Where is drummer jim gordon today

I was glad for the help. I was getting ready for the rest of my life. I thought it was pretty strange, but there was nothing I could do about it.

I heard them all the time. They would tell me if I was doing right or wrong. And I took it in like a fool. They said I had some kind of responsibility to God and country. I was the king of the universe, they said. I had to make sacrifices, and I had to do what they said. There was no more reason for eating less than there was for the existence of the voices.

But however many calories he lost in food, there were more in the alcohol he consumed. He could drink a fifth of scotch or vodka a day and still work. No one knew about the battle raging for his mind. He was still the king of the calfskins, with all the privileges that went with it. If one woman left him, there was always another one eager to take her place, though there were now few women part of the music social swirl who did not know the risk they were taking.

One was a secretary named Stacey Bailey, who got to know Gordon while working for Bread. She moved in with him and for a long time beat the odds. In fact, there were times when Gordon was quietly at peace with himself.

He earnestly recited passages from the Bible and was often a warm, sensitive person. He brought her breakfast in bed, got her a seat next to Bob Dylan at a Joan Baez concert and took care of her dog and its newborn puppies when she went to visit her parents.

But there was also ample reason to be on guard. A dangerous Orestes was on the prowl, stirred on by fear and insecurity and the voices. He shared the secret of the voices with Bailey and complained about his mother. Although he made no link between the two, his complaints about his mother were the same as those about the voices.

He tried so hard to please his mother, he told Bailey, but that was not enough for her. His mother wanted to control his life, as all women did. I said whatever came into my mind, and I tried to stay calm.

I knew I just had to convince him that he had to stop. She was on the verge of passing out when he loosened his grip. He repeated the cycle again and again. Finally, he released her and fell back on the bed laughing. It was all a joke, he said. Hysterical, Bailey ran to the neighbors. Gordon begged her to come back. He cried. He was — is — crazy. The violence Gordon committed against women was his personal affair, and as long as he kept it that way, no one in the business — virtually all of them men — said anything.

Yet for Gordon every day was becoming a struggle. The voices were tormenting him now to the point that it made it harder and harder for him to control his rage. His main defense was his politeness and keeping his distance from people. He tried to patch it up. It was only a band-aid solution, though. Gordon needed the drink to fight the relentless voices, and in a short time he was drinking more than ever. The madness was winning, and soon everyone would know it.

The first time most people in the L. During one session Gordon suddenly stopped playing. The whole studio grew still as Gordon glared at guitarist Dean Parks. Parks denied it. Parks assured him that it was impossible for him to do anything from across the room. Gordon grudgingly began playing again, but a few sessions later he railed at someone else. Gordon was becoming a liability.

Record producers would not hire him anymore. With few recording dates being offered, Gordon wound up doing lower-paying work, like television, movies and commercials. But the change in atmosphere did him little good. There was just no escape. The combination of work, drink, the voices and life on the run was killing him.

Making me drive to different places. Starving me. I was only allowed one bite of food a meal. And, if I disobeyed, the voices would fill me with a rage, like the Hulk gets. He told her voice to leave him alone. When that did not work, he telephoned his mother and told her the same thing.

Naturally, she did not know what he was talking about. Allowing for his ambivalent feelings toward her, the doctors gave their permission for him to go home with her on weekends. Even then he would hear her voice tormenting him, and again the cycle of accusations and denials would begin. But Gordon agreed to see a doctor as an outpatient. She found him at home, unconscious.

He was rushed to the hospital, suffering from an overdose of the sedatives prescribed by his psychiatrist. At his next meeting with his doctor he apologized for attempting to commit suicide. The voices, he explained, did not care if he killed himself. As serious as his condition was, he would not continue therapy. The rage inside him made it impossible for him to keep his appointments. So he reluctantly went back to work, doing mostly commercials and movies.

