September 9, 2025 • 20 mins
This podcast contains discussions of sensitive topics...Listener discretion is strongly advised. While the stories you’ll hear are rooted in real events, not every detail is strictly historical—some moments are dramatized with creative license to bring the narrative to life. Please keep this in mind as you listen.
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He was the hidden heartbeat behind some of the most iconic songs of the ’60s and ’70s. You’ve sung along to his work, tapped his rhythms on the steering wheel, carried his music through every stage of your life—yet you never knew his name. Fame was never meant for him. But his story? It’s one of genius, shadows, and a descent so dark it silenced everything. This episode of Jonny’s Dead Air Podcast takes you behind the music… into the terrifying quiet that followed.
Written by Jonny Hartwell
Voiced by Jonny Hartwell
Music Credit: Reel World Audio.
A iHeart Radio Production
Jonny’s Dead Air Podcast
Written, hosted, and produced by Jonny Hartwell.
A production of iHeartRadio Pittsburgh.
Thanks for listening—and for keeping the light on.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
He was the hidden heartbeat behind some of the most iconic songs of the ’60s and ’70s. You’ve sung along to his work, tapped his rhythms on the steering wheel, carried his music through every stage of your life—yet you never knew his name. Fame was never meant for him. But his story? It’s one of genius, shadows, and a descent so dark it silenced everything. This episode of Jonny’s Dead Air Podcast takes you behind the music… into the terrifying quiet that followed.
Written by Jonny Hartwell
Voiced by Jonny Hartwell
Music Credit: Reel World Audio.
A iHeart Radio Production
Jonny’s Dead Air Podcast
Written, hosted, and produced by Jonny Hartwell.
A production of iHeartRadio Pittsburgh.
Thanks for listening—and for keeping the light on.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
And welcome in. I'm Johnny Hartwell and this is another
Johnny's Dead Air podcast story, a production of iHeartRadio. There's
a heartbeat inside every song. Sometimes that heartbeat belongs to
a person who kept everyone else on time while himself
was slipping off the edge. This story is about precision
(00:24):
and power, about a quiet guy at the back of
the stage who could lift a chorus with a single
fill and then disappear into the noise of other people's legends.
It's about a prodigy who became a ghost you hear
on the radio every single day without knowing his name.
It's about a melody you've carried for years, combined with
a tragedy you will never forget. A career that touched
(00:46):
the Beach Boys, Eric Clapton, George Harrison, Carly Simon, Delaney
and Bonnie Joe Cocker and so many others, records that
define whole decades than a mind unraveling in slow motion,
unrecognized until it was fun are too late. This is
the sound of triumph with a crack running through the center.
This is the beat that wouldn't stop and the silence
(01:08):
that finally did. This is Script eight. The Drummer in
the Hallway, Act one, the prodigy in the room. He
grew up under the Southern California sun, a San Fernando
Valley kid who'd rather practice rudiments than go to the beach.
In high school, he was already that frightening kind of
(01:28):
precise sight, reading charts, subdividing space like a surveyor. College
could wait, the road could not. At just seventeen, he
turned down a scholarship and joined the Everly Brothers and
flew to England. The human Metronome had legs now. The
studio became his address. Los Angeles in the late sixties,
gold Star Western Capitol rooms with no windows and clocks
(01:49):
that only mattered if you played behind them. He fell
in with the elite, the loose constellation of players later
nicknamed the Wrecking Crew. On call by day, on call
by night, he slipped into the most delicate system and
pop music and breathe for them. He had a percussion
on The Beach Boys Pet Sound Sessions. Yeah, that record,
and you could read his name in the margins of
(02:10):
the credits if you know where to look. He wasn't
just accurate, He swung like an axeman. One take could
be chapel quiet. The next thunder when Mason Williams cut
classical gas, the groove that made the melody glie forward.
Well that's him. By the cusp of the nineteen seventies,
the phone never stopped ringing. Delaney and Bonnie called then
(02:31):
Joe Cocker's Circus on Wheels, Mad Dogs and Englishmen, a
roaring human caravan where the drum riser felt like a
lifeboat in a storm. The red light You're not there,
but your ears are. The talkback crackles rolling take two,
The red light bathes the room. He's behind his kit sticks, hovering, heartbeat,
(02:51):
steady at the downbeat, the kit ballooms kick, drum warm
and certain snare as crisp, as fresh linen. On the
second verse, he oweps up the high hat, just a whisper,
like someone pulling back a curtain to let the morning
in the song exhales. The band looks up. Oh yeah,
this is it at too, building the skyline. He could
(03:13):
play anything, and he did. One day, he's with George
Harrison on All Things Must Pass, laying down something so
steady it feels like the whole wall of sound is
leaning on him. The next he's keeping Delaney and Bonnie's Roots.
