and of the diagnosed schizophrenics, only fifty percent respond to treatment. So it's
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just a devastating mental illness. And Jim suffered as an extreme version of it
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as you can. He had the so called command hallucinations. The psychiatrists noticed
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the electric hat man. Jim knew it his quite hot, foolty pain.
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And what it is if the voices in your head tell you to do something
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and you resist and don't do it, they give you a headache that gets
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you squirming on the floor, wetting your pants, wishing for mercy. And
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that was controlling Jim Oh for quite a while. I mean, he was
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able to mask and disguise his symptoms and carry on a five functioning professional life
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to such a degree that all the many, many many psychiatrists he saw failed
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to diagnose him properly. They just couldn't see that this guy was schizophrenic.
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I got depressive maybe mood disorder, alcoholic and drug addicted. That also bothered
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them. This is nineteen seventy five, this is the early days of psychiatric
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medicine. They carpet bombed him with these powerful antipsychotics and tranquilizers and he went
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through him like tissue paper. So the medical community, the recovery community,
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the musical community, nobody was really there to help Jim at that point.
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And he was in this pretty much by himself. He knew Brian Wilson and
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worked with him too. They had the same thing. How similar were their
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conditions Brian Schizer schiz Oh yeah, no doubt, Ryan schizophrenic. And here's
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voices and you know, the whole works. I don't think Brian's condition is
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as extreme as Jim's was. And Brian literally responded to psychiatric medicine in the
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last say twenty years or so. I mean when he went out in the
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I guess a late nineties was it, and he was on his feet and
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doing his songs. It was amazing tribute to the power of psychiatric medicine.
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But you still see it in Brian because he has that of talking that's a
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leftover from being hummeled with the stuff from the seventies and eighties that they had
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for you. So there's a lot of this in music. I mean Peter
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Green and Fleetwood, Mac sid Barrett, Pink Floyd, Skip Spence of Moby
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Grape. I just interviewed Cam Cobb. He wrote a book on Skip Spence.
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Excellent book. Damn Cobb amazing his MOBI great book is fantastic. I
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can't wait to get into the skip Spence book. For those are not familiar
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with Jim Gordon's skills and taken aback by the statement that he's called the greatest
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drummer in rock and roll history by many, can you talk about just how
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good he was and why was he so sought after as a session musician.
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There's two things that I want to say about that, okay. First one
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is that Jim had this supernatural talent on the drums. People who heard him
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for the first time couldn't believe what he could do. His ability to precisely
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divide and reallocate time. His intuition for how to use the drums as a
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musical instrument was this beyond any kind of training, right, And I believe
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that that incredible skill is rooted in the same biochemical system as his disease.
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Hey, he got a head around that. Interesting. Here's the second part.
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When Jim played drums, the combination of the report of striking the drum
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set, which is something you feel in every selling your body, not like
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playing the violin or the trumpet. The report of the drums plus the hypnotic
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effect of rhythmic entrainment, the power of the mighty groove, completely erased his
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disease. And when he was playing the drums, he was free, he
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was clear, he was in charge. He was in command. He was
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in a world where everything worked and he was on top of it. When
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he stopped playing drums, all went away. Those are two things that I
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think make Jim like different than somebody who picked up the drums and started playing.
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He just could do things on drums and saw drums and ways that other
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people couldn't. And didn't you know what Jim Keldner told me. Jim Keldner
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told me and he met Jim he was going to a session that he expected
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to be playing. It was a little folk rock group he was in and
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when he got to the studio there was this blue Ludwick drum set already up.
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So he realized, well, I guess I'm not drumming, And he
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sat down right next to the drum set and his life did a pivot.
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He went out the next day and bought a blue Ludwick drum set. And
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what he told me was, he said, I had to learn to play
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like Jim in order to not play like Jim. That's just how amazing his
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work is to other drummer. And Kellner is an amazing drummer too. He's
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a lovely guy. He wept during our interview, Such a soulful cat.
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He loved Jim. They played in the Mad Dogs and Englishman together, and
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and Jim was the power of the groove and and Keltner was the decorator that
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hit the pulse and and and ran around the symbols and stuff. They had.
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They had quite the little double drum act going. You had mentioned in
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another podcast to listen to the isolated drum track Layla Derek and the Domino's Leila,
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and just to get a listen to Jim isolated and see what he can
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do, and just the nuances and just an amazing it's amazing to listen.
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I suggest anybody check it out on YouTube. You could find it there.
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On that track, it's so easy to ignore or miss the drums because the
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stars are so dynamic. I mean, were they more dynamic and rock?
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But then that isolated drum track really shows you how nuanced Jim's part was,
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how how it probes into the very melodies that the guitars are creating, and
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how he's hit surprising beats and the accents you don't expect but they work.
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Again, the intuition is so powerful. There was another story you have in
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the book about his work on Carly Simons You're So Vain, not just drumming,
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but just his his sense of the overall songwriting process and how to create
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the create a better version of that song. Jim's work as a drummer was
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often ended up being like the orchestrator of the track, because he could envision
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things for a record that would create the entire on Beyonce of It Midnight at
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the Oasis, that that samba beat just sealed the deal on that thing.
