The Wrecking Crew (35 page)

To some, though, it seemed like Gordon's violent outburst was probably just one of those weird, inexplicable, random things that sometimes happen on the road, where the chaos and pressure can do crazy things to the best of people. It all seemed so out of character for the unfailingly pleasant drummer. A sunnier, more kindhearted person would have been hard to find. Certainly, few in the music business had any awareness of his mental instability. The kid seemed like a throwback to
Leave It to Beaver
or something. Frank Zappa even took to calling him Skippy. Gordon's playing, too—for the time being, anyhow—remained immaculate. And for quite a while, the skillfully deceptive drummer kept mostly to himself when on gigs, leaving his co-workers and others fooled.

Perhaps most notably during this period, Gordon fell into a musical relationship with the guitarist Eric Clapton through their brief association on tour as part of Delaney & Bonnie & Friends (a rootsy, R & B–flavored husband-and-wife outfit that opened for Clapton's then-band, Blind Faith, on a brief run through England). Following this and after finishing up his Mad Dogs duties by the early summer of 1970, Gordon then joined Clapton, Leon Russell, Dave Mason, and many other mostly British musicians in playing at Abbey Road Studios in London for producer Phil Spector on George Harrison's breakout solo album,
All Things Must Pass.

Soon thereafter, with his LA-based Wrecking Crew session work on permanent hold, Gordon accepted an invitation to hook on with Clapton and fellow Delaney & Bonnie alums Bobby Whitlock (keyboards) and Carl Radle (bass) to form a new band called Derek and the Dominos. Moving to Clapton's beautiful hillside estate deep within the lush woodlands of the English countryside, the reunited friends immediately immersed themselves in trying to find their sound, playing day and night while simultaneously fortifying themselves on staggering amounts of heroin, cocaine, and hard liquor.

After several weeks of woodshedding, the newly minted group broke camp, gathered their instruments, and caught a plane for the States, setting up shop at Criteria Studios in Miami during the late summer of 1970. With the foursome soon being joined by guest slide guitarist extraordinaire Duane Allman (of the Allman Brothers), a double album's worth of strong material quickly took shape. In particular, their output included a song that Clapton had written about his secret, unrequited love for his best friend George Harrison's wife, Pattie. Called “Layla,” it featured a half dozen intricately layered guitar parts, with Allman supplying the trademark opening riff and playing bottleneck slide throughout. Though Clapton felt all along that the power ballad had the possibility of becoming a standout, after they cut it he also realized that it had no suitable ending. The whole thing just kind of stopped.

Then one day in the studio, while Jim Gordon sat at a grand piano, playing around with some chord changes and melody ideas, a nearby Clapton stopped in his tracks. There it was: the perfect ending for “Layla.” Clapton and the rest of the band hadn't even
thought
about adding a keyboard piece as the outro.

“What about
that
?” Clapton asked Gordon excitedly. “That's good.”

Following a bit of arm-twisting, Gordon obligingly agreed to donate his composition to the common cause. Though he had been working on it for inclusion on a possible solo album, at least this way there would be a guaranteed co-writing credit alongside one of the biggest music stars around
and
probably some pretty good publishing royalties, too. Plus, as an added bonus, Clapton wanted Gordon to play the beautiful piano coda himself on the record, an unexpected honor for the multi-talented drummer.

For a little while, life in Laylaland was golden. The camaraderie of the whole adventure seemed like it had been practically torn right from the pages of Dumas's classic French novel,
The Three Musketeers—tous pour un, un pour tous!
—with Clapton, especially, enjoying the exhilaration of being one of four kindred spirits made from the same musical mold. He also grew to consider Jim Gordon to be the greatest rock-and-roll drummer in the world, no small praise coming from a man who had just been in
two
bands (Cream and Blind Faith) with another drummer's drummer, Ginger Baker.

But even with the superior, simpatico quality of their shared creativity, the quartet's incessant drug use began to overshadow everything. It led to a growing number of arguments and a general paralysis; after a hot start, followed by a couple of tours, work had come to a standstill just as they had begun recording their second LP. The substances were now more important. Suddenly, being rock and roll's answer to d'Artagnan and his three pals, Athos, Porthos, and Aramis, wasn't so fun anymore. The inevitable end for everyone came one day after a heated disagreement between Clapton and Gordon resulted in the superstar guitarist storming out of the studio in a rage. Their once-promising dream team collaboration had lasted but months.

