 Hello and welcome to the Drum History podcast. I'm your host Bart Van Der Zee and today we are joined by the very acclaimed author, Mr. Joel Selvin. Joel, welcome to the podcast. Good to be here, Bart. Yes. So I am super excited. You've been on my calendar for a year. I believe I emailed you like a year ago because someone recommended, you know, hey, there's a Jim Gordon book coming out and I found you and then you said, talk to me in a year. So you've been the farthest out calendar invite kind of thing on my phone calendar for a while. Today we're talking about drums and demons, the tragic journey of Jim Gordon, which is a very sad story. It's famous to many, many drummers, but I've been asking around to folks who aren't drummers and they go, who's Jim Gordon? So it's interesting how, you know, it's a wild story that I think we can help get it out there even more. And that's great. Your book is out today, the day that podcast is coming out, February 27th. It's available to purchase. The story is incredible drummer, prolific career, fast forward, tragic ending where he ended up murdering his mother in a schizophrenic kind of frenzy. I just want to let people know that's what we're getting at so you don't get to the end and go, whoa. So backing up, Joel, how did his career start? Well, the first thing I want to tell you about is that schizophrenia is unbelievably common. It occurs in one in 100 in the general population. By comparison, multiple sclerosis is one in 10,000. So all those people you see out on the streets sleeping under freeways, they're hearing voices. They're schizophrenics. And it's a tragedy of extraordinary dimensions. They do not live in the same reality that you and I do. And through no fault of their own, through chemicals in their brain, they're out of step with what you and I call normal life. Jim had a golden life. He was raised in San Fernando Valley in the 50s and found drums early in life and fell all the way down that rabbit hole. By the time he was in high school, he was being trained at UCLA. He played in various symphony orchestras and marching bands. And by the time he completed high school, well, the next day, he went on the road with the Everly Brothers. So 17 years old, he's starting at the top. He's gravitated to session work. And in Los Angeles in the early 60s, session work was something that was just exploding. And Jim had this extraordinary ability, this natural, this intuitive grasp of dividing time that everybody who heard him play was just shocked and amazed. He rewrote the book of drums. The big session drummers in Los Angeles at the time were Earl Palmer and Hal Blaine. And they just stepped aside and Jim went in shoulder to shoulder. Jim's playing on Good Vibrations by the Beach Boys. He's playing on Beat Goes On by Sonny and Cher. He's playing on Nancy Sinatra records. Glenn Campbell records. There's a brilliant drum part on Wichita linemen. And he attained the height of success in session work. Six days a week, three sessions a day, $100, $200,000 a year. He's 20 years old. Wow. And after five years of that, he grew tired of rooms with no windows. Plus in 1969, the scene had shifted from hit records to the stage. 1969, Led Zeppelin was touring that fall. They did a two and a half hour show with a half hour drum solo. Who were taking Tommy around the country? The Rolling Stones were back on the boards. And that's when Jim got into the Delaney and Bonnie band. Went from that to Joe Cocker and Mad Dogs and Enishman, and straight from that to London where he was a founding member of Derrick and the Dominoes. And of course he's the half author of Gleila, which is the single classic rock anthem of all time. He left London after a couple of years there. I mean, Derrick and the Dominoes, their first job was playing on the George Harrison solo sessions, which at that point was the absolute height of the rock culture. He was in there doing the first solo sessions for former Beatles. And Ringo started out doing those sessions, but he had to go to Nashville for a couple of weeks when he came back. Jim was behind the kit and they gave him a tambourine. Okay. Ringo didn't mind. Back in Los Angeles, he went back to the session work right away. He's doing hit records right off. Helen Reddy, I am woman. Gordon Lightfoot, sundown. Ricky, don't lose that number. Steely Dan, his masterpiece. You're so vain, Carly Simon. And he worked as much as you could work. About 1975, he started really being interfered with by the mental illness. By 1978, he was done. He comes to an end, a sudden end. He goes to Las Vegas. He's going to play a two week engagement with Paul Anka. He sets up for the rehearsal. He strikes his drum once. And the voices in his head tell him he's going to be dead if he strikes it a second time. He looks up to the musical director, says, I have psychological problems. I can't play this gig. Wow. And he went home and he really didn't play anymore. You