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BW. Stevenson's My Maria, that's a record. I feel like that somebody
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else played drums on it would have been unremarkable. But in so many of
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cases, Jim is the MVP on the track. And you're right that he
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beat a six inch crater into the head of the snare drum. Well,
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that that was an epic deal. I mean, they'd had all week in
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the studio and they tried out for his Carly's drummer, and then some British
15:58
session got Jim's passing through town. He's playing with a twenty piece orchestra that
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Frank Zappa put to. He's got one night off. He just puts in
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a call to the producer, Richard Perry. Perry says, get down here
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right now. And Carly sees the third drummer that week. She bursts into
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tears and has a beef with Perry about it, but you know he doesn't
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want to hear anything. Perry's worked with Jim on many things. You know
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that Harry Nielsen Records and Manny so Andy Newmark, who was Carly's drummer and
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took the first crack at it. He sat in the drum booth with Jim
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and watched this and he told me about it. He said, the first
16:41
take, everybody knew that it was a different world from what they'd been working
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on all week. And Perry, who was extraordinarily sensitive ear microtonal issues and
16:53
stuff like that, Jim and the rest of the band through about sixty takes
17:00
in five hours, and Andy said, in all that time, Jim never
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made a mistake. Perry, come dial him in, you know, do
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this, do that, need this, need that? But he just did
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it. And at the end of the session the snare drum was cratered like
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it had been, like turned into a bowl. But you can tell,
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I mean, listen to the record. I mean he hits those things so
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hard, and that whole build up under the pre chorus clouds in my coffee,
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clouds in my coffee. Is it just it's the arrangement of the record.
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Everybody else is like playing along with the drums, and that's the opposite
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of what it usually is. I had no idea he played with Tom Petty.
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Was it on just one song? So the Tom Petty sessions took place
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between the mud Crutch and the Heartbreakers. There's a period of time where Tom
18:02
didn't have a band together, and they thought, well, let's do some
18:04
Tom Petty solo sessions. Yeah, So everybody remembers that one because it's Al
18:12
Cooper on keyboards, Emery Gordie from Emmy Lou Harris's Band on bass, tom
18:19
and Mike Campbell from Mudcrutch on guitars, and Jim on drums, and they
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were just pumped as hell. This is the guy from Layla My God,
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right, and he's triple scale. Everybody else is single scale. But nobody's
18:37
complaining. And they cut this track and they go in to listen and it
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sounds fine to everybody, and Jim says to the engineer, do you have
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spare room for me? I could double my drums. Campbell says. He
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looked at Petty like what did he just say? They'd never heard of such
18:56
a thing. I mean the idea of doubling your drum was really everything has
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to be exact. You have to hit it at the exact same place,
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you have to hit it at the exact same time, you have to hit
19:06
it at the exact same volume, at the exact same value. I mean,
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it's just like nuts. And Jim went out and did it one take.
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I mean I'm talking to two or three people that were there that day
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and they remember it like a car crash they were in last week and that
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song, by the way, is called Strangered in the Night Man. It
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showed up on the first album. Yeah, as you would explain in the
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book, it would be a long time before Jim realized that he was mentally
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ill. He was suffering with schizophrenia all while building this amazing career as a
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session drummer dating back to the early sixties working with the Everly Brothers. But
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drums did provide him with relief, as you mentioned, and that was from
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an early age. Can you talk about his childhood. Was he experiencing signs
19:49
of mental illness at that time? It's hard to say. Jim goes both
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ways on it, and sometimes he says, yeah, this is something that
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goes back to his child and other times he says, no, it's not
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so. Jim's what do you call an unreliable narrator on that. There are
20:10
other people that have noticed that noticed things, and of course looking back then,
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everybody says, oh, yeah, well there's this and that Jim had
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what would have been a kind of Ozzie and Harriet upbringing in the San Fernando
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Valley had his father not been a kind of serious alcoholic mother was a nurse,
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his father was an accountant, and problems of growing up in an alcoholic
20:34
family are well known to us now. At that time it was kind of
20:37
a mystery. His dad went into AA when Jim and his older brother were
20:41
like in junior high. So at some point, you know, life at
20:47
home changed a little bit. Although his father was still a very stern discipline
20:51
area and very exacting and you know, suspicious of Jim's career in music.
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I mean that didn't go away for years until Jim was making more money than
21:03
they were. It was not the most pleasant home to grow up in.
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On the other hand, it was a kind of classic southern California fifties upbringing.
