Drums & Demons: The Tragic Journey of Jim Gordon

by Joel Selvin

Overview

“Jim was one of the rare players who danced on the edge. . . . I finished this book slack-jawed, trying to come to grips with this amazing, tragic story.” —Mickey Hart, Grateful Dead

“When people say that Jim Gordon is the greatest rock ‘n’ roll drummer who ever lived, I think it’s true, beyond anybody.” —Eric Clapton

Eric Clapton wasn’t the only musician who believed in Jim Gordon’s talent. Just ask any of the world-famous musicians who also played with him—John Lennon, George Harrison, Tom Petty, Frank Zappa, Steely Dan, Ringo Starr, Harry Nilsson, Joe Cocker, and many more. But as bestselling author Joel Selvin reveals in Drums & Demons, the story of Jim Gordon is the most wrenching rock opera ever.

This riveting narrative follows Gordon as the very chemicals in his brain that gifted him also destroyed him. An undiagnosed schizophrenic, Gordon descended from the absolute heights of the rock world to working with a Santa Monica dive-bar band for $30 a night. And then he committed the most shocking crime in rock history.

Based on extensive research, Drums & Demons is at once an epic journey through an artist’s monumental musical contributions, a rollicking history of rock drumming, and a terrifying downward spiral into unimaginable madness that Gordon fought a valiant but losing battle against. One of the great untold stories of rock is finally being told.

“[Selvin] brings Gordon’s darkness into the light.” —Questlove

“This affecting account sheds new light on one of rock’s most complicated figures.” —Publishers Weekly

“Selvin . . . presents Jim Gordon’s complex, tragic story fully in the round, as only he can.” —Mick Wall, author of Life in the Fast Lane and When Giants Walked the Earth

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781635769791
Publisher:	Diversion Publishing
Publication date:	12/20/2024
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	302
File size:	4 MB

About the Author

Joel Selvin a San Francisco–based music critic and author known for his weekly column in the San Francisco Chronicle, which ran from 1972 to 2009. Selvin has written more than 20 books covering various aspects of pop music—including the No. 1 New York Times bestseller Red: My Uncensored Life in Rock with Sammy Hagar—and published articles in Rolling Stone, the Los Angeles Times, Billboard, and Melody Maker. He has written liner notes for dozens of recorded albums and appeared in countless documentaries. His most recent books are Sly and the Family Stone: An Oral History and Hollywood Eden: Electric Guitars, Fast Cars and the Myth of the California Paradise.

Editorial Reviews

10/30/2023

Music critic Selvin (Sly & the Family Stone) delivers a sensitive account of the life and legacy of Derek and the Dominos drummer Jim Gordon (1945–2023), who suffered from schizophrenia and murdered his mother in 1983. Once deemed the “greatest drummer” in rock and roll by Eric Clapton and Ringo Starr, Gordon grew up in California and made a name for himself playing with the Everly Brothers as a teenager. Though troubled by “chatter inside his head” since childhood, Gordon found music to be therapeutic. “The drums anchored Jim’s world,” Selvin writes in one of the book’s many immersive passages. “The rackety report resounding through his body, the fire bell clanging of the cymbals, the hypnotic, rhythmic entrainment of the all-powerful groove—they silenced his unquiet mind.” But Gordon descended further into schizophrenia as his career accelerated in the late 1960s and ’70s—accompanied by punishing concert tours, rampant drug and alcohol abuse, and rehab stints—and he began hearing voices demanding that he commit violent acts. A recent change in California state law deprived him of an insanity defense in his mother’s killing, and he was convicted of second-degree murder and spent the rest of his life in prison. Without downplaying the gruesome details of Gordon’s crime, Selvin gracefully portrays the musician as “more than his disease.” He concludes with a heartrending scene from 1993, when Gordon learned in his prison cell that he’d won a Grammy for “Layla,” which he cowrote with Clapton. This affecting account sheds new light on one of rock’s most complicated figures. (Feb.)