Then a friend recommended him to Jackson Browne, who was going on tour. It was the spring of , and Gordon saw it as a chance for a comeback. The tour was uneventful for Gordon, just as he wanted it. He jogged and played racketball with Browne. You just wanted to root for him. He cut such a gallant figure, with his open white silk shirts and felt Borsalino hat, and he was such a good drummer. He just rose to the occasion. Yet, when Gordon got back from the tour, he saw that little had changed.

If anything, things had gotten worse. The music business was in a profound slump. Record sales were nose-diving, and artists were having a tough time getting their records produced. Sidemen were suddenly expendable. Frequently out of work, Gordon would go on drinking binges for months in an effort to drown out the voices.

But it did no good. Nor did calls to his mother and even to his brother, John, a bank executive in Seattle. He was falling totally under the control of the voices. They would not even allow him to accept all of the few jobs he was offered. Hanging up on Dylan hurt Gordon terribly, and he was determined not to let it happen again. My mother said to leave, and I had to obey. He returned severely depressed and in November checked himself into Valley Presbyterian Hospital.

It was one of his worst stays. He was so upset that he threatened to kill a nurse. The nurse told me nothing was wrong with me.

I had a pain in my back. It was a psychological pain. I broke a potted plant. Let me go. It was all over, though. Whatever jobs followed were of little consequence, and by he was, for all practical purposes, no longer a professional musician. With substantial savings, smart realestate investments and royalty payments coming in steadily, he could still afford to do anything or nothing. He stopped playing his drums. There were periods when he would not bathe, shave or change clothes for days, and others when he would dress up and go to church.

He spent much of his time sleeping, watching old movies on television, writing songs he would never finish, playing the same song endlessly on his piano late at night and drinking more than he ever had. When he checked into the hospital again, on June 5th, , he had already consumed two-thirds of a bottle of cognac and half a gallon of wine during the day.

He was gaining weight, and the doctors warned him that he was destroying his liver. His response, as always, was to leave. This time, the next day. The doctors never helped him, he thought. And yet he would turn to her when he got out. That, too, was part of the game. He had to see her or suffer the consequences. The line between mother and voice grew fainter until it did not exist.

She was the voice, and the voice was her. His obsession with her voice was becoming his whole life. She was a woman of unspeakable evil. He thought — still does — she killed Paul Lynde and Karen Carpenter. At times he figured that his mother wanted him to die, because his purposefulness — whatever that was — was over.

At other times he thought that she would rather torment him until the day she died. Nothing was right or even safe for him. He stopped going to a bar, he told Rolando, because there were evil people in it. He was uncomfortable wherever he lived, so he moved from one place to another.

No car suited his needs. With in two years, he went from his Mercedes to a Capri, a Scirocco, a Volkswagen van and finally the Datsun.

Gordon prepared for the worst. His record of child-support payments was unblemished, and he paid his bills on time: if he died suddenly, he would not owe anyone any money.

Through hundreds of recording sessions that spawned dozens of Top 10 hits, his work as one of the most in-demand session drummers of the era spills through a stunning array of albums. Jim Gordon was known as a solidly reliable professional session drummer, who could command as much as triple the usual rate paid to session musicians. When out on the road, Gordon became something of a liability, the exposure to vast quantities of drink and drugs brought out an extremely troubling side to his personality: at best ambitious and manipulative, at worst violent.

On June 3, , Gordon drove to the Hollywood home of his year-old mother, Osa, attacked her with a hammer and then fatally stabbed her. He has been in prison ever since. A diagnosed schizophrenic, it was not until his trial in that he was properly diagnosed. Due to the fact that his attorney was unable to use the insanity defence after a change in California law.

Gordon was sentenced to sixteen years-to-life in prison in Except, perhaps, for one brief moment on Feb. Alan White had this honour. This is one of the saddest cases that we have in prison. We have an individual who is seriously psychologically incapacitated, and he is a danger when he is not taking his medication. So, I just figured that's what had happened. I never.

I mean, he had been violent with me for absolutely no reason — but I didn't know anything about the voices. I don't know if he was hearing voices then. I imagine he probably was.

Probably a voice told him to take me out in the hall and punch me out.