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Then he had the classic fifties Southern California girlfriend who became his first wife,
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Jill, who was a dancer, professional dancer. She ended up dancing
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on Dick Clark's after school TV program where the action is. There's a story
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in the book she talks about how she was looking in the window of Jim's
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bedroom and she could see Jim talking to himself, and that's when first time
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she realized maybe something's up. There were a lot of conversations with unseen people
21:48
with Jim. I think he felt a lot of shame. He certainly felt
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like he couldn't reveal himself to people, and put a tremendous amount of effort
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into putting a mask on that he could operate from behind. Every so often,
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the turbulence of his inner life would emerge in some unexpected way, like
22:15
knocking read of COOLi age out or screaming at people in recording sessions that about
22:22
stuff they don't understand. And but for the most part he had it contained.
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He had little harmless smile that he that he wore, uh and and
22:36
people all mentioned his smile, you know, there's an easy, gentle smile,
22:40
and that it was something that he used to sort of hide behind.
22:44
And that's probably more like it common to schizophrenics as a matter of fact,
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little little goofy little smile. I'm harmless, don't don't worry. Uh So,
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that was like huge issue, the shame and the and and the amount
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of effort that he had to put in to keep all that under wraps.
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He started seeing psychiatrists in nineteen seventy five, and it was several years before
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he would mention, and he saw many of them, like you know,
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maybe a dozen, and it would be years before he told one that he
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was hearing voices, and that guy said, you come here right now,
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and put Jim into a residential treatment program. He was there for two or
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three months, nothing happened, and Jim checked out against medical advice, went
23:37
home and took an overd us as sleeping pills, tried to kill himself.
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When he went back to the psychiatric hospital, he told the doctor that the
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voices don't care whether I live or die. I thought it was interesting though
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in the book talk about in the beginning, in those early years, the
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voices in his head were helpful. When I mentioned that the mental health professional
24:00
that I bop, they wigged like he what they were helpful. Now we're
24:07
talking something that's like truly extreme. But then, of course, as time
24:11
goes on that the voice has become angrier and angrier and more and more controlling.
24:17
The book down Rock Podcasts will be back after this. I just listened
24:22
to an interview Mike posted on the Hustle podcast that's one of my favorite podcasts,
24:26
and this was before I read the book. He's talking about how he
24:30
knew Jim through Jim's older brother. I mean, what a small world story.
24:36
Mike Post famous for his legendary TV show themes like mag and p I
24:40
Hill Street Blues so many. Can you talk about how Mike knew Jim was
24:44
from his older brother, Well, he was a you're ahead of Jim in
24:48
high school and Jim wasn't in high school. It was the summer before high
24:52
school, and there was an episode at the Pee Wee Golf where Mike,
24:56
who was working there, had a upbraid obstreperous Jim Gordon and then they some
25:06
time later, Jim's in high school with Mike and they're in a jam situation
25:10
at a party together and Mike, like everybody else or Jim played drums and
25:15
went, wow, you know, I'm in a band that has a job
25:18
three nights a week. Do you want to join? And that's where the
25:22
Everly Brothers heard Jim. So, I mean, Mike and and Jim started
25:25
out together and and Mike was as good a friend as Jim ever. Had
25:30
a lot of big names that went to that high school. Right. Tom
25:32
Scott was in Grant High with Jim and Mike. There are a bunch of
25:37
session musicians in there, guys like Alan Estes and the Barone Brothers, Tom
25:45
Selleck, Tom Selleck, Yeah, Post and sellec were buddies in high school.
25:49
I got to ask you about what Jim does with the plastic orange juice
25:53
bottle on the beach boys. God only knows. But first, can you
25:56
talk about how Jim ended up connecting with Brian Wilson. The Everly Brothers had
26:00
Jim the day after he graduated high school, and so he was in the
26:11
pocket of the Everly Brothers who recorded Warner Brothers. And quickly the Jim Gordon
26:17
thing started to be discovered by people at Warner Brothers, and he started doing
26:22