know, a little bit here, this band, a little bit there, that band. No more big sessions. No more double scale dates. No, you know, it was really hard for him just to get out of his house. Was he earlier on, was this documented at all that he was having these kind of issues? I guess I don't know much about schizophrenia if you're born with it, or if it kind of creeps up. Neither do the doctors, Bart. They don't know what causes it. They don't know why it goes into remission when it does. They don't understand much about it at all. Yeah. And also, in Jim's case, the psychiatrist he saw and he saw many, he checked into psychiatric hospitals many times, like 15 times in four years. They didn't understand the dimensions of his illness because he was so successful. He was so high functioning. They just assumed that he was depressive, or maybe there was a mood disorder, but they didn't see. And then we also got to cut them some slack because Jim was lying to them. He wasn't telling them about the voices and the so-called command hallucinations. And what command hallucinations are is the voices tell you to do something. And if you don't do it, they give you the mother of all headaches. The psychiatrists call it the electric hat band. Jim called it white, hot, cruelty pain. It was sort of headache that would make you crawl along the floor and wet your pants. Oh my God. So if the voices don't want you to eat, you put your fork down. You leave the restaurant. Wow. If the voices don't want you to play drums, you don't play drums. And the voices hated drums and hated him eating. And now, you know, I'm talking about this like they are some entity outside of Jim's mind, but they aren't. Yeah. And that frustrated Jim, too, that he felt he was an intelligent person, a capable person, and he couldn't manage this, he couldn't surmount it. It was something that was, he was ashamed of. So he didn't reveal himself to people. There would be these unexplained episodes, little explosions, or a violent episode outbreaks even. But they weren't clear what they were about to even Jim. But nowadays he would be given medicine to probably... They gave him medicine then. They gave him primitive, anti-psychotic medicine, heavy duty tranquilizers. The only thing that worked for Jim was illegal drugs. Alcohol worked and cocaine worked. Cocaine. I'm talking to psychiatrists. Why would cocaine work on somebody whose head's filled with voices? Oh, it regulates the dopamine levels. Okay. And alcohol had a very deafening effect. It deafened the voices. Gotcha. And he had this enormous capacity to consume any kind of medicine. One of his psychiatrists told me that he had left a prescription at the hospital for Jim. He wanted him to take 45 milligrams of Haldol, which is this, a really strong anti-psychotic, in three doses a day, 15, 15, and 15. And he shows up a couple of days later, looks at the chart, and they've been giving him three doses of 45 a day, 45, 45, 45. The shrink heads up to see Jim, figuring this guy's going to be a zombie. He didn't experience even any therapeutic effects. Okay. So he's wired a little bit differently, but... Well, that's why he drums like he does. You read my mind. I was going to say, maybe that's what makes him so special the other way, which... The electrochemical setup in his brain obviously gifted him with this incredible intuitive ability to divide time. Yeah. You know, I've heard other drummers trying to scribe the Jim Gordon style to me. You know, you retired the second beat, and then it puts a roll in the measure, and you know, you can do it, right? No, you can't. Do you have to have such finely tuned intuition in order to play beyond notation like that? Right? It's his style. We're not talking any semi-quavers. We're talking beyond that. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Which, all right, we're like, I mean, we just went, that was an unbelievable way to summarize it, but I just want to kind of... People got this from what you said, but the amount of sessions and songs, and you can't be in the car listening to the radio for more than 10 minutes if you have classic rock or whatever a rock station on without hearing a Jim Gordon song. I mean, he is a part of music history more than people very fairly give credit to, but he was a protege of Hal Blaine as what I've read. I mean, he was in the wrecking crew, correct? Well, first of all, that's a term I kind of deplore. It comes up in the 80s. Hal Blaine sort of popularized it. The guys in the recording sessions that worked those sessions back in Los Angeles in the 60s, they didn't know they were the wrecking crew. I know. And then Carol Kay Kay or whatever. She's serious about it, but so was Steve Douglas, who was a very close friend of mine. Steve thought it was really trivializing. And who's the wrecking crew? 50, 60 people. Yeah. But what you're saying was true that that Hal Blaine and Earl Palmer were the first called