LOS ANGELES – Jim Gordon, the famous session drummer who backed Eric Clapton and The Beach Boys before being diagnosed with schizophrenia and going to prison for killing his mother, has died. He was 77.
Gordon died Monday at the California Medical Facility in Vacaville, the state Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation confirmed Thursday. It is believed that he died of natural causes, but the official cause will be determined by the Solano County coroner.
Gordon was the drummer in the blues rock supergroup Derek and the Dominos, led by Clapton. He played on their 1970 double album “Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs” and toured with them.
Gordon was credited with contributing the elegiac piano coda for “Layla.” The band’s keyboardist Bobby Whitlock later claimed that Gordon took the piano melody from his then-girlfriend, singer Rita Coolidge, and did not give her credit.
Coolidge wrote in her 2016 memoir “Delta Lady” that the song was called “Time” when she and Gordon wrote it. They played it for Clapton when they went to England to record with him.
“I was outraged,” Coolidge wrote. “What they clearly did was take the song that Jim and I wrote, threw out the lyrics, and tacked it onto the end of Eric’s song. It was pretty much the same arrangement.”
Coolidge said that she took comfort in the fact that Gordon’s singing pleasures went to his daughter, Amy.
Gordon can be heard on George Harrison’s first post-Beatles album “All Things Must Pass,” The Beach Boys’ album “Pet Sounds,” and Steely Dan’s 1974 song “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number.”
He has also worked with Joan Baez, Jackson Browne, The Byrds, Judy Collins, Alice Cooper, Crosby Stills & Nash, Delaney & Bonnie, Neil Diamond, Art Garfunkel, Merle Haggard, Hall & Oates, Carole King, Harry Nilsson, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers and Barbra Streisand, among others.
Gordon’s mental health later declined.
In 1970, Gordon was part of Joe Cocker’s famous “Mad Dogs & Englishmen” tour, along with Coolidge, then a backup singer before going on to a successful solo career.
She wrote in her memoir that one night in a hotel hallway, Gordon hit her in the eye “so hard that I was lifted off the floor and slammed into the wall on the other side of the hallway.” She was briefly unconscious.
With two weeks left in the tour, Coolidge performed with a black eye. She did not file battery charges against Gordon but signed a restraining order, and their relationship ended.
In June 1983, he attacked his 71-year-old mother, Osa Gordon, with a hammer and then fatally stabbed her with a butcher knife. He claimed a voice told him to do it.
It was not until after his arrest for second degree murder that Gordon was diagnosed with schizophrenia.
Gordon was sentenced to 16 years to life imprisonment with the possibility of parole. However, he was denied parole several times after not attending some of the hearings and remained in prison until his death.
Born James Beck Gordon on July 14, 1945, in the Sherman Oaks section of Los Angeles, he began his professional career at the age of 17, supporting The Everly Brothers.
Gordon was a member of The Wrecking Crew, a famous group of Los Angeles-based session musicians who played on hundreds of hits in the 1960s and 70s.
He was a protégé of drum legend Hal Blaine.
“When I didn’t have the time, I recommended Jim,” Blaine told Rolling Stone in 1985. “He was one hell of a drummer. I thought he was one of the real up-and-comers.”