Though Derek and the Dominos' one-and-only album,
Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs,
did manage to climb to number sixteen on the U.S. charts, most of the public never even knew that “Derek” was really Eric, a major selling point. As for the single version of “Layla,” after a couple of edits and unsuccessful releases over nearly a two-year period it finally made its way to number ten on the U.S. Top 40 during the summer of 1972.

Despite the dispiriting demise of Derek and the Dominos, Jim Gordon's career behind the kit never even skipped a beat. The virtuoso stick man smoothly slid on to playing the drums on many other high-profile album projects for acts like John Lennon (
Imagine
), Harry Nilsson (
Nilsson Schmilsson
), and Traffic (
The Low Spark of High Heeled Boys
). With his résumé now certifiably chockablock with an astounding array of world-class credits, Gordon sat among rock and roll's elite. It seemed like everybody wanted him. If it wasn't Steely Dan calling one day, it was Gordon Lightfoot or Hall & Oates calling the next. The hits just kept on coming, too. But, unfortunately, so did the voices and the drugs.

By the mid-Seventies, having returned to the LA area for good after intermittent periods of living in England, Gordon's mental decline began to accelerate, making his previously hidden problems now painfully obvious to almost everyone. While he was riding one day in the backseat of a VW Camper Van being driven by Gary Coleman on the Hollywood Freeway, Gordon's dark side emerged once more, this time in a far more public setting.

Coleman and Gordon had become fast friends through working together in the LA studios as part of the Wrecking Crew, sharing a common fondness for all things percussion
and
of a mind-altering nature. The supposedly square Gordon had even gotten Coleman to take LSD for the first time. But the drummer's ability to adequately handle his own substance intake—and the mounting cacophony of voices—was fading fast.

“If you knew who I am, you'd want my autograph,” Gordon maniacally yelled at startled motorists while hanging as far as he could by one arm from the vehicle's open sliding door. “I'm a star!”

Petrified for Gordon's safety, Coleman struggled to avoid swerving into the other lanes of traffic as he simultaneously tried to coax his out-of-control colleague away from an accidental tumble onto the rushing pavement below.

“Jimmy, come on, man,” Coleman pleaded, slowing down as much as he dared on the crowded five-lane northbound thoroughfare. “Please, just get back inside and close the door.”

But Gordon refused to listen. He needed to let the world know who he was. Didn't these drivers realize that
he
was the one playing the drums on their car radios on hits like “Doctor My Eyes” and “You're So Vain”? That he also co-wrote the song “Layla” with Eric Clapton? Or that he had worked with both George Harrison and John Lennon, two-fourths of the Beatles?

Finally, fed up with Gordon's childish, bizarre behavior, Coleman's wife, Mary Lou, who was riding in the passenger seat up front, turned around, narrowed her eyes, and said in an ominous, do-not-even-
think
-about-messing-with-me tone, “Sit the fuck down and shut up.”

And, surprisingly, Jim Gordon did.

Perhaps it was the sound of a woman that made him snap to. His mother's voice had always been the loudest of the bunch in his head. The dominant one. Always telling him what to do. Where to be. How to act. And even though he hated her for it, he had to comply. He
had
to.

When Gary and Mary Lou Coleman finally made it home that night after safely dropping Gordon off at his house, they both breathed a sigh of relief. Drugs were one thing. This
was
the music business, after all. But the harrowing events on the freeway were way over-the-top. Something was seriously wrong with Gordon. It was now patently obvious. The guy was addled, touched even. And, friend or no friend, Coleman's wife had experienced enough.

“I don't want you to ever go near him again,” she said, her worry evident.

“Why?”

“Because he's going to kill someone someday.”

*   *   *

Creativity at the genius level has never been known as a hotbed of mental health. High art, in its purest form, requires the unflinching exposure of the human heart—a vulnerable, and, for some, exceedingly dangerous place to go. Especially for Jim Gordon.

