Jim Gordon: the legendary drummer who savagely killed his own mother
It’s no secret that rock and roll has never controlled the most wholesome of characters. It doesn’t necessarily take a ton of sleuthing to find the dark back pages of legends like Eric Clapton or Led Zeppelin, especially with the benefit of hindsight, to see just how demented those days were. If it was this bad with the actual celebrities, it was a different story when talking about some session musicians like Jim Gordon.
Around the end of the Summer of Love, Gordon was about to have a fairly lucrative career. In the wake of The Beatles’ breakup, Gordon played drums for some of the Fab Four’s solo material, including extensive work with George Harrison on his album Living in the Material World. From there, he started to rub elbows with some other titans of the industry, working with Eric Clapton to deliver one of the best breakdowns of the decade on the song ‘Layla’, coming up with the iconic piano figure that would become iconic along with Clapton’s riffs.
Things were looking up as long as he could keep his nose clean, but Gordon went down an insanely dark path when dealing with problems back home. Amid the constant sessions, Gordon had picked up a heroin habit and was also very fond of cocaine. Coupled with his rapid consumption of substances were his undiagnosed mental health issues, which started with hearing voices in his head during the early 1970s.
One of the voices was that of his mother, which became more and more of a problem for him throughout the decade. Gordon finally stopped it in 1983 when he visited his mother’s house and bludgeoned her to death with a knife and a hammer. Offering no escape plan, Gordon was apprehended by the authorities and given 16 years to life in prison for his actions.
Despite being diagnosed with schizophrenia, Gordon maintains that he had no intention to commit such a vile act, remarking to Rolling Stone, “I had no interest in killing [my mother]. I wanted to stay away from her. I had no choice. It was so matter-of-fact, like I was being guided like a zombie. She wanted me to kill her and good riddance to her.” After being rediagnosed for his mental problems in 2017, Gordon passed away in 2023 from an undisclosed illness.
When his fellow musicians heard about the news, they were taken aback, with Clapton remarking, “That was never apparent when we were working together. It just seemed like bad vibes, the worst kind of bad vibes. I would have never said that he was going mad. To me, it was just the drugs.” While his colleagues may have been ignorant of the problems he was suffering from, perhaps anyone with a knowledge of mental health could have saved him from his own hand.
Despite his sinister actions, Gordon still has the resume that most session musicians dream of, working alongside both George Harrison and John Lennon and being credited with co-writing some of the greatest songs of the decade. Gordon might have had to work his way through his fair share of hardships in the music industry, but his greatest enemy was the voices in his own head.