drummers. Jim shows up on the scene in 1964 and he vaults right into them along their, you know, first call. Yeah. Protege, yeah, Hal tossed him all the work. Hal introduced him to the Beach Boys. Hal and Jim share the composite master track to Good Vibrations, although that's all Jim on Heroes and Villains. And you know about God only knows, right? Orange juice bottles. Oh, really? Yeah. He's fooling around with orange juice bottles on the session. Somebody else has got the trap set. He's doing additional percussion. And Brian catches on to it and goes, Hey, yeah. So he takes a razor blade and he cuts off the bottom of four orange juice bottles and he pitches them. So they're four different notes. And he goes right along the drum part going clop, clop, clop, clop, clop, clop, clop. Next time you hear God only knows, you're going to hear those. Yeah. Now I will, I will have to hear it. And you said they're right in the mix. They're part of the whole thing. That's awesome. And you sent me some great photos of it looks like Brian Wilson kind of shirtless in the studio and then Jim Gordon wearing a fire hat. That's the fire sessions from the smile album. Yeah, it looks like he fit right in and could kind of hang because he was younger than those other guys. So he was kind of getting into that rock generation a little bit more than maybe Earl Palmer and Hal Blaine who are a little bit earlier. So he was a young guy, but he was rock and roll. You know, go into that in the book about how all these other drummers were under the influence of Gene Krupa. And that was their world was Gene Krupa. And Jim, he was rock and roll, baby. He was 11 years old when Heartbreak Hotel hit the radio. So that's, he's that other side of that generation. And that's what he brought to the Los Angeles recording sessions was he brought this rock and roll sensibility. Everybody just loved Jim. Yeah, which that's huge. I mean, that is an enormous first band to get into. But all right, so he's playing on all these huge songs. He's getting the money. What was his lifestyle like? I mean, did he have a big house? Did he have fast cars or was he just work all the time? You know, was he with you? He was high school sweetheart, who was a dancer on Dick Clark's Where the Action Is. Gorgeous blonde gal. They loved cars. They bought cars like crazy. They had a beautiful Spanish style two bedroom house in the valley, not far from where his parents live. And yeah, when you work three sessions a day, six days a week, you don't have too much time for a lifestyle. And his wife was on a TV show five days a week. So they were busy young show business couple. Yeah, absolutely. Maybe that working, working, working, working, not taking a break obviously might have exacerbated the, you know, not letting his brain calm down. But you know what I think about that part, is I think the only place in the world where Jim was safe was with drumsticks in his hand. And I think that the rhythmic entrainment and the report of the drum, because as you know, when you hit a drum, you feel it in every cell in your body. So I'm playing trumpet. I believe those two things and the power of the almighty groove just lifted him up above the voices. And he didn't hear the voices and he didn't have his disease and he was free. And that's why the drumming was the sanctuary to him. Everybody else is just a drummer, because Jim drums were life. Wow, that's very powerful. I mean truly for it to be freeing him from quote unquote kind of demons in his head. That is wild. All right. So he burns out. Let's get back on that timeline there of kind of leading up to what happened. So how old was he when he stopped? Like when he was like, I'm not doing this anymore. I can't play the sessions anymore. If you had to put a rough age to it. 45 and stopped in 78. So what's that? That's 33. Man, I'm 33. That's incredible too. Well, he had a 15 year career. That's it. 15 years. And you know, played on 100 great records. Yeah. Iconic. And all those guys are, I mean, Eric Clapton, I mean, the B, you know, George Harrison's passed away. But really looking at your list on this nice sheet you sent me though, like John Lennon, George Harrison, Eric Clapton, Tom Petty, Frank Zappa, Steeley Dan, Ringo Starr, Harry Nielsen, Joe Cocker and many more. I mean, the list is, it's, I don't want to say it's the right place at the right time, but he pretty much was the guy on every iconic, playing with every iconic rock star that we know today. So here's the thing, Bart, is that his job in the studio was to make hit records, right? Yeah. And that was a science that they pursued. So that after a while, after, you know, a couple of thousand sessions, they're no longer chasing hit records, they're making hit records. And when Jim goes into the studio, he's a part of that hit making machine. And I could give you example of example of pieces where his drum part sealed the deal. I mean, you're so vain. He