Reconstructing a life—particularly one that’s gone off the rails—is an exercise in chasing ghosts. Such ghosts appear throughout Drums and Demons: The Tragic Journey of Jim Gordon, veteran music journalist Joel Selvin’s biography of the legendary rock drummer who backed up frontline stars like John Lennon, the Beach Boys, and Joe Cocker before a voice in his head compelled him to murder his mother, Osa. It is a chilling piece of work.
Raised in Sherman Oaks in a conventionally dysfunctional family, Gordon took refuge in his musical skills, which, Selvin notes, “sent an immediate electric shock wave through his body.” By high school, he was gigging at the Condor, the topless club in San Francisco’s North Beach, before taking to the road with the Everly Brothers. He hit the Los Angeles music scene at the exact moment when record labels stuck in the crooner past of Frank Sinatra and Nat King Cole were seeking to adjust to the 1960s era of singer-songwriters—and, not coincidentally, cash in on their popularity.
Selvin, a former music critic for the San Francisco Chronicle (where, full disclosure, he and I were colleagues for a time), has found his métier as a writer of books about, among other subjects, the Grateful Dead, the Rolling Stones’ infamous 1969 concert at Altamont Speedway, and Bay Area roots label Arhoolie Records (that title coauthored with the company’s founder, Chris Strachwitz). Here, he’s on home turf, using interviews with collaborators and family members to trace Gordon’s career.
In the process, Selvin makes assertions—some arguable—about the drummer’s hitmaking role on recordings such as Glen Campbell’s “Gentle on My Mind” and Carly Simon’s “You’re So Vain.” Certainly, Gordon was renowned for his contributions, but it’s doubtful that his beat alone is what put these songs, or the many other pop hits referenced in Drums and Demons (the discography is formidable), over the top.
The case for Gordon’s impact on Steely Dan’s “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number,” to which he added a tasty jazz intro that quotes Horace Silver’s “Song for My Father,” is more convincing, as is the argument on behalf of his sterling work on the Derek and the Dominos track “Layla”—although that legacy is compromised by the sordid history of the song’s famous piano coda, which Gordon claimed to have composed but apparently lifted without credit from his then-girlfriend, Rita Coolidge.
Still, the heart and soul of Drums and Demons is the drummer’s descent into mental illness, which Selvin recounts in understated, police reporter prose while also indicting a broken mental health system and its frequent failures, then and now, to diagnose and treat sufferers in a timely and effective fashion. When Gordon was treated at a facility in the San Fernando Valley, the medical director concluded that his “primary problems were psychological, and that drug and alcohol issues were secondary,” Selvin asserts.
That said, dosing on tabs of Owsley’s acid and bingeing on speedballs while holed up at Eric Clapton’s aptly named Hurtwood Edge estate was hardly a road map to recovery, as the deaths of too many rockers can attest. Being shuttled in and out of psychiatric centers and rehab facilities that he was able to leave at will made things considerably worse.
Gordon’s slow-motion decline was horrific. He punched Coolidge outside a hotel room and went on to assault other girlfriends as well as his second spouse. As his life spiraled into chaos, he tried to keep things together by playing with a bar band, the Blue Monkeys, in Santa Monica dives.
His auditory hallucinations, however, led him to turn on his mother, a registered nurse who tried to help him. In 1983, he attacked her with a hammer, then stabbed her to death with a butcher knife. He was convicted of second-degree murder, and he died last year at the California Medical Facility in Vacaville at age 77, never having recovered fully from his delusions.
Gordon tried to save his life through music—and succeeded, for a while. Ultimately, however, he could only go so far. Selvin’s knowledgeably reported and researched book portrays a musician who hid his fears in the shadows behind his drum kit; it also reminds us that it’s dangerous and willfully ignorant to imagine that being gifted or successful automatically translates to contentment or emotional stability.•
DRUMS AND DEMONS: THE TRAGIC JOURNEY OF JIM GORDON, BY JOEL SELVIN
Paul Wilner is a longtime journalist, poet, and critic who lives in Monterey County. He is the former editor of the San Francisco Examiner Magazine, San Francisco Chronicle Style section and managing editor of the Hollywood Reporter. His work has been published in the Paris Review, New York Times, ZYZZYVA magazine, Barnes and Noble Review, Los Angeles Times and many other publications.