He grooves rolling like an engine that never stalls. Then
he's out with Joe Cocker, helping turn chaos into something
you can actually dance to. And of course Carly Simons,
(03:35):
You're so vain, that sly little backbeat that almost winks
at you. Yeah, that's Jim. By this point, Jim wasn't
just on records, he was inside them. It was part
of his DNA. He may not know the name, but
you definitely know the sound. Derek and the Dominoes, Yeah,
he was there too. And when they cut Layla, the
one with a piano coda that still makes the hair
(03:55):
on your arm stand up. His hands were right in
the middle of that too. Think about Jackson Brown's Doctor
My Eyes or Linda Ronstats It's So Easy, or Harry
Nielsen's Jump into the Fire where the drums sound like
they're trying to break out of their own cage. Then
there's Breads. Everything I Own so soft you almost don't
notice how perfectly it's carried. Steven Stills love the one
(04:16):
You're with, even the breakbeat in the incredible bongo bands, Apache,
the one hip hop DJ's sampled until it's practically become
its own language. Yeah, that's all him. So many songs,
so many artists, but the same heartbeat, the same pair
of hands behind them all. You're behind the control room glass,
headphones on through the glass. The guitarist is just a silhouette.
(04:40):
The organ hums like electricity in the walls. Our drummer
counts in with the not only the bass player sees.
Halfway through the take, the song threatens to derail emotion,
tripping over itself, but the kick stays true. The tom's
round up. The snare draws a clean line back to shore.
In the control room somewhat exhales for the first time
in four minutes. It's perfect. So who is this man?
(05:04):
Who is this drummer? We'll get to that in act three.
Next Act three, the machine has a name. Before we
say his name, think about this. You know his work.
You've carried it with you, You've sung along with it
(05:25):
in the car, tapped it out on a steering wheel
at a red light. Let it soundtrack break ups, weddings,
late nights, and long drives. But you don't know him,
but you weren't supposed to. That was the deal with
session players. Their name stayed in the shadow so the
stars could shine. They walked into studios through the side doors,
punched in, made history before lunch, and walked out anonymous.
(05:47):
On the album Jackets, sometimes they were listed, sometimes they weren't.
Sometimes it just said drums and yeah, that was just enough.
But here's the contradiction. He was everywhere, that tight pocket
on Steely Dance, Ricky, don't lose that number, that loping
rhythm behind all I Know from Art Garfunkle, the raw
dry pushing Johnny Rivers rock and Pneumonia, and the boogie
(06:09):
woogie flu the hypnotic groove of Tom Waite's step right up,
even the swirling patterns in Traffic's low spark of High
Hill Boys. It was all Jim, one man, one drummer,
heard across the globe every single day. Yet if you
stop someone on the street and asked who played drums
on those songs, you'd get silence, maybe a shrug, maybe
(06:31):
a wrong guess, because nobody was supposed to know. It
was his kind of strange fame. His work circled the world,
but his name stayed in the wings. He was the
ghost in the music, felt not seen, and yet it's
time we say it. The invisible man at the center
of all those records. Drummer Jim Gordon. That's right, Jim Gordon.
(06:54):
Even now, recognition didn't follow. Right. He wasn't on the
magazine covers, no screaming fans with posters, no arena spotlight
trained on him. The stars stood out front, and he
stayed behind the cymbals, steady as ever. But in the
grooves of the vinyl and the spines of the cassette tapes,
he was already immortal. He's on the tour bus, fluorescent
(07:14):
light overhead, everyone else asleep out the window, America, unreels, billboards,
street lights, the same hotel you left three hours ago.
In the dark, a thought lends, and it won't leave.
Something is off, not in the band, but inside. It's
a tiny wobble in the wheel. A voice not loud
(07:35):
enough to parse. He puts his forehead to the glass
and watches his breath bloom and fade. The voices, always,
the voices. Why won't they stop? At four red flags? Next,
(07:59):
at four red flags midnight, the fridge opens, bleach white glare.
He stands motionless, listening. The house creaks like an old boat.
Somewhere in the silence a thought slips in. She's watching you,
she's controlling you. Do something. He grips the counter, The
(08:21):
milk in his hand warms. The silence is crowded with whispers.
By the mid nineteen seventies, Jim Gordon was everywhere. His
phone never stopped ringing. Frank Zappa wanted him. John Lennon
wanted him, Glenn Campbell, Alice Cooper, Hollandoates, Tom Petty. The
list kept growing, growing, and growing. If you needed perfection
(08:42):
in the pocket, you called Jim Gordon and he always delivered.