was the third drummer to cut that track. Midnight at the Oasis. Who would have thought of that Samba groove for that record? Jim did. Yeah. One of my favorites of his is My Maria by BW Stevenson. He just embeds the drum part so far into the composition, into the fabric of the composition. You can't imagine somebody else playing it. And if somebody else had tackled it, who was just like a, you know, a backbeat timekeeper kind of guy, it would have been just an ordinary piece. I'm not sure it would have been a top 10 hit. So that's the surgical skill that that guy developed. And when he got out into the rock band world, where you're no longer playing under a microscope, but you're playing to the grandstands, he opened up his style. And you can hear him on live albums by traffic, Delaney and Bonnie, Joe Cocker and Derek and the Dominoes. And he's ferocious. Good. I mean, that's great that he, I feel like the way you describe it of getting out of the walls of the studio and getting on the stage, that had to be fun. I mean, was he living the rock and roll lifestyle on the road? I mean, was he partying pretty hard and kind of, I mean, was he living the life back then? He was kind of a square guy that grew up in very conservative. And as the whole drug culture started to leak into it, he sampled it. But I think it was the Mad Dog's Englishman tour where he dived in drinking, psychedelics, everything. And that's also where he had his first real psychotic break when he punched out his girlfriend, Rita Coolidge. Wow. Not good. Clearly. But it's hard to be in your own mind. I'm sure that must have been tough to just not really understand. He did understand, though. He did try and get himself checked out and just not be able to solve. It took him a long time to understand that the voices were something that he made up. Long, long time. Yeah, you can't even imagine that. That was when he was in residential treatment at UCLA when he finally told his psychiatrist that he realized that he was generating the voices. Not that that made much difference, you understand. Yeah, they're still there. And they're still getting the headaches. Geez, Louise. Yeah, that's terrible. So, all right, but we have about 10 years from ish from this point to when the tragedy kind of happened. So, what happened in that period there when he was done playing off the road? I remember reading it in your book where it's, you know, he's playing in kind of bar bands. And it's how your book starts. And it's not really very pretty to see that where what the guy came from. So, how did that go? That decade? It was playing Blue Mondays out in Santa Monica at some Irish bar for about 40 people. Three sets a night, 50 bucks. The other guys in the band were all great musicians, but they hadn't had any success. They would go on eventually as a success. The bass player would go on to Chris Isaacs' band and Pete Anderson, the guitar player, would produce Dwight Yokum's records. But at that point, they were just, you know, scuffling. And they couldn't believe that Jim Gordon stumbled into their club one night and was looking for a band to join. He'd been in a couple of bands and it was the thing in the MTV world, you know, bands. So, he thought that might be a way back into music. It really didn't work out. One of the Schizophrenics have an impossible time with human relations. Impossible. So, being in a band just strained all that part of his life of having to keep that mask on, that genial, compliant, collaborative mask, while inside his interior life is roiling and turbulent. And you mean band, meaning like, instead of being a session player, I'm hired for a tour. Right. You're a group of five people or so who played together every night. Right. We're the band, yes, understood. There are a couple of different groups you put together. He didn't put them together. Other people put them together and included him, who were session musicians who would like not get in the kind of work they were before the MTV thought maybe like directing themselves in this way. But they never got past the garage band style. The Monday nights at the Santa Monica Irish Bar were like about as public as he got. Yeah, I imagine there wasn't much motivation or if you're having that much difficulty holding it together with four guys in a room because of what's going on inside of you, it's hard to kind of push and drive and have the, you know, and really try to make it happen. So he does that for a while and then take us through the event, you know, if you want to talk about that. Well, Chief among the voices in his head was the voice of his mother. And his mother was a nurse. There was nothing wrong with OSA. Maybe she was a little controlling, but she had a difficult child to deal with, adult child and a grandchild that she was very close to. But she didn't really exist as a real person in Jim's head. Like Jim would go for dinner at his mother's house and she would