The 1970s rock scene could be incredibly accommodating—hospitable, even—to sexual deviants, drug addicts, and alcoholics, but it didn’t know how to deal with someone who was genuinely insane. Drummer Jim Gordon scaled the absolute heights of music: first, as a Hollywood session drummer who played on hit records by the Beach Boys, Sonny & Cher, Glen Campbell, and many more, then as a member of Derek & the Dominos, playing alongside guitarist Eric Clapton as well as in sessions with John Lennon and George Harrison. But Gordon suffered from schizophrenia. His head was crowded with malevolent voices that commanded him ruthlessly.
The rock scene stood by and watched silently as Gordon struggled with his demons, until one day he finally snapped and brutally murdered his mother, whose voice was chief among the tormentors in his head. With that, Gordon became an instant pariah. Nobody visited him in jail or attended his trial. Despite the extraordinary accomplishments throughout his career, he was immediately forgotten when he was shuffled off to prison for the rest of his life, in 1984 at age 38. Gordon died in March 2023, at age 77, at the California Medical Facility, in Vacaville, after spending half his life incarcerated.
The most surprising discovery that I found in researching my new book, Drums & Demons: The Tragic Journey of Jim Gordon, was how ridiculously common schizophrenia is: 1 in 100 in the general population. By comparison, the rate of multiple sclerosis is 1 in 2,500. The streets of our nation are filled with these unfortunate souls, who lead confused and bewildered lives they cannot understand. Gordon was in the rare and fortunate position of being able to afford the best care available, although treatment hardly served him.
The rock scene stood by and watched silently as Jim Gordon struggled with his demons.
The murder he committed shocked and astonished the music community that knew his luminous work with Joe Cocker’s Mad Dogs & Englishmen, as well as with Derek & the Dominos, but Gordon had been suffering in secret for many years. He saw a dozen psychiatrists before he confessed to one about the voices in his head. That psychiatrist whisked him straight into his first residential treatment program. He went in and out of mental hospitals for years, confounding medical professionals with his high-functioning professionalism. Many people thought his problems lay exclusively with drugs and alcohol, which he employed extensively to ease his symptoms. He wasn’t diagnosed with schizophrenia until after he was arrested.
There were strange episodes that went unexplained—such as the loud, intense argument Gordon held with unseen voices in the middle of a Hall & Oates session that sent the other musicians scurrying out of the room—but nobody questioned Gordon’s ability. As long as he kept cutting hit records with the likes of Steely Dan, Johnny Rivers, Gordon Lightfoot, and Carly Simon, his behavior went unquestioned. Gordon masked his turbulent inner life behind an easy smile and genial manner. But he struggled with his disease every day.
Gordon navigated some of Frank Zappa’s most complex and demanding music with near-inhuman ease. In a 1990 interview, Zappa said of him, “If a mental illness strikes somebody and they wind up doing something like this, there’s chemistry involved and that kind of gets lost in the shuffle in a lot of these situations.” He continued, “I’m not defending anybody who decides to go out and commit a murder, but if a chemical reaction in the brain can cause such a thing to happen, it could happen to anybody.”
Joel Selvin is a music critic and the author of several books, including Hollywood Eden and Altamont