Publishers Weekly

Praise for Drums & Demons:
"When people say that Jim Gordon is the greatest rock 'n' roll drummer who ever lived, I think it's true, beyond anybody."
—Eric Clapton

"Jim was one of the rare players who danced on the edge and knew the secrets. . . Yes, Jim was healing himself when he drummed, but when he stopped the voices started again. . . I finished this book slack-jawed, trying to come to grips with this amazing, tragic story."
—Mickey Hart, Grateful Dead

"Jim Gordon is one of the most important drummers in American rock history – he kept the beat for everyone from Buffalo Springfield to the Beach Boys to Jackson Browne to John Denver to Randy Newman. He is also a man whose mental illness and substance abuse sent him spiraling into tragedy. Joel Selvin's Drums & Demons, both painstaking and painful, brings Gordon's darkness into the light."
—Questlove

"When you could get Jim Gordon on your album you were really something. I mean he played with EVERYBODY. . . We were able to get Jim to play on the Alice Cooper Goes to Hell album when he was the most sought-after drummer in rock 'n' roll. We really, really liked Jim very much except he got to a point where he was talking to himself a lot during takes, we could hear him muttering to himself."
—Alice Cooper

"Based upon my interactions with Jim Gordon, author Joel Selvin accurately portrays Jim's genius as well as his development into the living hell he gradually occupied. Jim was always soft-spoken, and the first one to arrive at a session. His drums spoke for him, and he had a subtle but commanding presence. Years later, when he was scheduled for a session where I was producing a commercial, he arrived forty-five minutes late, was surly, and uninvolved. Someone else had taken over the Jim we knew and loved, and that was the last time I saw him."
—Mark Lindsay, Paul Revere & The Raiders

"I loved Jim Gordon like a brother and am grateful for Joel Selvin's unstinting notice of Gordon's luminescence, which adds great leavening to this heartbreaking work of staggering genius."
—Van Dyke Parks

"Selvin delivers a sensitive account of the life and legacy of Derek and the Dominos drummer Jim Gordon, who suffered from schizophrenia and murdered his mother. . . [but was] once deemed the 'greatest drummer' in rock and roll by Eric Clapton and Ringo Starr...Without downplaying the gruesome details of Gordon's crime, Selvin gracefully portrays the musician as 'more than his disease'...This affecting account sheds new light on one of rock's most complicated figures."
—Publishers Weekly

"Joel Selvin is one of the Big Beasts of American music writing. He presents Jim Gordon's complex, tragic story fully in the round, as only he can. Biography of the Year!"
—Mick Wall, author of Life in the Fast Lane and When Giants Walked the Earth

Praise for the Work of Joel Selvin:

Sly & The Family Stone: An Oral History:

"A first-hand account of both the kaleidoscopic talent that drove Stone to the top and attracted so many people to him, and the madness that he soon descended into and never truly returned from. . . . It amounts to a definitive history of one of the rock generation's greatest and most tragic artists."
—Jem Aswad, Variety, The Best Music Books of 2022

"As disturbing and chilling a version as you'll ever find of the ‘dashed '60s dream' narrative: idealism giving way to disillusionment, soft drugs giving way to hard, ferment to rot."
—David Kamp, Vanity Fair

"The musical trajectory of Sly & The Family Stone, and especially its namesake and leader, Sly Stone (born Sylvester Stewart), makes even the most shocking episode of Behind the Music look like Nickelodeon programming. Esteemed music journo Joel Selvin chronicles the good, the bad, the ugly (and the really ugly)."
—Bob Ruggiero, Houston Press

Hollywood Eden: Electric Guitars, Fast Cars, and the Myth of the California Paradise:

"Hollywood Eden brings the lost humanity of the record business vividly back to life. . . . [Selvin's] style is blunt, unpretentious and brisk; he knows how to move things along entertainingly. . . . Songs about surfboards and convertibles had turned quaint, but in this book, their coolness is restored."
—New York Times