But away from the drum kit, cracks began to show.
Friends noticed sudden rages, outbursts that seemed to flare out
of nowhere. Tour mates described him disappearing for hours, pacing
muttering to himself. Sometimes he wouldn't show up at all.
Then the next day he'd walk into the studio, sit
(09:04):
down and play flawlessly, as if nothing had happened. Singer
Rita COOLi to remember one incident vividly on the Mad
Dogs and Englishman tour. After what should have had a
joyful night of music, Jim turned violent, striking her without warning.
It left her shaken and afraid, but at the time,
people shrugged it off as rock star behavior. The violence,
(09:26):
like the voices, was written off as temper ego and stress.
Then there's the piano coda. Coolidge insisted that she had
written the figure that later became the soaring ending to
the song Leyla. She claimed Jim had stolen it, passed
it off in the Derek and the Domino sessions. Others
back to her story. If true, it's just another glimpse
(09:46):
into the unraveling sense of self genius, blurring into obsession,
obsession into theft. He also began talking about voices at first,
in passing strange little comments like did you hear that
they're laughing at me? Friends thought it was a joke,
or maybe exhaustion. Musicians on the road are sleep deprived,
strung out, and half crazy anyway. But for Jim, it
(10:09):
wasn't a figure of speech. The whispers were real. They
followed him everywhere. He even sought help, but the system
failed him. Doctors misdiagnosed him. Some called it stress, some
called it substance related. Some prescribed medication that dealt him
so much he could barely play, so he stopped taking it.
Others ignored the warning signs entirely. In the nineteen seventies,
(10:32):
schizophrenia wasn't a headline diagnosis. It was a stigma. Still,
the work kept coming, and as long as the work
was good, no one wanted to look too closely at
the man behind it. He was way too valuable, too
perfect a drummer to stop and ask is he okay?
The red flags were everywhere, explosive tempers, paranoia, violence, voices
(10:55):
in his head, but in a business that worshiped output
and shrugged it pain, they weren't as warnings. They were
dismissed as just Quirk's mental illness is rarely cinematic. It's
incremental sleep that won't come, food that tastes wrong, whispers
behind the refrigerator. Hum. He sought help at times and
bounced between explanations, stress, substances, exhaustion, while psychosis threaded itself
(11:20):
through the whole circuitry in an era ill equipped to
separate rock and roll excess from the crisis of the brain.
Warning lights were mistaken for stage lights, and the calendar
did what calendars do. It turned and the beat goes on,
and so did the voices. Act five, The Spiral. Next
(11:48):
Act five, The Spiral, The problem wasn't really with his mother,
not the real one. Osi Marie Gordon had been this
steadfast one, the support of one, the woman who saw
his talent before anyone else. She drove him to rehearsals,
paid for lessons, believed he could be something special. But
in Jim's mind, in his fractured, tortured mind, she had
(12:10):
become something else. The voices told him she was the enemy.
They told him she was behind the torment, that her
voice was the one whispering inside his skull, mocking him,
controlling him. It was a delusion, pure and brutal, But
to Jim it was more real than the daylight pouring
through the blinds. It was an early afternoon. The Van
(12:31):
Duy's house was quiet, except for the tick of a
clock and the faint hum of the refrigerator. Jim was
pacing his drum, sat silent in the corner of the
room that once rang with sound. The sticks hadn't touched
heads and weeks. He rubbed his temples, muttering half sentences
to himself, stopping to listen, as if as if somebody
(12:51):
had just spoken behind him. In the kitchen, Osa Marie
was making tea. She moved slowly deliberately spooning sugar into
a cuff, trying to maintain a sense of normalcy. She
had seen his outburst before, she had heard the erratic rants,
the paranoia, but she always believed, Hey, this is my son.
He will come back to me. The good boy is
(13:12):
still there somewhere. Jim pacing low and harsh. You're in
my head again, Osa tired, Jimmy, No, I haven't. It's
just your illness talking. Don't lie to me. You're controlling
it all you and the voices. You won't stop, you
won't stop. Osa sets the spoon down, trying to steady
her voice. Sweetheart, it's not me. Please, you need help.
(13:34):
Let me call the doctor. You know. No, no more doctors,
no more pills. I know it's you. I know it's you.
It's always been you. Osa trying to stay calm, Jimmy,
look at me. I love you. I'm just trying to help.
Speaker 2 (13:45):
No, no, no, you're a liar. You're in my head.