sessions and real quickly he ran into the other session musicians, and the drummers
26:30
of course recognized the level of intuition that this kid was operating on and just
26:37
were beside himself. Also Los Angeles in nineteen sixty four, the recording scene
26:45
was just starting to really blow up, and there was so much work that
26:51
it wasn't necessarily as competitive and cutthroat as other recording talents might be like,
26:59
so there was adh in geniality, and it was hal Blaine who took Jim
27:04
under his wing. Hal Blaine was the number one first call drummer Hal and
27:08
Earl Palmer, and how was the guy that Brian had been using on Beach
27:14
Boys record since the very beginning practically and Hal brought Jim into Beach Boys sessions
27:22
to do additional percussion during the pet sound session. That's where they he ends
27:29
up on God Only Knows. Yes, I love this story. They sliced
27:32
orange juice bottles. What was the reason? So that they're tuned to four
27:37
different notes? Wow, that is brilliant and clop clop clop clop clop clop
27:41
clop clop follows Hal Blaine's drum part. Of course, Brian just completely flips
27:48
for it and features it in the Midt. Next time you hear God only
27:52
Knows, you're going to hear the orange juice bottles, so they'll just stick
27:56
right out and you never noticed him before, and then you're going to realize
27:59
that Jim Gordon playing plastic orange juice po and some of the standout songs Jim's
28:04
on Crosby Stills, A Nash Marrakesh Express, After Midnight, Let It Rain
28:11
from Clapton, of course, Layla Derek and the Domino's Traffic, Low Spark
28:15
of High Heeled Boys, Steely Dan Ricky, don't lose that number, which
28:18
I didn't know. Harry Nilsen jump into the fire. Carly Simon, you're
28:22
so vain. He's on Joe Cocker's Mad Dogs and Englishman. As you mentioned,
28:26
the range of Jim's work is just astonishing. He was Merle Haggard's favorite
28:32
drummer. He also plays on the Gary Pucket sessions, which are huge sessions
28:37
twenty eight musicians like two bass players, three keyboard players, you know,
28:41
huge string and huge horns, and one drummer. Yeah, Merle Haggard,
28:49
Gary Puckett, Glenn Campbell, Wichita Lineman's that's a genius little drum part that
28:56
you've never noticed on Brushes where he switches makes a stealth switch to sticks in
29:03
the final chorus. It's like an edit you can't hear. How do you
29:08
do it? Bang? It sticks all of a sudden and the whole track
29:11
elevates. Do you have a personal favorite track featuring Jim on drums? I
29:17
love BW. Stevenson's My Maria Love That. I also love Grazing in the
29:22
Grass by the Friends of Distinction. There's a Johnny Rivers album called La Reggae,
29:30
which is not very distinguished for I mean, it's Johnny Rivers and it's
29:36
got boogie woogie flu on it. That was the hit off it. But
29:41
there's some tracks on there. The band is Larry Carlton, Dean Parks,
29:48
Joe Osborne on bass, and Michael o'martin on keyboards and Jim on drums.
29:55
And then there's also these sessions from nineteen sixty seven with the Everly Brothers that
30:00
I ran across. Now, nineteen sixty eighty seven, the Everly Brothers were
30:03
at an all time low ebb. I mean, nobody cared what the Everly
30:06
Brothers were doing, and they did an album, and the band is Jim
30:12
on drums, Larry Nechtel on bass, and he might have been the most
30:17
talented of all those guys, Glenn Campbell and James Burton on guitar, and
30:22
Billy Preston on oregon and it is as ridiculous as it sounds. They're just
30:27
murder So is it when he's working with Clapton and Derek and the Dominoes that
30:32
we start to see signs of Jim's mental decline, Because you're right about he's
30:36
getting moody and something he said that pissed off Eric, and there was an
30:38
incident where he's chasing somebody down with a knife. Is this when things really
30:42
start to go downhill? Yeah? I think the seams were beginning to stress
30:47
there. Those guys were also just using such an enormous amount of drugs and
30:52
alcohol that caused all kinds of personality problems in the group and personal problems for
30:59
all the members. All of them was strung out on junk and drunk all
31:03
day. So you know that contributed to everything, including Jim kind of like
31:10
seeing his disease emerge more prominently when he got back to Los Angeles after the
31:18
whole Derek and the Dominoes episode was over. He got sober, went to
31:26
AA meetings, really tried to walk the straight and narrow, got married a
31:32
second time, but it didn't work out. The disease was too powerful,
31:37
and it's bit by bit took away everything that he had. It took away
31:42
his marriage, it took away his houses, it took away his cars,
31:47
it took away his relationship with his daughter. But his mother didn't think he
31:52
had any psychological problems. She thought it was because of the drugs and alcohol.
31:56
Somehow she was convinced that that Jim's problem were strictly with drugs and alcohol.
32:00
She didn't really recognized the signs of mental illness and her son, and
32:07
of course it was such a peculiar and difficult situation. She was one of
32:13
the chief voices in Jim's head hectoring him. So, for instance, he
32:19
would be at her house having dinner and she'd be fussing over him, wondering
32:23
why he's not eating the turkey, you know, it's his birthday dinner or
32:27
something, and inside his head he hears her voice saying, you eat that
32:31
and you're going to die. So Jim was just hugely confused and bewildered by
32:39
this horrible situation, and his mother had no idea what was going on.
