DRUMS & DEMONS

A biography of the famed drummer and convicted murderer.

An in-demand session player in Hollywood, Jim Gordon (1945-2023) was one of music’s golden players in the 1960s and ’70s; he played on the Beach Boys’ “Good Vibrations,” Carly Simon’s “You’re So Vain,” John Lennon’s “Power to the People.” Most famously, Gordon was one of the players Eric Clapton assembled for Derek and the Dominoes and the soaring hit “Layla.” “No drummer had a greater career than Jim Gordon,” writes Selvin, author of Altamont and Fare Thee Well. Yet Gordon suffered from severe mental illness, logging time in psychiatric wards until, in a psychotic break, he stabbed his mother to death. It was not his first bout of violence: He savagely beat a former wife, sure that she “was trying to bring evil spirits into their home.” Selvin charts the course of Gordon’s illness, which first began to manifest in the form of voices directing him to harm himself and others. Though a brilliant musician who was “capable of practically superhuman, heroic feats on the drums,” he doubted his abilities and increasingly withdrew into himself. He also began to self-medicate, and it didn’t help that at the “Layla” sessions there were enough drugs to fuel an army of hardcore users, a small matter for someone of Gordon’s “Falstaffian” appetites. The voices in his head eventually merged in the voice of his mother, who, he imagined, directed him to discard his drums, an untenable command. After the murder, Gordon lived the rest of his life in prison, dying 40 years later at the age of 77. Selvin encourages readers to remember Gordon for more than the killing: “Jim Gordon was more than his disease, even though his life and disease were intertwined all along his path.”

A capable work of musical biography, with all its tragic consequences.