You've always been in my head. The room fills, not
with the sound anyone else could hear, but with a
suffocating pressure that only Jim felt. The voices were a
choir without faces.
Speaker 1 (13:59):
She's laughing at you. She wants to destroy you. She's
the reason for the pain. End it, end it, end it,
end it now. The voices crowd over one another, urgent, commanding, relentless.
Jim's hand closes around a hammer. The cold weight steadies
him in a way nothing else could. His knuckles whiten,
(14:21):
his breath quickens. His mother's eyes widen. No, Jimmy, please, no, no,
don't do this, but the voices drown her out. Do it,
do it now, do it? Now? Stop her. The hammer
comes down once twice. The blows reverberate like thunder. Inside
the tiny kitchen, a teacup shatters to the floor. Oh
Sa cries out, staggered, confused, pleading Jimmy as if the
(14:41):
word could pull him back, but he is gone. The
hammer falls again. The voices roar in approval. Good, good,
she can't hurt you anymore. Finish it, finish it. Jim
drops the hammer, his chest heaving, and grabs a knife
from the counter. The blade flashes in the harsh kitchen
light a final strike. Silence follows, heavier than any drumbeat
(15:06):
he ever played. The room is still. The only sound
is the hiss of the kettle left on the stove
and the relentless tick tick tick of the clock. Steam
curls upward like a ghost, leaving the body. Jim staggers back,
staring at his hands, at the weapon, at his mother's
body on the floor. The voices are quieter, now, satisfied,
(15:31):
almost smoothing. It's done. You're free now. She won't ever
speak again. But there is no freedom, only the smell
of blood, the echo of violence, and the weight of
what can never be Undone hours later, at the courthouse,
the scene is so ordinary, it's obscene. Fluorescent lights, the
(15:55):
scuff of shoes, clerks shuffling papers, and there sits Jim Gordon,
shoulders slumped, face blank, the same hands that gave life
to Layla, now shackled in cuffs. Someone down the hall
slams a door. The crack ricochets like a gunshot, like
a snare drum struck in an empty room. The echo
(16:17):
goes on and on, then vanishes into silence. And this
is how the rhythm stopped, Not with applause, not with
a fade out, but with a hammer, a knife and voices.
Only he could hear Act six, the epilogue of Jim Gordon.
(16:40):
Next Act six the epilogue of Jim Gordon. Jim died
on March thirteenth, twenty twenty three, at the age of
seventy seven, at the California Medical Facility in Bacerville. News
outlets wrote the same sentence in different orders. Co writer
on laylah session and grad killed. His mother died in prison.
(17:02):
The obituaries tried some better than others to hold the
two realities in one paragraph. But what do we do
with a legacy like that? A year later, journalist Joel
Salvin published Drums and Demons, a book that pulled the
camera back. It traced the unbroken line from the brilliant
right hand to the broken circuitry behind his eyes, arguing
(17:23):
for a more honest memory, one that doesn't excuse but understands,
one that remembers the warning signs the industry missed and
the person inside the headlines it also categorized. It also
cataloged the astonishing range of records he powered, Beach Boys
and Bongo Rock, Traffic and Carly Simon Delaney and Bonnie
(17:44):
Derek and the Dominoes, The spine of an era measured
in downbeats. The coda to the most famous song he
touched is still disputed. In the margins, readA Coolidge's long
standing claim, Bobby Whitlock's corroboration, and the paperwork that never changed.
History is rarely unanimous. But the piano still rises, and
(18:05):
the drums still carry it, and the listeners who know
nothing of credit or courtroom still feel the lift in
the chest. There's a caution in all this, too, about
what we miss when we mistake output for wellness, About
how a mind can be both wondrous and unwell, About
what happens when the people we cheer are rewarded for
(18:28):
never stopping, even when stopping might save them. You're in
a car. The sun is low, The piano figure swells,
and for a moment it feels like forgiveness, like the
air itself got lighter. The snare holds the center with
impossible calm. Then the song ends, the radio slips in
(18:49):
the commercial, the spell breaks. You drive on the melody
trails like a contrail. You can't quite see anymore. Somewhere
in the long memory of tape and lacquer, a drummer
is still counting everyone in history, wrote Jim Gordon as
a footnote a line in the credits, A shadow behind
the stars a tragic headline. But what if it had
(19:12):
been different? What if the voices had been recognized for
what they were, not mistaken for eccentricity or rock and
roll excess. What if someone had pulled him out of
the studio long enough to truly listen, to diagnose, to treat.
