"New Coat of Paint", which opens Tom Waits's "The Heart of Saturday Night" (1974), begins with a brilliant lick by drummer Jim Gordon and settles into a lovely shuffle. Gordon (1945-2023) played on many brilliant recordings in the 1960s and 1970s and even got a co-writing credit for the piano coda to Eric Clapton's "Layla" in 1970. Years ago, I learned he was serving a life sentence for murder, but when I recently found out he played drums on "New Coat of Paint", I looked further and also learned that he suffered from undiagnosed schizophrenia when he murdered his mother in 1983, and that he died in prison this past March. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 5 December 2023)
Tuesday, December 05, 2023
Jim Gordon, the drummer on Tom Waits’s “The Heart of Saturday Night” (1974)
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2 comments:
Thank you for mentioning Jim's brilliant work on this album. Joel Selvin has a new book out about Gordon, DRUMS & DEMONS. Jim was deeply ashamed of his mental illness. He considered himself an intelligent person who should have been able to deal with his mental issues. What no one really knew was just how hard Jim fought against his illness. He had 15 voluntary hospitalizations in a four year period, met with many psychiatrists and therapists, was prescribed countless rounds of antipsychotics, anxiolytics, and antidepressants, went to AA meetings, group therapy, and had inpatient treatment. Nothing worked, as his illness was so profound.
Schizophrenia never occurred to his psychiatrists as Jim was so high functioning in a demanding profession. They thought he was suffering from severe depression or atypical bipolar disorder. It took him years to admit to a psychiatrist that he heard voices. He desperately wanted to build a relationship with his daughter, his family, and those he cared about. He wanted to be able to make connections with others, but his mental illness made it impossible. After his first hospitalization of several months, Jim was in despair that he had found no relief or benefit from treatment and went home and made first of many attempts to take his own life.
The voices (primarily of his mother, Osa)told him to not eat, not sleep, to not play the drums. They told him to throw away his gold records and his drums. Jim would carry his gold records to the dumpster, then go back to his apartment and guzzle alcohol until the voices were muted enough for him to retrieve them from the dumpster and put them back on the wall. Then the alcohol would wear off and he would repeat the same thing over and over, for dozens of times a day, for weeks at a time. The same with his drums.
They told him to manicure his yard one blade of grass at a time, which he did for weeks. If he did not obey the voices, he would be subjected to pain so violent that it would throw him to the ground in agony and he would wet himself. When work dried up for Jim due to his declining mental state, he lived in a world of isolation, alone in his house, where he could not tell what was real or what was a delusion of his mind. Then the voices told him to do much worse. To make it even more heartbreaking, Jim had told his psychiatrist years before that Osa was his only friend in the world. She loved Jim, but thought his problems stemmed from drugs and alcohol, and that if he could get control of those issues, he would be alright.
The voices told Jim the only way to find peace would be to silence his mother's voice. His world was a hellish landscape of delusion and he desperately wanted to escape from the torment that overwhelmed his life. He committed a violent act that traumatized his family, friends, and everyone that knew him. After it occurred, everyone in Jim's life turned their backs to him. They were traumatized and with good reason. It had come out of nowhere, but no one knew the extent of Jim's illness or just how hard he had fought to gain control of his life. A heartbreaking story.
Selvin hopes his book with help bring Jim some of the empathy and compassion he didn't receive while he was alive and separate his musical legacy from the violent act that destroyed everything in his life.
Jim's daughter Amy, who had not had any contact with Gordon since his crime, read Selvin's book and told him: "I wish to remember him as the father who loved me and fought as hard as he could so that I might feel this above all the rest."
Jonathan
Thank you so much for sharing this, Jonathan. I remember reading Joel Selvin in the San Francisco Chronicle in the 1980s, when I lived in Palo Alto.
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