Joel Selvin’s Drums and Demons explores the tragic life of drummer Jim Gordon

Courtesy of Joel Selvin

Despite having been the session musician for innumerable rock and pop classics from the ’60s and ’70s, drummer Jim Gordon ’s legacy has sadly been relegated to one of a true crime story, after he killed his mother during a psychotic episode in 1983. The salacious details of the death of Osa Marie Gordon have eclipsed the work Gordon did with artists as varied as Glen Campbell, Hall & Oates, Steely Dan, and the Incredible Bongo Band, to say nothing of his time behind the kit with Derek & the Dominoes.

Journalist and author Joel Selvin’s new book, Drums & Demons: The Tragic Journey of Jim Gordon, out this week from Diversion Books, looks to examine Gordon’s life and career, recontextualizing the drummer’s story to tell how he went from dizzying heights to a “terrifying downward spiral into unimaginable madness that Gordon fought a valiant but losing battle against.” We spoke with Joel Selvin about bringing Jim Gordon’s full story to life.

Joel Selvin. // Photo credit Jim Marshall

The Pitch: The thing I find most fascinating about this book, just in terms of its creation, is the fact that there’s literally one contemporaneous interview with Jim Gordon in Modern Drummer magazine. What were the challenges in telling this story when you don’t have access to more of that sort of material?

Joel Selvin: I had access to that material. I acquired some research that was done by a pair of semi-professional journalists. They wanted to be journalists and they got him to agree to cooperate on a book. Between 1988 and I think it sort of wound up in 1990, they conducted interviews with Jim. They had access to his medical records, his diaries, everything, and they didn’t really know what to do with it.

I said, “You had access to the diaries. Wasn’t anything in there?”

“It’s just his studio dates,” and it’s like, “Oh, wait a minute here …” but that thing was long gone. They hadn’t worked on it for 30 years. One of them was dead, the other one had a few transcripts left, and I had some pretty exclusive material.

I mean, interviewing with Jim you are talking to somebody who’s only partly there. He comes into focus and he’ll talk and then he’ll float away, so it was really challenging to pick apart his interviews and figure out what he’s talking about in cases.

Also, you spoke with so many people who knew him–friends, colleagues, and family.

People didn’t know Jim well. It is in the nature of schizophrenics. His interior life was so turbulent that the only way he could manage his life was to put on a kind of superficial mask and go out in the world that way. People always talk about, “He had this easy smile.” It wasn’t that easy.

Everybody from the people that qualified as friends like Mike Post or Larry Rolando, they don’t really know that much. The people that he worked with, hundreds of sessions, they knew nothing of him, like Dean Parks. “Dean, did you ever have dinner with him? ‘No, never did. Never saw him eat.’ Did you know he was married? ‘No, was he married?’ Yeah, he had a kid. ‘No, really?'”

That’s in the nature of schizophrenia–you can’t form the kind of bonds that relationships grow from.

With several of your books, you’ve worked closely with the subjects of them, like Dave Mustaine and Megadeth or Sammy Hagar. What was this like, given that you’re having to reconstruct a life that so few people actually knew about?

The most important single piece of research was about a thousand union contracts that I picked up on, what you might call, the Jim Gordon underground. A drummer who had studied Jim extensively had compiled a massive amount of Jim’s union contracts. I mean, a thousand contracts. It more than scratches the surface, but it’s not half, but it did give me a kind of map to what he was doing when he was doing it in the studios and that was like knowing what his day-to-day was.

It’s sort of a given, I think, at this point, that Hal Blaine came up with the whole concept of the Wrecking Crew after the fact. There is that very famous, very good documentary, but this book makes it very clear that it’s not the whole story, given how much Jim Gordon worked with all of these people and he’s not so much as mentioned in the entirety of that film.

Yeah, I was just thinking about that. I don’t think Denny Tedesco mentioned him, does he? I really love that movie and I think that he put his arms around a really sprawling story and pulled it into an authentic account. It’s just–where does that story begin and where does it end? I don’t know, but he made a great movie.

I’m not really thinking that he left stuff out because Jim Gordon isn’t in there. But it’s true: the Wrecking Crew is an amorphous term. I mean, Denny had to borrow it for the movie, there’s no question, but how many people belong to the Wrecking Crew? 50, 60, 70?

What a silly thing, because on one date, Shelly Manne could be playing drums, and nobody thinks of him as being in the Wrecking Crew. He’s got his jazz world credentials thoroughly established, but man, he played on a lot of pop sessions, so it really is amorphous, meaningless, and it trivializes, I think, the genuine contributions of these session players, because they were the best in the world. They were the ones that took the lead from how session players are supposed to behave, which came out of New York, and they drove their work into the forefront of music scene.

The New York guys were conservative. They tended to come out of the big band world and they really weren’t pushing any boundaries, right? The Los Angeles guys–different world. They changed how music sounded. They changed how the Beatles made their records and how everybody made their records. Those Beach Boys records were copied all throughout the world and as you know, that wasn’t the Beach Boys, exactly.

The joy of music comes through in this book, even as it is a heartbreaking story.

It was really important to detail Jim’s artistic life. It’s so monumental, and the only thing he’s known for is killing his mother. The number one assignment was to detail the extraordinary accomplishments of this guy’s professional career.

What has the response been from the folks with whom who you spoke in order to bring this book to life?

His daughter Amy’s read it, and would say that it was revelatory to her. Mike Post read it, and he told me that he had beaten himself up for years for not helping Jim enough and he read the book and realized he couldn’t have helped Jim. Dean Parks called it a tour de force. People are going to say what they’re going to say about it but man, if his traumatized daughter feels like this brought her father more clearly and focus in her mind, that’s all the validation I’m going to need.

I have to imagine that the real validation is that it helped people like come to terms with things that have been bothering them for decades.

The story is not known. Jim didn’t tell people about it. It happened kind of in secret. He did his best to keep it from people’s view. And then boom, he kills his mother, and that’s the only thing that people see: “He killed his mother.” They don’t see the 15 psychiatric residential treatment admissions. They don’t see the dozens of psychiatrists that he saw. There was no sense of the years and years of torture and torment that went behind that. It just was this shocking, stunning event and people didn’t look beyond it. They just averted their eyes.

Jim was never the beneficiary of any real compassion and to me, after I saw into his troubled heart, I don’t think there was any other response but to have some sense of compassion for this poor, poor man.

Really, the saddest part of this is that he was so good at hiding it. As you say, he saw it well over a dozen mental health professionals and was able to hide it from the vast majority of them.

All of them. Nobody diagnosed him as schizophrenic until he killed his mother. Even the ones that had the most detailed relationship with him thought he had a mood disorder and was depressive, exacerbated by drugs and alcohol, but nobody saw the schizophrenia.

Here’s the number one most amazing thing that I discovered doing this book: schizophrenia is 1 in 100 in the general population. 1% of our people. That’s all those folks that are out there on the sidewalk, sleeping in gutters, and shit like that. Their heads are filled with the voices, too. Now of all those schizophrenics, 50% of them cannot be treated.

The other 50% sliding scale–on one end, they can live nice, productive, quiet lives like working in bakeries at night and stuff like that, all the way up to heavily-medicated and struggling to deal with every day. And then the other side, nothing can help them. From what I can tell from talking to people that work in mental hospitals–psychiatrists that work with schizophrenics–I described Jim’s symptoms, and Jim has as severe a case as you can have and that’s evidenced by the torture he put himself through.

Joel Selvin’s new book, Drums & Demons: The Tragic Journey of Jim Gordon is out this week from Diversion Books.