32:44
Really Before I forget, there's a fascinating story in the book behind that ending
32:46
codea on Layla and how Jim plays a role in that. Can you talk
32:51
about that? Lapton got back, well, the whole band got back to
32:53
Miami after they'd recorded the record, there'd be some post production and mixing,
32:59
and wasn't satisfied with Layla, and he remembered a piano piece that he had
33:04
heard Rita Coolidge and Jim play in Olympics Studios in London during a Delaney and
33:10
Bonnie session. A couple of years before, Reid had given him a tape
33:15
of it, and it was a piece that the two of them had written
33:17
together when they were living together in Hollywood. Clapp remembered this and asked him
33:23
to play it on piano and thought it would make like an extended code of
33:29
the producer Tom Dowd called it the piano Exit. So Jim did a version
33:32
of it, sort of ham fisted, and then Whitlock, the keyboard player
33:38
from Derek Londminos, did a second version, and Dowd made a composite of
33:44
the two versions and put it on the end. And this is interesting because
33:47
you know, when the album finally came out in this country, after the
33:55
tour was over and everything, they put out Laila as a single without the
34:00
piano exit, just the three and a half minute version, and it stalled
34:05
on the charts, like somewhere in the mid charts and just disappeared. A
34:09
year and a half later, and I don't really know why the company decided
34:14
to try again with a Leila single, only this time they included the piano
34:17
exit and made the whole seven minutes go on, and this time it was
34:22
a hit, went all the way to the top ten. So there was
34:24
something about that that was insightful of Clapton to see that that thing was needed,
34:34
that kind of majestic framing that that piano thing does. But then,
34:37
of course Clapton didn't include Rita Coolidge in the copyright, and nobody bothered to
34:45
tell her about it. She had to hear it on the radio and green
34:49
bloody murdered. Oddly enough, that had happened to her earlier, when she
34:52
and Bonnie Bramlett wrote a song called Groupie Superstar, which was not only something
34:59
she sang on on stage every night with Mad Dogs and the Englishmen, but
35:02
the Carpenters made into a substantial hit record. It was credited, however,
35:07
to Leon Russell and Delaney Bramlett, so she never saw a penny from that
35:13
one either. Yeah, the song is credited to two people only, Clappton
35:16
in Jim Gordon. Jim must have made a lot of money off the publishing
35:20
right made him the wealthiest prisoner in the California Penal Authority. Yeah, I'm
35:25
sure as we get into the seventies we see Jim's mental state, becoming a
35:30
danger to others. There's a chilling story in the book of his wife.
35:32
I think this is his second wife that you just mentioned, and he's staring
35:37
her down. She comes home and he's just sitting there staring her down,
35:38
accusing her of bringing evil spirits into their home. And you said this was
35:45
his psychotic break, right, Oh, I'm sure that the episode would be
35:50
to Cooliers and the episode with Chris O'Dell were some kind of those fissures at
35:58
this point. Now he's having like full scale hallucinations, you know, you're
36:04
trying to make the devil's triangle and bring evil spirits. And the violent outburst
36:12
was was truly brutal. So that's a point where Jim really came off the
36:19
rails, and I don't think he ever got back on. He clearly yearned
36:24
for female attachments, but schizophrenics really can't bond with other people, and so
36:32
relationships are just impossible. And Jim had very few friends, very few none,
36:45
really, and the relationships were brief and throught, and before long they
36:57
didn't exist at all. Yeah, I just kept his distance from everybody,
37:00
right, living in a condo. He was not playing music anymore, not
37:06
going out of the condo anymore than the neighborhood liquor store, gain and weight,
37:10
using a lot of coke, eating delivered pizzas, and you know,
37:17
just being mentally ill by himself. But it's interesting you say that the liquor
37:22
and the drugs actually helped with the voices and helped to eliminate them. I
37:27
think that the liquor and the coke were his most effective coping mechanisms. The
37:35
liquor he could get to the point where he wasn't unconscious, but not far
37:43
away, and he wouldn't hear the voices, so he could go eat or
37:51
do things that the voices wouldn't let him do. And I was wondering about
37:54
the cocaine thing myself. That just didn't seem indicated. Now your head's filled
37:59
with voices, would you want to use cocaine? But one of the psychiatrists
38:01
I talked to he said, oh no, no, no, it would
38:05
normalize the dopamine. Yeah, so he should have been on prescribe medication.
38:13
Well, he was on that other stuff too, howl dooll forty five milligrams
38:17
a day, tranquilizers, you know, whatever the psychiatrist gave him, he
38:22
took and it had no apparent effect. One of his doctors I talked to
38:30
he said that he had prescribed forty five milligrams of how doll while Jim was
38:36
in treatment in three point fifteen milligram doses, and they misunderstood it and gave
38:45
him three forty five milligram doses. And when the shrink heard about this,
38:50
he rushed to the hospital, figuring he'd see something. This guy would be
38:52
a zombie. He says that not only was he not a zombie, but
38:59
there was no parent therapeutic effect from the medicine. So Jim had some kind
39:05
of metabolism that was energized by all this biochemical stuff that was going on in
39:10
his life. The book Down Rock Podcasts will be back after this. That
39:17
June of seventy four tour with Southern Hillman and Furrey JD. Salder of Eagles
39:23
fame, Richie Ferret, Buffalo Springfield. Hillman was famous with the Birds,
39:30
the Flying Burrito Brothers, So talk about this. There's a story where they're
39:36
in a car together and he asked them to stop. He's got to get
39:38
out and take a leak, and he doesn't come back like he's like racing
39:43
with imaginary people or something getting into a starter's position like a sprinter, and
39:49
when a truck comes by, running alongside the truck to see how long he
39:52
can keep up with it. And really there's nothing that anybody could have done
39:58
to help him at that point. Plus they did, they weren't sure what
40:00
was going on. A lot of people said that that. And you know,
40:07
Mike Post and Jim's first wife read the book. Now, what they
40:15
told me was that they could They both said the exact same thing, that
40:22
they can stop feeling guilty about not having helped Jim anymore. That Jim,
40:29
they came to understand, was beyond help said, and the voices in his
40:32
head were getting worse, and ultimately it leads to that tragic day in early
40:37
June nineteen eighty three. To understand where Jim's mind is at this point?