"A jukebox musical of a book. . . . If Altamont marked the premature end of the 1960s, Hollywood Eden is the decade's origin story, capturing the lingering 1950s and the transition in Southern California music from surfing and hot rods to the singer-songwriters of the canyons."
—San Francisco Chronicle

"What Selvin does so well is focus on a specific community and what made it work. . . . Selvin took a similar approach in . . . Summer of Love. Here he zooms in tighter on less trodden ground, with more revelatory results."
—Los Angeles Times

"Forget the subtitle, which is its own myth. The book is in stray facts no one else would dig up, yet alone think of publishing . . . and, in this ten-years-on-the-strip tale of white people coming out of University High in Los Angeles and making records, the way Selvin can cut right down to what really matters, over and over again."
—Greil Marcus, Los Angeles Review of Books

Fare Thee Well: The Final Chapter of the Grateful Dead's Long, Strange Trip:

"Examines every sad twist, turn, and betrayal involved in the Dead's various offshoot groups leading up to their 2015 Fare Thee Well reunion."
—Rolling Stone

"Selvin smartly steers clear of tie-dyed '60s mysticism, offering instead a reported look at the lives of the remaining ‘core four' members. . . . how the four men grappled with their own ambitions."
—Washington Post

"A great and inspiring story."
—Marty Balin, founder of Jefferson Airplane

"Illuminating, astounding, and accurate, Fare Thee Well is a remarkable account of the successes and failures by the talented, individualist remaining members of the Grateful Dead since the death of their leader, Jerry Garcia."
—Steve Miller, founder of the Steve Miller Band

"Fare Thee Well is a masterful summation of the agonies, trials, and tribulations that beset the Grateful Dead after Jerry Garcia passed away."
—Sam Cutler, author of You Can't Always Get What You Want: My Life with the Rolling Stones, the Grateful Dead, and Other Wonderful Reprobates

"As always, Joel Selvin boldly goes where others fear to tread."
—Robert Greenfield, author of Dark Star: An Oral Biography of Jerry Garcia

"An enthusiastic but clear-eyed and enjoyably gossipy piece of modern rock history."
—Publishers Weekly

Altamont: The Rolling Stones, the Hells Angels, and the Inside Story of Rock's Darkest Day:

"Boy, did I live in a bubble—or something. I had no idea the extent of bruising under the melting rainbow. Selvin is revealing our tricky gestation in the weird womb of sixties rock. Frightening."
—Grace Slick, member of Jefferson Airplane

"An account that moves at movie pace, Selvin cuts through woolly cop-out rhetoric, offering clarity and detail . . . Altamont was a tragedy in the classical sense—a disaster born of hubris and folly—and Selvin nails every last shred of both."
—Mojo Magazine

"An incisive account of the most infamous concert debacle in rock history. . . . This book provides context and perspective, showing the sea change in rock that was taking place as the Rolling Stones attempted to reassert themselves amid the increasing dominance of San Francisco psychedelia and the spirit of Woodstock. . . . Compelling."
—Kirkus Reviews (Starred Review)

"Selvin's presentation of Altamont busts the myth of innocence lost; in fact, Altamont just made the reality harder to ignore."
—Publishers Weekly

Here Comes the Night: The Dark Soul of Bert Berns and the Dirty Business of Rhythm and Blues:

"Selvin's tale . . . rights a historical injustice, shining a light on an overshadowed great man and deepening our understanding of a history we continue to dance to."
—New York Times

"Selvin makes the case that borderline-shady characters like Berns have always cast a big shadow over pop."
—Rolling Stone

"Again and again, Selvin brings forgotten recording sessions that any other chronicler would have ignored to such stirring life that they validate not only the story he has to tell but the worth of Berns's own life. . . . Selvin lets you feel the contingency of the moment, how everything that happened—this inflection, that hesitation—could have turned out completely differently, and led to nothing."
—Greil Marcus, Believer