Would we know his name today, not in the margins
of album jackets, not as a whispered cautionary tale, but
(19:35):
carved alongside the grates. Would Jim Gordon be as instantly
recognizable as Bottom or Moon or Baker. Would the man
who gave us rhythms we still hum have finally stepped
out from behind the symbols into his own light. Or
would he have simply kept doing what he did best,
staying invisible, steady, essential, while shaping the very soundtrack of
(19:56):
our lives? We will never know. All we can do
is hear the records he left behind, feel the pulse
of his work echoing through the decades of music, and
remember that brilliance and brokenness can live inside the same person.
And maybe, just maybe, his story reminds us that behind
(20:16):
every perfect beat, there is a fragile heart, a fragile mind,
waiting for someone to notice before it breaks. I hope
you enjoyed Script eight, The Drummer in the Hallway, the
story of Jim Gordon. This has been Johnny's Dead Air podcast.
I'm Johnny Hartwell, thank you so much for listening.
And welcome in. I'm Johnny Hartwell and this is another
Johnny's Dead Air podcast story, a production of iHeartRadio. There's
a heartbeat inside every song. Sometimes that heartbeat belongs to
a person who kept everyone else on time while himself
was slipping off the edge. This story is about precision
(00:24):
and power, about a quiet guy at the back of
the stage who could lift a chorus with a single
fill and then disappear into the noise of other people's legends.
It's about a prodigy who became a ghost you hear
on the radio every single day without knowing his name.
It's about a melody you've carried for years, combined with
a tragedy you will never forget. A career that touched
(00:46):
the Beach Boys, Eric Clapton, George Harrison, Carly Simon, Delaney
and Bonnie Joe Cocker and so many others, records that
define whole decades than a mind unraveling in slow motion,
unrecognized until it was fun are too late. This is
the sound of triumph with a crack running through the center.
This is the beat that wouldn't stop and the silence
(01:08):
that finally did. This is Script eight. The Drummer in
the Hallway, Act one, the prodigy in the room. He
grew up under the Southern California sun, a San Fernando
Valley kid who'd rather practice rudiments than go to the beach.
In high school, he was already that frightening kind of
(01:28):
precise sight, reading charts, subdividing space like a surveyor. College
could wait, the road could not. At just seventeen, he
turned down a scholarship and joined the Everly Brothers and
flew to England. The human Metronome had legs now. The
studio became his address. Los Angeles in the late sixties,
gold Star Western Capitol rooms with no windows and clocks
(01:49):
that only mattered if you played behind them. He fell
in with the elite, the loose constellation of players later
nicknamed the Wrecking Crew. On call by day, on call
by night, he slipped into the most delicate system and
pop music and breathe for them. He had a percussion
on The Beach Boys Pet Sound Sessions. Yeah, that record,
and you could read his name in the margins of
(02:10):
the credits if you know where to look. He wasn't
just accurate, He swung like an axeman. One take could
be chapel quiet. The next thunder when Mason Williams cut
classical gas, the groove that made the melody glie forward.
Well that's him. By the cusp of the nineteen seventies,
the phone never stopped ringing. Delaney and Bonnie called then
(02:31):
Joe Cocker's Circus on Wheels, Mad Dogs and Englishmen, a
roaring human caravan where the drum riser felt like a
lifeboat in a storm. The red light You're not there,
but your ears are. The talkback crackles rolling take two,
The red light bathes the room. He's behind his kit sticks, hovering, heartbeat,
(02:51):
steady at the downbeat, the kit ballooms kick, drum warm
and certain snare as crisp, as fresh linen. On the
second verse, he oweps up the high hat, just a whisper,
like someone pulling back a curtain to let the morning
in the song exhales. The band looks up. Oh yeah,
this is it at too, building the skyline. He could
(03:13):
play anything, and he did. One day, he's with George
Harrison on All Things Must Pass, laying down something so
steady it feels like the whole wall of sound is
leaning on him. The next he's keeping Delaney and Bonnie's Roots.
He grooves rolling like an engine that never stalls. Then
he's out with Joe Cocker, helping turn chaos into something
you can actually dance to. And of course Carly Simons,
(03:35):
You're so vain, that sly little backbeat that almost winks
at you. Yeah, that's Jim. By this point, Jim wasn't
just on records, he was inside them. It was part
of his DNA. He may not know the name, but
you definitely know the sound. Derek and the Dominoes, Yeah,
he was there too. And when they cut Layla, the
one with a piano coda that still makes the hair
(03:55):
on your arm stand up. His hands were right in
the middle of that too. Think about Jackson Brown's Doctor
My Eyes or Linda Ronstats It's So Easy, or Harry
Nielsen's Jump into the Fire where the drums sound like
they're trying to break out of their own cage. Then
there's Breads. Everything I Own so soft you almost don't
notice how perfectly it's carried. Steven Stills love the one
(04:16):
You're with, even the breakbeat in the incredible bongo bands, Apache,
the one hip hop DJ's sampled until it's practically become
its own language. Yeah, that's all him. So many songs,
so many artists, but the same heartbeat, the same pair
of hands behind them all. You're behind the control room glass,
headphones on through the glass. The guitarist is just a silhouette.