By the late Seventies, heroin had already been in Gordon's life for a number of years, causing further damage, especially with his predilection for mixing it with cocaine, the result known as a “speedball.” And his unexpected violent outbursts, fueled by the voices and the drugs, became more frequent, sometimes even occurring behind studio walls, once an unthinkable act. “You're messing with my time,” he screamed at an innocent, bewildered session guitarist one day while menacingly eyeing him. “You're moving my hands.” Another time Gordon showed up a half hour late for an important recording date with a well-known producer, started to play, missed his crash cymbal entirely, and fell to the floor, too crocked to continue. The session had to be canceled.

Not only had Gordon become notoriously unreliable, but his presence, when he could muster it, was by now corrosive also. Nobody in the studios wanted to be near him. Two marriages had failed. His drug use and drinking were at an all-time high. More than a dozen trips to local psychiatric hospitals had done little. The drummer's life was in tatters.

On the evening of June 3, 1983, mentally and emotionally exhausted from years of existing under the strict control of the incessant voices raging inside his head, Jim Gordon just wanted to make it all stop. They were monitoring his every move, telling him what to eat, how much, and when. They also didn't want him to play the drums anymore, either. In Gordon's view, the voices had become one with that of his real-life mother. Something had to give.

Carefully placing a hammer and an eight-and-a-quarter-inch kitchen knife into a leather attaché case, Gordon got into his white Datsun 200SX and eased his way into busy mid-Valley traffic. He then drove east from his Van Nuys condo toward his mother's small North Hollywood apartment, careful to obey all traffic laws along the way. The voices were sticklers about that.

Sliding into an available parking spot on the street out front, Gordon grabbed the two implements he had brought along and hopped out of the car. After making his way up the walkway toward the building, he then rang the bell. As his seventy-two-year-old mother shuffled over and opened the door, she found, to her surprise, the towering, glowering figure of her youngest son staring down at her. Now face-to-face with the imagined source of all his suffering, Gordon knew what had to be done. In his crazed mind, it had all come down to a matter of self-defense. She was the enemy. It was either kill or be killed. And the look on his face said it all.

Before Osa Gordon could move or even yell for help, Gordon barged his way inside and viciously attacked. In a blur of motion, he smashed in her skull with his hammer, then repeated the act three more times for good measure. As she screamed and crumpled to the floor, he swiftly switched to the knife, plunging its gleaming, serrated edge over and over into his still-conscious mother's chest in order to make sure he finished the job. The voices—her voice—had finally fallen silent.

When the police found Gordon the next day, facedown and moaning in psychic agony on his living room rug, they had merely come to inform him about her death. But he quickly confessed, telling them as he sobbed uncontrollably in the back of the patrol car that he was sorry, so very sorry, but she had tortured him for years.

At his subsequent bench trial in Los Angeles in 1984, the judge found Gordon guilty of second-degree murder and sentenced him to sixteen years to life in state prison. And there the drummer remains. One of the greatest Wrecking Crew talents of them all, a Grammy winner (for co-writing “Layla”) who so masterfully laid down the beat for the biggest names in music, has permanently settled into a quiet life behind bars, taking his daily medications and occasionally playing in the prison band.

19

Love Will Keep Us Together

Thanks very much, everybody. You've been great.

—P
HIL
S
PECTOR

Six years after they first hit the American charts with “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” the Beatles were done. Having grown increasingly acrimonious, the quartet shocked the world by releasing their final album,
Let It Be,
in the spring of 1970, no ordinary recording. The Beatles left the tapes in the vault for the better part of a year before John Lennon finally hired Phil Spector to fly across the pond to see if he could make something out of them.

Slowly returning to limited recording action after his meltdown following the “River Deep, Mountain High” debacle back in 1966, Spector duly slapped a heaping helping of echo and strings on the Beatles' record, helping to push it (and its namesake single) to the top of the charts. Delighted with the outcome, Lennon and fellow Beatle George Harrison brought Spector back for an encore, having him produce “Instant Karma” and “Imagine” for Lennon and the triple LP
All Things Must Pass
for Harrison. The master of the Wall of Sound was back, if only as an overseas producer.