Drums & Demons: The Tragic Journey of Jim Gordon

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.)