40:42
Can you talk about that? What state of mind is he in in June
40:45
of nineteen eighty three, Well, he'd been out of the music business pretty
40:49
much for five years, living by himself, without friends and without any kind
40:55
of social contact, just having this disease, this rampage, just making his
41:02
life a hieronymous Bosh hellscape and chief among the tormentors was the voice of his
41:12
mother, and this spiral out of control. Over the years. There was
41:17
all sorts of attempts at treatment, residential treatment and otherwise. And there was
41:22
a point where he actually was like on the good foot enough to do a
41:29
tour with Jackson Brown. But he really couldn't hang on to his sanity.
41:35
And that's the truth, and he knew it, and he had this sense
41:39
of shame or guilt or whatever it was. He wasn't going to show people
41:45
his craziness. That was important. It was also important to play drums.
41:53
So he played in this little band in a garage for a while. They
42:00
didn't happen anything. And then another little band, and at the time of
42:06
his arrest, he was working with some guys in a blues band that had
42:09
a regular gig on Monday nights in this downtown Santa Monica and he was pulling
42:15
down forty bucks a night for four sets. And that was the time where
42:23
he wasn't besieged. You know, the guys in the band with him had
42:30
no idea that anything was wrong with Jim. They thought he They just thought
42:32
he was quiet. Reading through these chapters, I can only imagine how hard
42:37
it would be to get through each day for this guy, and it was
42:44
for his mother. It had to be heartbreaking. There's a letter she writes
42:46
to him that I almost teared up reading it. She was sad that he
42:52
didn't stick around for his birthday party. She wrote, I hope you will
42:54
stop by for your presence and some cake and a little visit. Ben Barrett
42:59
called for you about nine thirty am. I gave him your home phone.
43:02
I hope that was okay. I don't have the number of your exchange.
43:07
Jim. I love you and would do anything I could for you if I
43:09
just knew what to do. Wow. But he manages to get studio work
43:15
despite the illness and some pretty scary incidents. But he's continuing to get work.
43:22
There is a story. I think it's when he was in the studio
43:24
for a Paul Anka song in nineteen seventy nine. I think that pretty much
43:29
reached the end of the road at that point. Can you talk about what
43:31
happened there? Well? Dylan called he wanted Jim to go on tour,
43:37
and Jim really wanted to play with Bob Dylan. That sounded like just what
43:42
he needed. But the voices wouldn't let him, and in fact, they
43:45
made him hang up the phone, and he was furious, so he called
43:52
paul Anka. He knew Anka from mom back rec sessions that they've done together,
43:57
and uh Anka had a job for him, a Vegas run. So
44:02
Jim went out to Vegas to play with paul Anka for a couple of weeks,
44:07
and he set up his drums for the first rehearsal the sound check of
44:09
the opening night, and he hit the drums once and the voices told him,
44:15
you hit it again and you're dead. So he looked at the music
44:20
director and said, I have psychological problems and I can't do this, and
44:27
they got Anchor on the phone and Anchor said fine, and Jim went back
44:30
to Los Angeles and that's pretty much the end of his professional career. He
44:37
went into residential treatment almost immediately and had a horrible experience and just was spinning
44:46
out of control. Between seventy nine and that fateful night in nineteen eighty three,
44:51
what is Jim doing, Where's he living? How's he getting by?
44:53
The voices won't let him stay in any one place, moving from Oakwood,
45:00
the place across the street from Oakwood. These were all sort of temporary residences
45:04
in the valley Burbank, and this condo and that condo. This car,
45:09
that car it was, you know, and not a nice car. They
45:14
had to sell his Mercedes. And working, no, not working, seeing
45:22
his daughter not so much, no trying to on occasion, but really,
45:28
you know, just holding up. And you'd go out to the bar in
45:35
Burbank called Chadney's every so often there was a sort of a session musician hangout,
45:39
and sometimes he'd just sit around and have drinks. Sometimes he'd sit him
45:44
with the band. But there wasn't any music career. It was a struggle
45:49
every day. And then that safful night, June third, nineteen eighty three,
45:54
and he just couldn't fight the voices anymore. He killed his mother.
46:00
I mean it's graphic. First he's a hammer, then he stabbed her.
46:05
What was in his mind? What was the reason he did it? Like
46:08
the voices were telling him, if he did this, the voices would stop.
46:14
Ah, how do you explain the reasoning of someone who's mentally ill.