(04:40):
The organ hums like electricity in the walls. Our drummer
counts in with the not only the bass player sees.
Halfway through the take, the song threatens to derail emotion,
tripping over itself, but the kick stays true. The tom's
round up. The snare draws a clean line back to shore.
In the control room somewhat exhales for the first time
in four minutes. It's perfect. So who is this man?
(05:04):
Who is this drummer? We'll get to that in act three.
Next Act three, the machine has a name. Before we
say his name, think about this. You know his work.
You've carried it with you, You've sung along with it
(05:25):
in the car, tapped it out on a steering wheel
at a red light. Let it soundtrack break ups, weddings,
late nights, and long drives. But you don't know him,
but you weren't supposed to. That was the deal with
session players. Their name stayed in the shadow so the
stars could shine. They walked into studios through the side doors,
punched in, made history before lunch, and walked out anonymous.
(05:47):
On the album Jackets, sometimes they were listed, sometimes they weren't.
Sometimes it just said drums and yeah, that was just enough.
But here's the contradiction. He was everywhere, that tight pocket
on Steely Dance, Ricky, don't lose that number, that loping
rhythm behind all I Know from Art Garfunkle, the raw
dry pushing Johnny Rivers rock and Pneumonia, and the boogie
(06:09):
woogie flu the hypnotic groove of Tom Waite's step right up,
even the swirling patterns in Traffic's low spark of High
Hill Boys. It was all Jim, one man, one drummer,
heard across the globe every single day. Yet if you
stop someone on the street and asked who played drums
on those songs, you'd get silence, maybe a shrug, maybe
(06:31):
a wrong guess, because nobody was supposed to know. It
was his kind of strange fame. His work circled the world,
but his name stayed in the wings. He was the
ghost in the music, felt not seen, and yet it's
time we say it. The invisible man at the center
of all those records. Drummer Jim Gordon. That's right, Jim Gordon.
(06:54):
Even now, recognition didn't follow. Right. He wasn't on the
magazine covers, no screaming fans with posters, no arena spotlight
trained on him. The stars stood out front, and he
stayed behind the cymbals, steady as ever. But in the
grooves of the vinyl and the spines of the cassette tapes,
he was already immortal. He's on the tour bus, fluorescent
(07:14):
light overhead, everyone else asleep out the window, America, unreels, billboards,
street lights, the same hotel you left three hours ago.
In the dark, a thought lends, and it won't leave.
Something is off, not in the band, but inside. It's
a tiny wobble in the wheel. A voice not loud
(07:35):
enough to parse. He puts his forehead to the glass
and watches his breath bloom and fade. The voices, always,
the voices. Why won't they stop? At four red flags? Next,
(07:59):
at four red flags midnight, the fridge opens, bleach white glare.
He stands motionless, listening. The house creaks like an old boat.
Somewhere in the silence a thought slips in. She's watching you,
she's controlling you. Do something. He grips the counter, The
(08:21):
milk in his hand warms. The silence is crowded with whispers.
By the mid nineteen seventies, Jim Gordon was everywhere. His
phone never stopped ringing. Frank Zappa wanted him. John Lennon
wanted him, Glenn Campbell, Alice Cooper, Hollandoates, Tom Petty. The
list kept growing, growing, and growing. If you needed perfection
(08:42):
in the pocket, you called Jim Gordon and he always delivered.
But away from the drum kit, cracks began to show.
Friends noticed sudden rages, outbursts that seemed to flare out
of nowhere. Tour mates described him disappearing for hours, pacing
muttering to himself. Sometimes he wouldn't show up at all.
Then the next day he'd walk into the studio, sit
(09:04):
down and play flawlessly, as if nothing had happened. Singer
Rita COOLi to remember one incident vividly on the Mad
Dogs and Englishman tour. After what should have had a
joyful night of music, Jim turned violent, striking her without warning.
It left her shaken and afraid, but at the time,
people shrugged it off as rock star behavior. The violence,
(09:26):
like the voices, was written off as temper ego and stress.
