Remember listening to music back in the day? Settle down in a bean bag or stretch out on the couch and read the back of the album cover. You do this enough and over time you’ve developed a mental map of world of rock ‘n’ roll. The studios. The producers. Even the fricking engineers’ names became familiar. Even if there were no lyrics to read this minutiae seemed to be as revelatory as the Dead Sea scrolls. I devoured it as part of the ‘experience’ of music and over time these names lodged in my brain.
One such name that seemed to pop up all the time was Jim Gordon (drums). My initial rock ‘n’ roll dream was to be a drummer. So, I paid attention to these guys. Steve Gadd. Jim Keltner. Jim Gordon. Levon. Keith ‘Fucking’ Moon, man!
Jim Gordon’s name came up most often so I figured he must be good (duh!). But I knew nothing about him. He didn’t have the lifestyle of Keith ‘Fucking’ Moon nor feature in Rolling Stone in any way that would make his name register for anything other than his prolific credits.
A couple months ago I read Drugs and Demons: The Tragic Journey of Jim Gordon by Joel Selvin. (Highly recommended if you’re into this sort of stuff.) Many of you will know the story and I’m not going to retell it here. I was not only stupefied to learn just how prolific, adored (by his peers and fans) and influential (‘he invented rock ‘n’ roll drumming’) he was but I was shocked to learn he murdered his mother with a kitchen knife. And that he spent the rest of his years in prison where he died just two years ago in 2023.
Surfing through the internet after that I learned that I’m a late comer to this story. There are dozens of interviews with fellow drummers on YT and other places which both praise the drummer and condemn the man. And it’s that latter attitude that has left me unsettled. I’m not an apologist for murder. He got what the law says was coming to him. But to simply condemn one of the great geniuses of popular music, a man who dominated the session culture of the 60’s and 70’s, who could always be relied on to deliver exactly the sound and beat the producer or the artist needed, even when they didn’t know it, who was by all accounts a quiet, gentle giant—though these qualities worn off when the drugs really kicked in—but a man who was tortured for years by disembodied voices in his head that drove him to murder, seems unfair.
I personally don’t know what that’s like. But I know people who do. I do have experience with torturous mental health and know of the despair and the desperation this brings. To summarize Jim Gordon’s life as that of a drug-addled murderer is a complete misreading of the man’s life. It seems he was relieved to be put away, where he was unable to harm anyone else. I get that; and I’m glad he found some safety and peace before he died. RIP Jim. You deserve it.
Here is a just the thinnest of thin scraping of Jim Gordon’s work. He started out drumming for the Everly Brothers in the early 60s and then went on to be nearly every group’s and producer’s go-to sticks man for twenty years. He mostly worked alone, as a session drummer but did join Delaney and Bonnie and Derek & the Dominos for a while in the early 70s. And you know that beautiful elegiac piano outro on Layla? Well, that was Jim’s idea. And him playing.
Hope you enjoy.
Missionaries, Mercenaries and Misfits 
Love this, per usual, and funny and super tangential sidenote. The year I was in 8th grade–1971-72–we spent in Berkeley, where my father had a sabbatical. Despite the enormity and area of the Bay Area, a startling number of people confused my father Joel Selbin the chemistry professor–admittedly a very hip and cool looking one–with Joel Selvin the rock music writer despite then looking approximately nothing alike and Mr. Selvin being some 20 years younger than my very young looking father…at some point, someone somewhere introduced them and it transpired that my father was much more amused by all this than Mr. Selvin…¯_(ツ)_/¯
Another time some drunk on a transatlantic plane flight was convinced my father was John Newcombe and my mother some second or third-rate Bond girl and much hilarity, of sorts, ensued
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I can see the Selvin-Selbin mixup but John Newcombe? Newcy (as he’s called here) has a very broad Aussie accent so your pa must look exceedingly like him. Or is he a good impersonator as well?
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You can be counted on for a nuanced and sympathetic interpretation of a topic that has been sensationalized and misunderstood. As music fans, we seem to mythologize and glorify drug and alcohol addiction, as well as the psychiatric illnesses of people like Syd Barrett, Roky Erickson and Skip Spence.
The sad fact is that drug use worsened their conditions and caused more suffering. I have mixed feelings about the current advocacy of psychedelics and ketamine as treatments for depression. I don’t doubt that some folks benefit, but there are people who don’t respond favorably to psychoactive chemicals, just as there have always been “bad drunks” for whom alcohol seems to be an antisocial lubricant.
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ya not wrong….at 16 I saw a picture of Johnny Thunders with syringe & needle in his hat and thought it was the coolest thing I’d ever seen…while I never went quite that far, during my brief punk incarnation I went farther than I should have…I thought it was what you did. Fuck, I have a burn mark on my sweet tele from lighting a cigarette and putting it in the headstock and, because I don’t smoke, forgetting about it….lol, lol, lol. But the drugs was dumb.
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Hi Jon, thanks for those kind words. Yeah you can’t seem to be taken seriously unless you’ve been an addict of some substance. I remember watching a doc on Clapton a couple years ago I had no idea how wasted he was for those years most of the 70s. Godon definitely seemed to lose control of his ability t control the voices in his head the more he used drugs.
I never have been a drug user except for when I lived in Pakiistan and hash was like 3.2 beer….cheap as chips and available everywhere. As on old man now I do enjoy some cannabis oil to help me sleep and relax.
I’ve lost a copule friends to demon alcohol which is bad enough…really sad.
Do rock and roll stars these days still do drugs? Maybe there are just different that the ones we grew up around, but I don’t seem to hear much of heroin addicts i the top artistys. Who knows.
Take care dude.
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