46:20
But it had not occurred to him to kill his mother, and it occurred
46:25
to him to kill himself. And that's much more common with schizophrenics. Schizophrenics
46:31
are rarely violent towards other people, but they're frequently who harmed themselves. And
46:40
the thought apparently occurred to Jim to kill his mother, and he couldn't get
46:46
loose to the thought. And as far as I can tell, she was
46:53
dead in forty eight hours. At one point she was going to move to
46:57
Seattle, so she would have been further away him in but didn't. What
47:01
was that about. She had planned to relocate to Seattle, where Jim's older
47:07
brother had an in law suite mapped out for her. He was a banker
47:15
and had a wife and stepchild up there, and she had been living mostly
47:23
in Faho, where she'd had a place, but her partner died and she
47:30
moved back to San Fernando for a little bit to take care of his estate
47:35
and go back into her old house, which she hadn't sold and was living
47:40
there. She and Jim were not really in touch at that point, other
47:46
than her voice in Jim's head. I don't think they even spoke on the
47:52
phone. I didn't know. After reading the book, I now know that
47:55
after committing this crime, he went to the bar to hang out like just
48:02
it was like any other night. I talked to somebody who ran into Jim
48:07
at Chad News that night, and he said he wondered how he got the
48:10
cuffs of his khakis all muddy. He had made an attempt to go there
48:15
during the day and there was a neighbor that saw him. He didn't know
48:20
who this person was, but he saw Jim. He's knocking on the door.
48:25
He went by in the afternoon. She wasn't home, and the Osa's
48:31
screams reported to the police by the neighbor, and the police responded pretty quickly.
48:39
It took them a while, but not that long. The fingered Jim.
48:45
They found a letter from Jim's brother that talked about issues, and they
48:52
found Osa's notebook which had the things you were reading in it. And then
48:58
they went over to Jim's house about six in the morning, and he drained
49:00
a couple of bottles of vodka after drinking Long Island iced teas at the bar.
49:08
So I think he had a three point three when they put him into
49:14
the jail bug alcohol count. I mean, I'm close to unconscious, but
49:21
yeah. They found him and curled up under his coffee table and they pushed
49:25
open the door and he was crying and whining, and he just said,
49:29
I did it. I did it. I'm sorry I did it, but
49:31
she was torturing me. You have no idea I want to ask about the
49:36
trial. Now, only one person from Jim's music past shows up, Jay
49:39
Osmond, the drummer of the Osmon Brothers, who first met Jim when they
49:43
were playing the Andy Williams show together in Las Vegas almost fifteen years before.
49:47
He pleaded not guilty due to insanity. What was the judge's ruling? And
49:52
I'm curious as to what your thoughts are about the ruling? Was it just
49:57
in your mind? So the whole thing was a miscarriage of justice of immense
50:00
proportions. Again, I mean the systemic failures that Jim experienced with the medical
50:09
world, the recovery world, the musical world, and now the legal world.
50:15
This is just incredible. But the year before Jim went to court,
50:21
the California Electorate and their great wisdom had passed some Reagan era law and order
50:27
thing that redefined so much about how the justicism could apply sentencing. And one
50:36
of the things they did was make insanity please almost impossible in order to qualify
50:45
for an insanity Lee in nineteen eighty three, the standard was you had to
50:51
not know what you were doing when you did it. Jim clearly knew what
50:58
he was doing, so he didn't qualify at all, and he was convicted
51:04
of second degree murder no jury, and the judge was the judge knew what
51:12
the situation was, and he knew that Gym was not responsible for his actions,
51:16
knew Jim was insane. Six psychiatrists testified to that effect during the trial,
51:22
five of them for the prosecution. But he knew that Jim didn't have
51:34
the ability to premeditate his crime, so he gave him a sixteen year to
51:38
life degree sentence for a second degree murder. This is not a horrible sentence,
51:43
really, but of course Jim just stayed in. Really, what should
51:49
have happened is he should have been diverted from the criminal justice system into private
51:55
mental care, because here was somebody who could actually ford private mental care and
52:02
be taken care of in in in the most comfortable and and and and the
52:07
and and the best ways, and and and and But you know the funny
52:10
thing, Erica, it's just astonishing to me going through all of this stuff.
52:21
Jim was the beneficiary of so little compassion and understanding. I get it.
