Rock music has more than it’s share of weird and tragic stories but this one is one it’s weirder and more tragic ones.
At one time, Jim Gordon was one of rock music’s most admired and in demand drummers. During the sixties became the protégé of studio drumming legend Hal Baine and played on everything coming out of Los Angeles, from The Beach Boy’s Pet Sounds to Mason Williams’ Classical Gas.
He toured with Delaney & Bonnie where he met Eric Clapton, and subsequently joined Derek and The Dominos’, playing on the classic Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs and also playing with the band on their U.S. and UK tours. He was also part of Joe Cocker’s Mad Dogs and Englishmen Tour, George Harrison’s All Things Must Pass, Dave Mason‘s album Alone Together, Traffic’s Low Spark of High Heeled Boys, most of Steely Dan’s Pretzel Logic, including the single “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number”. . . .
You get the picture.
Oh, and he is also credited with writing the piano coda for the song “Layla” but that claim has been disputed by the Dominos’ Bobby Whitlock who claimed that the piano melody was actually written by Gordon’s girlfriend Rita Coolidge.
But underneath all this success, Gordon was also dealing with very serious mental health issues. Gordon developed schizophrenia and began to hear voices (including his mother’s) which compelled him to starve himself and prevented him from sleeping, relaxing and eventually from playing drums. His physicians misdiagnosed the problems and instead treated him for alcohol abuse. It was during his tour with Joe Cocker in the early 1970s, that Gordon reportedly punched his then-girlfriend Rita Coolidge in a hotel hallway, ending their relationship.
It all came to a tragic head when on June 3, 1983, Gordon attacked his 72-year-old mother, Osa Marie Gordon, with a hammer before fatally stabbing her with a butcher knife; he claimed that a voice told him to kill her. It was only after his arrest that Gordon was properly diagnosed with schizophrenia. At his trial, the court accepted that he had acute schizophrenia, but he was not allowed to use an insanity defense because of changes to California law due to the Insanity Defense Reform Act.
The Sad Tale of Jim Gordon
As of 2021, he remains incarcerated at the California Medical Facility.
ManRoy Music 
Bobby whitlock has backed off of that claim. The reason for that is most likely what rita coolidge said in her book about jim Writing that piano coda.she only wrote a counter melody and unused lyrics. No one seems to pay attention to that statement in her book. Which is unfortunate. Bobby made those statements years ago. He Clearly doesn’t feel that way now. He actually defends jim when people accuse jim of stealing from rita. He has a youtube channel, he responds to people directly when they say those things about jim.
Jim was a brilliant drummer, but a troubled soul. May he rest in peace.
You’re spot on. Beyond drumming, Gordon was an accomplished musician since he was a teen – he could read and write music. Read what you want on Blogs or Facebook posts about what Coolidge says. I’ll stick with what she wrote herself in her book, which is quite telling (ead excerpt below).
She did not even come up with the idea for the song ‘Time’ – Jim Gordon did. She said so herself in HER book (read below). Nor did she have the speck of musical talent that Jim Gordon did (he wasn’t some hippie, half-assed drummer and, he produced several albums).
Below is what Coolidge wrote in her book about this matter. There are important facts that will sneak by if you’re not reading carefully. And for what it’s worth, Coolidge didn’t write any of her hits.
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Excerpted from Delta Lady: A Memoir by Rita Coolidge with Michael Walker.
Copyright (c) by Rita Coolidge. Reprinted by permission of Harper, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers
“One afternoon in 1970, Jim Gordon came over to my house in Hollywood, sat down at the piano, and played for me a chord progression he’d just composed. Most people know Jim as one of L.A.’s top session drummers in the early ‘70s — he played on everything from Glen Campbell’s “Wichita Lineman” to the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds album — but he was also a capable pianist, and because he was exposed to so many styles of music, he had a well-developed sense of melody and structure.
“The chords Jim played for me were in the key of C sharp and built to an eight-note refrain before the progression repeated. There was something haunting about it, especially when the bright major chords suddenly dipped to B-flat 7th for the refrain. It also seemed deeply familiar—like when you meet someone you’re immediately attracted to who seems at once both exotic and approachable.”
“I loved Jim’s progression, but at the moment that’s all it was — a stunning riff, not a song. As we played with it, a second progression suddenly came to me, a countermelody in the key of G that “answered” and resolved the tension of Jim’s chords and built to a dramatic crescendo that bridged the song’s beginning and ending. I wrote lyrics that reflected the melody’s sense of fatalism and hope (“my darling believe me, don’t ever leave me, we’ve got a million years to show them that our love is real.”).
Thank you both for clarifying the issues. As you are probably aware, since my publishing this post more than two years ago, Bobby Whitlock passed away. Such a waste and such a shame.