“He was an amazing guy, just really so charismatic,” Coolidge continued. Gordon quietly had received outpatient treatment for his condition and previously exhibited few if any signs of it to his fellow musicians. So we walked out of the room together … And then he hit me so hard that I was lifted off the floor and slammed against the wall on the other side of the hallway… It came from nowhere.” ![]() ![]() Quoted in Bill Janovitz’s Leon Russell biography, Coolidge says, “Jim said very quietly, so only I could hear, ‘Can I talk to you for just a minute?’ He meant he wanted to talk alone. However, he had a history of mental illness and in 1970 assaulted singer Rita Coolidge, his girlfriend at the time, while both were on tour with Cocker. He cut his teeth as a session musician on hits by many of the above artists and became one of the most in-demand drummers in the business, occasionally touring with the likes of Delaney and Bonnie, Cocker and Derek and the Dominos. He played with rock bands and the Burbank Symphony as a teen and was offered a music scholarship to UCLA, but instead joined the Everly Brothers for a British tour immediately after he graduated from high school in 1963. ![]() He was indisputably one of the greatest rock drummers of his era, but his long, inadequately treated mental illness resulted in the murder of his mother.īorn in 1945, Gordon was raised in California’s San Fernando Valley and began playing drums as a child. Any casual fan of 1960s and ’70s rock has heard his playing on songs by the Beach Boys (including the “Pet Sounds” album), Steely Dan (“Rikki Don’t Lose That Number”), Carly Simon (“You’re So Vain”), John Lennon (“Power to the People”), Gordon Lightfoot, Harry Nilsson, Sonny and Cher, Nancy Sinatra, Glen Campbell, Leon Russell and even the Byrds - that whipcrack drum fill at the end of their 1967 cover of Carole King and Gerry Goffin’s “Goin’ Back” was played by him.
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