wonder out loud why he didn't want to eat his dinner. Inside Jim's head, her voice was telling him, don't eat that. Don't eat that. It'll make you sick. Wow. And she didn't understand this. And Jim thought that, oh, that was just her little game trying to get him to eat. He knows she doesn't want him to eat. And OSA's husband went into, Jim's dad, went into Alcoholics Anonymous in 1958. So they were extremely well versed in what the recovery community had to offer in the mid-70s. And OSA was convinced that Jim's problems were drugs and alcohol. She didn't understand that there was underlying mental issues. And in fact, the recovery community in 1975 had very little understanding of what we now know as dual diagnosis, where you're addicted and you have organic mental illness. And those things braid together in a very complex and confusing way. They know more about dealing with this now than they did in 75, but it's still very complicated. In 75, they didn't even have the phrase. So doctors were very confused about what the role drugs and alcohol played in his condition and none of them. And there were many, many, many doctors and none of them guessed schizophrenia. He had to kill his mother for that diagnosis. The whole thing built to extraordinary, horrible climates. It started with the gold records. He had a room in which he hung all his gold records. And they were very important to him. That was all that was left of his career. And the voices wanted him to throw them away. And they tortured him. So he finally took the records down off the wall, took them out to the dumpster, went back to his condo and guzzled vodka until he was drunk enough that the voices had died down. Then he went and got his gold records and hung them back up. Sometimes he would do this four or five times a night. Okay. This went on for weeks. And then the voices wanted the drums. Now that, he didn't want to do it all. So the headache was unbelievable. And finally he had to give in there too. So every night he would go out and stack the gold records by the condo, the dumpster, go get his drums out of the garage and stack them by the dumpster and then go back and drink himself to just before he was unconscious and then put everything back. That went on until the night before he killed his mother. Man, torture. You wonder, there's no answer to this, but you wonder why the voices in his head would be so, I mean, they just would make you want to be so like self, like just destroy everything that you love. I guess that's, there's no, I mean, I'm sure there's a lot of psychological reasons to that, but what misery that he had to go through? What hell? The voices, check this out, Bart. The voices coming from his head. So they know everything he's ever done. They know every thought he's ever had. They know all his weak spots and they go right there. You couldn't have a worse enemy than yourself. Yeah, true. And that's exactly what was going on with Jim was these voices were burrowing in to all his fears, all his anxieties, his deepest feelings. Before we get to the next day or the next night with his mom, did he end up fully destroying his beloved gold records and drums or did those remain? The night before he killed his mother, he brought them back in and he hung them up. Only this time, they weren't quite hanging right. They weren't so neat. They weren't, and he looked at them hanging on the wall in slight disarray and he was overcome with a great sense of despair. So he was very, very far down some emotional alleyway at that point. And when the thought started to occur to him through voices in his head that he could kill his mother, it had never occurred to him before. Suicide had, there had been several suicide attempts, but this, that was a new thought. Now he was concerned that his mother would feel the pain. So he got a hammer. He thought if he hit her with a hammer, he would knock her unconscious and then he could stab her and she wouldn't feel it. It was a brutal, brutal attack. And he smashed her with a hammer a number of times and he stabbed her a number of times right through the aorta. She was killed instantly and the last stab wound stuck in the floor. Geez. Was he aware of what he did and did it kind of snap out of it for a second? I'm sure he was aware of what he did, but you know what I mean? Did it, the weight of it hit him? So he was in a fugue state, but he was very well aware of what he was doing in the sense of consciously killing his mother. This was being very crucial in his trial because the year before they had changed the law surrounding insanity defenses in California. And pretty much in order to qualify for an insanity defense, you had to not know what you were doing when you did it. And since the cop showed up at Jim's apartment and the first thing he said to him was, I killed my mother. He knew what he was doing. Yeah. They didn't really qualify for the insanity defense. However, the judge