Then there's the piano coda. Coolidge insisted that she had
written the figure that later became the soaring ending to
the song Leyla. She claimed Jim had stolen it, passed
it off in the Derek and the Domino sessions. Others
back to her story. If true, it's just another glimpse
(09:46):
into the unraveling sense of self genius, blurring into obsession,
obsession into theft. He also began talking about voices at first,
in passing strange little comments like did you hear that
they're laughing at me? Friends thought it was a joke,
or maybe exhaustion. Musicians on the road are sleep deprived,
strung out, and half crazy anyway. But for Jim, it
(10:09):
wasn't a figure of speech. The whispers were real. They
followed him everywhere. He even sought help, but the system
failed him. Doctors misdiagnosed him. Some called it stress, some
called it substance related. Some prescribed medication that dealt him
so much he could barely play, so he stopped taking it.
Others ignored the warning signs entirely. In the nineteen seventies,
(10:32):
schizophrenia wasn't a headline diagnosis. It was a stigma. Still,
the work kept coming, and as long as the work
was good, no one wanted to look too closely at
the man behind it. He was way too valuable, too
perfect a drummer to stop and ask is he okay?
The red flags were everywhere, explosive tempers, paranoia, violence, voices
(10:55):
in his head, but in a business that worshiped output
and shrugged it pain, they weren't as warnings. They were
dismissed as just Quirk's mental illness is rarely cinematic. It's
incremental sleep that won't come, food that tastes wrong, whispers
behind the refrigerator. Hum. He sought help at times and
bounced between explanations, stress, substances, exhaustion, while psychosis threaded itself
(11:20):
through the whole circuitry in an era ill equipped to
separate rock and roll excess from the crisis of the brain.
Warning lights were mistaken for stage lights, and the calendar
did what calendars do. It turned and the beat goes on,
and so did the voices. Act five, The Spiral. Next
(11:48):
Act five, The Spiral, The problem wasn't really with his mother,
not the real one. Osi Marie Gordon had been this
steadfast one, the support of one, the woman who saw
his talent before anyone else. She drove him to rehearsals,
paid for lessons, believed he could be something special. But
in Jim's mind, in his fractured, tortured mind, she had
(12:10):
become something else. The voices told him she was the enemy.
They told him she was behind the torment, that her
voice was the one whispering inside his skull, mocking him,
controlling him. It was a delusion, pure and brutal, But
to Jim it was more real than the daylight pouring
through the blinds. It was an early afternoon. The Van
(12:31):
Duy's house was quiet, except for the tick of a
clock and the faint hum of the refrigerator. Jim was
pacing his drum, sat silent in the corner of the
room that once rang with sound. The sticks hadn't touched
heads and weeks. He rubbed his temples, muttering half sentences
to himself, stopping to listen, as if as if somebody
(12:51):
had just spoken behind him. In the kitchen, Osa Marie
was making tea. She moved slowly deliberately spooning sugar into
a cuff, trying to maintain a sense of normalcy. She
had seen his outburst before, she had heard the erratic rants,
the paranoia, but she always believed, Hey, this is my son.
He will come back to me. The good boy is
(13:12):
still there somewhere. Jim pacing low and harsh. You're in
my head again, Osa tired, Jimmy, No, I haven't. It's
just your illness talking. Don't lie to me. You're controlling
it all you and the voices. You won't stop, you
won't stop. Osa sets the spoon down, trying to steady
her voice. Sweetheart, it's not me. Please, you need help.
(13:34):
Let me call the doctor. You know. No, no more doctors,
no more pills. I know it's you. I know it's you.
It's always been you. Osa trying to stay calm, Jimmy,
look at me. I love you. I'm just trying to help.
Speaker 2 (13:45):
No, no, no, you're a liar. You're in my head.
You've always been in my head. The room fills, not
with the sound anyone else could hear, but with a
suffocating pressure that only Jim felt. The voices were a
choir without faces.
Speaker 1 (13:59):
She's laughing at you. She wants to destroy you. She's
the reason for the pain. End it, end it, end it,
end it now. The voices crowd over one another, urgent, commanding, relentless.