"Berns is simply a hook for a larger history of the business of rhythm and blues in the 1960s. Here Comes the Night paints this milieu—unscrupulous businessmen shilling teenybopper hits."
—Los Angeles Review of Books

"Here Comes the Night makes a strong case for Berns as the consummate record man, not just another white guy trolling the world of NYC independent R&B looking for a buck but a passionate believer in music. . . . Selvin takes a labyrinthine tale involving hundreds of characters and tames it. . . . It's as classic a '60s music story as any. And Selvin tells it with period-appropriate style."
—Mojo, Four-Star Review

"Joel Selvin's new book makes a claim to greatness. In the world of glaringly and exhaustively over-examined star bios, the San Francisco–based journalist not only exhumes a lost soul in the pantheon of '60s pop and soul (along with capturing rock 'n' roll's burgeoning eruption), he also creates as engaged and energetic a narrative as any so-called serious writing can contain."
—Paste Magazine

"A compelling biography of a man who wrote and produced records in a fever. It's also an unvarnished account of the often-sordid world of East Coast music publishers, tunesmiths, record hustlers, label executives, gamblers, studio engineers, rack-jobbers, dee jays, and leg breakers."
—DownBeat Magazine

"A vivid, character-filled picture of the wild west atmosphere of the New York music biz, often branching out into narrative detours that are consistently entertaining and enlightening."
—Austin Chronicle

"Selvin chronicles in delicious detail the golden era of the early 1960s rhythm and blues music scene and the turbulent, hard-knuckle world of record-making behind the glitzy, gold foil facade of rock and roll success and glamor."
—Cleveland Plain Dealer

"Joel Selvin has written a book whose prose is so alive, it begs to be read out loud."
—Goldmine Magazine

"A thrilling story of a little-known songwriter and record producer of some of the greatest rhythm and blues hits. Longtime San Francisco Chronicle music critic Selvin digs with gusto into the tasty history of New York City's hit-making songwriters, artists, and record magnates of the great R&B era of the early 1960s. . . . Selvin's prose, muscular and Runyon-esque and never taking itself too seriously, moves the narrative along from its upbeat start to its sordid denouement at the edges of New York's gangland. A fascinating time capsule of a freewheeling era in American music."
—Kirkus Reviews

Summer of Love: The Inside Story of LSD, Rock & Roll, Free Love and High Times in the Wild West:

"Selvin spins out stories like an acid-age papa unraveling counterculture legends around the old electronic campfire. Warm, human, knowing and funny, this is no flashback—it's a trip."
—Dave Marsh, Rolling Stone

"[A] defining rock-culture book. If you want to know what it was really like to live in the Sixties, this is the one to read."
—Stephen King

"If you want to know how the San Francisco music scene developed, Joel tells you."
—Jerry Garcia

From the Publisher

01/01/2024

Prolific music critic Selvin (Arhoolie Records Down Home Music) has produced a long overdue biography of a key figure responsible for the popular music sound of the '60s and '70s. Jim Gordon (1945–2023) was legendary for his drumming ability and what he brought to the recording studio. For a 10-year period, the results of his genius could be heard nearly every hour on pop radio, and the songs remain a staple of classic rock today. From Mason Williams's "Classical Gas" to the Beach Boys' "Good Vibrations," from the Everly Brothers to Steely Dan and the Hues Corporation's "Rock the Boat," Gordon gave recordings that extra drive that made them hits. He even snagged a cowriting credit on Eric Clapton's "Layla." Gordon was also beset by frightening voices. His undiagnosed schizophrenia culminated in a horrific outcome in 1983, when he brutally murdered his mother and was imprisoned until his death in 2023. It's a tribute to Selvin that he handles the contrasts and complexities of Gordon's life with sympathy here, while not shying away from the toll Gordon took on those around him. VERDICT This narrative of Gordon's life, hugely influential drumming, and legacy is consistently compelling from start to finish.—Bill Baars

Library Journal

2024-02-09
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.

Kirkus Reviews