and there was no jury was understood that this man was insane. I mean, the prosecution witnesses said he was insane and didn't have the facility for premeditation. So Jim was convicted of second degree murder. He was sentenced to 17 years. He served 38 and died in jail. Yeah. Every time parole came up, Jim would do something to undermine his parole hearing. He clearly didn't want out of jail. He wanted to stay in. Why no jury? I know there's, my wife's an attorney, but she's with the city here and I know there's reasons why they don't do juries for certain things. Why no jury for him? I think that was a very wise defense decision. The horrifying nature of the crime was just so extreme. Yeah. You kill your mother and everybody that you know looks the other way. Nobody visited Jim in jail. One person showed up at the trial. That would be J. Osmond, the drummer of the Osmond Brothers. He was just instantly forgotten. And as far as his career goes and his contribution to the music, that's totally buried. Nobody thinks about it or talks about it or anything. There's some Rolling Stone list of the best 500 rock drummers. I haven't seen it myself, but somebody that did an interview with me checked it out and they said they could find him. You're right. I mean, I don't have that memorized, but I've seen that. And really his name is kind of whitewashed from history. But what about all the payments for all these massive songs? Did that continue to roll in? Jim was the most wealthy prisoner in the California penal authority because of those royalties. Pretty much just Layla. I mean, you know, rock and roll stew by traffic. I doubt kicks down a lot of dough. But the family didn't talk to him. He hadn't seen his daughter since she was 10 years old. And she was very close to her grandmother. She was 14 and she was traumatized by this. His ex-wife wanted nothing to do with him. She was very close to her mother-in-law. Same with Mike Post, his lifelong associate and best friend. No, no. Jim cut himself off from everybody in the world when he did that. There's no blueprint for how to handle that situation. So you don't blame people for not wanting to be around him. But how was he received as a prisoner? People must have liked him. There were two attitudes about it. One which was, you know, wow, he was a rock star. And the other was what a waste. So Jim, from what I know from talking to people who serve time with Jim was not super present on the yard. He was kind of reclusive, stayed to himself, didn't play music in any organized fashion, would occasionally sit in with the prison ban, but really avoided that. And this is in keeping with how schizophrenics behave as they get older. They become more and more withdrawn and more and more reclusive. God, yeah. Well, it's a sad story. It's obviously a very sad story. I mean, the guy, it's not something where you hear about some people and you go, man, that is an evil person. I mean, Jim seems like he was tortured the entire time. And you feel bad for him, but then you're torn too to be like, well, the guy killed his mom. So that really sort of pulls people in both directions. So Zappa said that he doesn't condone murder. But if this has to do with chemicals in the brain, it could happen to anyone. Yeah. Jim never really got much help. There's no shortage of irony about Bart, the rock scene of the seventies, incredibly accommodating, hospitable to drug addicts, alcoholics, sex deviants, but somebody who was actually mentally ill. I don't know what to do with that. He never got any of the compassion that he deserved. But on the other hand, all the world knew was that he killed his mother. That just came out of the blue. They don't know about the 15 hospital admissions behind that. They don't know about the years of torture, of all the incredible efforts that Jim went through to try and rid himself of these voices and get back to the golden life that he was scheduled to lead. None of that made the papers or the Rolling Stone or anything. What came out is just that, wow, this guy had been disappeared off the scene and then suddenly the voices made him kill his mother. That's very lurid and tawdry and great material for a headline. But it's not the whole story and it's not the picture of Jim's life. No, it's not indeed. And I was going to ask, I mean, this is seven years before I was born that this happened. Was this headlines all over? Was this major news, this mega rock star? Just did they latch onto it and turn it into it? It wasn't O.J. Simpson by any means. But the guy that played on Eric Clapton's records kills his mother. He gets his name in the newspaper. Yeah, that's fair to say. Yeah. Boy, okay, but he passed away in 2023. So very recently, I mean, were you already working on this book in some capacity or did you start? I mean, how long have you, how long did this take to put together? I've been working on the book for about four years. It came out of the