52:30
I mean, the crime was so horrifying, and it came out of
52:35
the blue because he'd been so successful at concealing his illness. Uh, but
52:42
really, nobody ever stood back and said, wait a minute, what's going
52:46
on here? How did this happen? Where did this come from? That's
52:53
the truth. And and and nobody did that. Uh. I guess Jay
52:58
Osmond was there, you know, to like just show some sympathy, But
53:05
that was it. I mean, and and and and there the mechanism of
53:12
our society, you know, the legal world and the medical world, they
53:16
totally failed Jim totally. No, no nobody gave him any breaks. The
53:23
book is called Drums and Demons, The Tragic Journey of Jim Gordon. It's
53:27
out now. Is this like the most intense book you've ever written, because
53:30
you've written about quite a few different topics in music. Is this the toughest
53:37
one you've ever had to do? Oh? Yeah? And I like to
53:40
get into the dark end of things, you know, Uh, the Hell's
53:49
Angels and Altamont and and the gangsters and Burns and and uh, the whole
53:54
dark underbelly of the of the l A scene with the Hollywood and you know,
54:00
but that to tell you the truth, Eric, as I fell into
54:06
this, as I got more understanding of the situation and more information, I
54:13
became very emotionally involved, and I really felt for Jim in a deep and
54:19
profound way because nobody else did. They just and then I would talk to
54:24
people who knew him and they would just glow, like Van dyke Park said,
54:30
Oh Jim, he was the spree de Corps. So there was some
54:35
wonderful energy in young Jim that was left behind, and you could hear it
54:40
on every record he's on. There's no record that Jim plays on that he
54:45
doesn't leave something special. But here's this guy that was just never understood and
54:55
never officiated for his cormat and for his terrible circumstances, and it completely ruined
55:08
his reputation. I mean, that's a stupid thing to say. It sounds
55:12
stupid, but really, this was one of the greatest drummers in rock who's
55:16
the list of credits is unparalleled, and he's been robbed of that reputation by
55:23
his crime. I'm giving you an example. Rolling Stone that Parragon of journalistic
55:30
Excellence has a list of rock's greatest drummers out there on the internet. Jim
55:37
is number fifty nine. Number fifty eight is Sheila e Okay, I like
55:45
Glamorous Life, although I think that's mostly friends on drums, but she does
55:50
not rate above Jim Gordon as a drummer's though. He's a pariah and as
55:57
such he's been robbed of his accomplishments. And one of the things that the
56:01
book has done is it has restored Jim's reputation as a musician to a degree.
56:08
And people look at that playlist in the back and they go, oh
56:12
my god. He played on the Beat goes on, He played on different
56:15
drum he played Meltor May session. Oh my god, I didn't know.
56:20
He was on Bird's Records and Buffalo Spring right, he was on the first
56:22
Neil Young solo session. I mean, ah, so yeah. I mean
56:29
he left his mark on music history, and it's an indelible mark. It's
56:34
for something very special. The people that worked with him, what do they
56:37
say about Like, what does Clapton say about Jim Gordon? What has he
56:39
said about him over the years. Jim Gordon's name has never come out of
56:44
Clapton's lips since then. He accepted all those Grammys without saying thanks to his
56:49
co author. Well, we know he died in prison March twenty twenty three,
56:52
but he was up for parole in nineteen ninety one. Jim skipped his
56:55
parole, and he skipped it and made sure that he couldn't be paroled anyway,
57:00
you know, stop taking his meds or skip his talk therapy appointment.
57:07
He didn't want out. He understood that this was probably the easiest place for
57:12
him to be as crazy as he was. Well, you already answered the
57:15
question I was going to ask, which is what do you hope the book
57:19
accomplishes? Which you feel it already has started to change the narrative on Jim
57:23
Gordon. How do you hope Jim will be remembered? I think it has
57:28
already changed the narrative as you say that again, the extraordinary accomplishments and the
57:36
struggle that he underwent to try and stave off this inevitable the triumph of the
57:46
disease. It's kind of private, but I was talking with his first wife,
57:53
Jill, about Jim dying, and it was not it was another horror
58:00
show. Just let's leave it at that. And what she said was she
58:05
wondered whether Jim one or the voices one, and she said, I think
58:12
the voice is won. And he was how old when he passed? He
58:15
was seventy seven. He'd spent half his life in prison. If there was
58:19
a way to go back in time, would there have been something that could
58:22
have been done to prevent all of this from happening. I'm not sure there
58:28
was help for Jim. Okay, this is a really fernicious disease, and
58:36
I'm pretty convinced it doesn't get much worse than the case Jim had. When
58:42
I talked to mental health professionals to describe as symptoms, they're all really impressed.
58:47
I mean, this is a certifiable person that should be institutionalized and cared
58:57
for. Clearly couldn't care for himself under any medical conditions. So no,
59:02
I'm not really sure. Brian really he squeaked by and it was never inevitable
59:09
for that. Brian's story has got plenty of tragedy in it too. I
59:14
guess Melinda has a lot to do with that. But Brian clearly was not
59:20
as ravaged by his mental illness as Jim was. Jim was bombarded by a
59:27
condition the likes of which you just don't rarely see. Drums and Demons,
59:31
The Tragic Journey of Jim Gordon by Joel Salvin is out now through Diversion Books.
59:37
You can get it whoever books are sold. Also make sure you visit
59:42
Joel's website Joelsalvin dot com. And there's also a Drums and Demons playlist up
59:47
on Spotify, about one hundred songs, about four and a half hours,
59:50
so if you got a spare afternoon check it out. All right, Well,
59:52
we will put that up on the show notes page too so people can
59:55
access it there as well. Joel Salvin, thank you. I really love
1:00:00
talking about Jim. It's an important story for many reasons, and I really
1:00:07
thank you very much for taking the time to have me as a guest.
1:00:16
That's it. It's in the books.