Jim's hand closes around a hammer. The cold weight steadies
him in a way nothing else could. His knuckles whiten,
(14:21):
his breath quickens. His mother's eyes widen. No, Jimmy, please, no, no,
don't do this, but the voices drown her out. Do it,
do it now, do it? Now? Stop her. The hammer
comes down once twice. The blows reverberate like thunder. Inside
the tiny kitchen, a teacup shatters to the floor. Oh
Sa cries out, staggered, confused, pleading Jimmy as if the
(14:41):
word could pull him back, but he is gone. The
hammer falls again. The voices roar in approval. Good, good,
she can't hurt you anymore. Finish it, finish it. Jim
drops the hammer, his chest heaving, and grabs a knife
from the counter. The blade flashes in the harsh kitchen
light a final strike. Silence follows, heavier than any drumbeat
(15:06):
he ever played. The room is still. The only sound
is the hiss of the kettle left on the stove
and the relentless tick tick tick of the clock. Steam
curls upward like a ghost, leaving the body. Jim staggers back,
staring at his hands, at the weapon, at his mother's
body on the floor. The voices are quieter, now, satisfied,
(15:31):
almost smoothing. It's done. You're free now. She won't ever
speak again. But there is no freedom, only the smell
of blood, the echo of violence, and the weight of
what can never be Undone hours later, at the courthouse,
the scene is so ordinary, it's obscene. Fluorescent lights, the
(15:55):
scuff of shoes, clerks shuffling papers, and there sits Jim Gordon,
shoulders slumped, face blank, the same hands that gave life
to Layla, now shackled in cuffs. Someone down the hall
slams a door. The crack ricochets like a gunshot, like
a snare drum struck in an empty room. The echo
(16:17):
goes on and on, then vanishes into silence. And this
is how the rhythm stopped, Not with applause, not with
a fade out, but with a hammer, a knife and voices.
Only he could hear Act six, the epilogue of Jim Gordon.
(16:40):
Next Act six the epilogue of Jim Gordon. Jim died
on March thirteenth, twenty twenty three, at the age of
seventy seven, at the California Medical Facility in Bacerville. News
outlets wrote the same sentence in different orders. Co writer
on laylah session and grad killed. His mother died in prison.
(17:02):
The obituaries tried some better than others to hold the
two realities in one paragraph. But what do we do
with a legacy like that? A year later, journalist Joel
Salvin published Drums and Demons, a book that pulled the
camera back. It traced the unbroken line from the brilliant
right hand to the broken circuitry behind his eyes, arguing
(17:23):
for a more honest memory, one that doesn't excuse but understands,
one that remembers the warning signs the industry missed and
the person inside the headlines it also categorized. It also
cataloged the astonishing range of records he powered, Beach Boys
and Bongo Rock, Traffic and Carly Simon Delaney and Bonnie
(17:44):
Derek and the Dominoes, The spine of an era measured
in downbeats. The coda to the most famous song he
touched is still disputed. In the margins, readA Coolidge's long
standing claim, Bobby Whitlock's corroboration, and the paperwork that never changed.
History is rarely unanimous. But the piano still rises, and
(18:05):
the drums still carry it, and the listeners who know
nothing of credit or courtroom still feel the lift in
the chest. There's a caution in all this, too, about
what we miss when we mistake output for wellness, About
how a mind can be both wondrous and unwell, About
what happens when the people we cheer are rewarded for
(18:28):
never stopping, even when stopping might save them. You're in
a car. The sun is low, The piano figure swells,
and for a moment it feels like forgiveness, like the
air itself got lighter. The snare holds the center with
impossible calm. Then the song ends, the radio slips in
(18:49):
the commercial, the spell breaks. You drive on the melody
trails like a contrail. You can't quite see anymore. Somewhere
in the long memory of tape and lacquer, a drummer
is still counting everyone in history, wrote Jim Gordon as
a footnote a line in the credits, A shadow behind
the stars a tragic headline. But what if it had
(19:12):
been different? What if the voices had been recognized for
what they were, not mistaken for eccentricity or rock and
roll excess. What if someone had pulled him out of
the studio long enough to truly listen, to diagnose, to treat.
Would we know his name today, not in the margins
of album jackets, not as a whispered cautionary tale, but
(19:35):
carved alongside the grates. Would Jim Gordon be as instantly
recognizable as Bottom or Moon or Baker. Would the man
who gave us rhythms we still hum have finally stepped
out from behind the symbols into his own light. Or
would he have simply kept doing what he did best,
staying invisible, steady, essential, while shaping the very soundtrack of
(19:56):
our lives? We will never know. All we can do
is hear the records he left behind, feel the pulse
of his work echoing through the decades of music, and
remember that brilliance and brokenness can live inside the same person.
And maybe, just maybe, his story reminds us that behind
(20:16):
every perfect beat, there is a fragile heart, a fragile mind,
waiting for someone to notice before it breaks. I hope
you enjoyed Script eight, The Drummer in the Hallway, the
story of Jim Gordon. This has been Johnny's Dead Air podcast.
I'm Johnny Hartwell, thank you so much for listening.
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