pandemic. And I had completed the manuscript and submitted to the publishing house, took a vacation, went to Hawaii. And the first morning that I was in Hawaii, I got a call from Mike Post. Mike was Jim's high school buddy. They were in their first band together. He was his daughter's godfather. And when I first started to research the book, I got a hold of Mike Post to see if there would be any possibility of getting the family to cooperate with me. And he was very respectful, but absolutely not. No question about it. This was a trauma to these people. They wanted nothing to do with it and wished me well, but that was it. So Mike's on the phone telling me the Jim has died and the family wants to get out in front of it and they want to send out a release, but they don't know how. And they wondered if I could do it. So no problem. We sent out the press release announcing Jim's death. And at that point, then Mike and Jim's wife and daughter Amy became involved in the project. We conducted interviews, shared photographs. And now they've read the book and they've extremely moved by it. Mike Post said that it caused him to understand that he couldn't have helped Jim and that he had felt guilty all this time because he hadn't helped Jim enough. And now he realized that wasn't possible. The daughter told me that the book explained so much to her that she needed to understand and they're grateful. The word for that part is validation. Those people read this book and I was aware they were out there when I was writing it, but I wrote the book that I wanted to write and told the story the way I wanted to tell it and have them be able to embrace that work given all they've been through, validation. I think you handled it in a very, it's factual, it's positive. You're like, this guy didn't get a fair shake. He was mentally, it was an imbalance in his brain. I mean, it wasn't his fault. You're not going for the salacious kind of like, you know, you don't have some horrible picture on the cover of the book that's like, you know, pointing to what happened. I think you handle it very respectfully. It's incredible to read and it's just, it's, I don't know, man, it makes you feel a lot of weird, you feel bad for him. You can't believe that it happened. You love the rock and roll history. It's just, it's fun to read, but I want to ask you a question about, and this is just, maybe it's, it's, you see things on TV or about true stories, but you wonder like, what you said about Jim and his apartment, taking things off the wall and taking things out to the, to the garbage and bringing it back in. If he's alone, schizophrenic, you know, voices in his head, how do you know these details to put them in the book? And then at what level do you kind of fill in with your own? Because you're an incredible author. I didn't fill in much at all. But I did happen into a pile of research that a couple of gals compiled in 1988. So five years after the crime, they got Jim to agree to cooperate with a book. And they had a lot of interviews with Jim in jail. They had access to his diaries, his medical records. They didn't really know what they were, were dealing with. Like, you know, I said, well, you had his diaries and oh yeah, they were useless. It was just his studio dates. Oh yeah, that's useless, right? That's, that's a book right there. So they, they were, they were not professional journalists. And they never completed the, the book and split up back in the early nineties. And I'd met them at that point and, and tried to convince them at that point to turn over their research to me. One of them just wouldn't let go. It was too personal. So like 30 years later, some book editor at Harper Collins says, you know what you should do for your next book, Joel? You should do something about rock and roll and crime. I go, oh, Jim Gordon, I circle back and was able to acquire that research at this point. So yes, invaluable access to, you know, Jim's inner thoughts and, and, and his activities and, and yeah, all that stuff about weeding his back garden. As you said, with those two women where you can have all that information, but to boil it down and make it into something that's readable and that's a story is truly a skill. I mean, you've written a ton of books. So you know how to do this as a, as a great rock and roll author, but really that that's the, that's what gets it into, you know, people's hands to actually want to read it is, is it a good story? Good or bad, tragic. And I think you did again, you did a great job. Thank you so much, Bart. I really appreciate that. The story, I just needed to stay out of the way of the story and, and, and get it on the page without prejudice. And that's what I wanted to do. It was a, there were points where it was very difficult to thread that needle and you just, you use your most sense, your best sensibilities, but yeah. And you earlier, you said it was fun to read. I gotta tell you, I would have to go revise that book. And when I got to the second half, my stomach would turn sour. Yeah. I couldn't work on the book. Oh, you know, the usual working days, eight, 10, 12 hours, I would have to go upstairs after a couple hours, just feel terrible. It's wrenching, wrenching material. There's so much pain on every page. And I came to really feel for Jim. I saw him do his troubled heart and I came to really feel for this guy like I was going to give him the compassion as a author that he's been deserving all this time and never got. Yeah. I don't know how you or anyone would feel about it, but it almost just seems like that kind of story that would become nowadays like a Netflix show or something, these kind of crime stories. At first I thought it was an impossible story for any kind of cinematic treatment because it's just, it's got such a horrible denouement. As I looked over the book and came to be more familiar with how the story laid out, I began to see it is cinematic. It is incredibly cinematic. And Jim is a very unconventional hero, but he is a hero. He is somebody who went to battle against a severe enemy, mental illness, and he battled really hard. And in the end, he lost. But that is what trauma is about. The controversy, the adversity of conflict and the question of whether you're going to overcome it or not. You know, in literature, he would have overcome it in real life. He didn't. Yeah. Well, I don't think I asked this before, but you yourself are not a drummer, I would imagine, correct? Or are you? I am not. Yeah. I mean, you're drunk. Yes. Yeah, but this is a story beyond drummers. I mean, there's some episodes I do with a Civil War historian and we talk about Civil War drums because they know that world, but this is so beyond that that it got your attention. Drums are an important part of the whole thing. Like I said, I really feel like Jim's disease was defeated by the drums, that his incredible supernatural ability to the drums were a product of his electrochemical setup in his brain. And then there's the whole spiritual connection of the ancient history of drums. I think I said in the book that to strike a drum is to shake hands with the ancestors. Yeah. Yeah. And the bass drum is the mother drum and the heartbeat. And I mean, I think we're all biased if you're most people listening to this are drummers, but there's something very, like you said, it's ancient. And I think they're also used to very cool instruments. It's physical. Keep people dancing to keep soldiers marching. It's used to hypnotize people. And the shaman, the shaman knows the drum as a beacon to guide him home from his out of body experiences. Okay. Wow. That's pretty cool. I've never heard that one. I've heard plenty of other uses like firemen hitting drums to let people know and things like that. But wow, we all love the drums. You're on the drum history podcast here. So we all love it. So let's talk about some of your other books here. I have not read your other books. I've heard your name through the research and things, but like you picked the right topics to talk about from what I can see. And I'm excited to read some of your other books, Altamont, Sly and the Family Stone. You have a ton of books. So tell us more about your other works. Well, I spent 36 years as the pop music critic at the San Francisco Chronicle. And I wrote a few books during the time I was at the paper, but in 09, you may have heard about the Daily Newspaper Business. I was one of 120 editorial employees to leave their jobs that year at the Chronicle. And yeah, I've published 12 books I've sent. So it's about one a year. The first thing I did was call my old pal, Sammy Hagar, who had been bugging on me about writing a book and said, do you want to do that book now? And we cut a deal in about three minutes. And that thing was a number one New York Times bestseller. Unbelievable. So right out of the box, I felt like there was there was some there there. And you mentioned here comes the night. That's the biography of a songwriter named Bert Burns that very few people know. And after that book came out, he was inducted in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. A documentary was made about and Rob Reiner has just finished a script based on my book. He's going to shoot the Spinal Tap sequel sometime this year, I think next month. And then he's going to shoot the Bert Burns book based on my movie. Unbelievable, man. I mean, that's again, you're picking cool topics, which, you know, it's obvious for stories. Yeah, good stories. And they're not all always there. You know, people think like, oh, you've done so much. You should write a book about it. You know, anecdotes don't make a book. A story makes a book. And you find a story, then you work on telling it. Altamont was just an obvious story. I don't know why some better writer didn't get to it before I did. But there I was just waiting around for me. And it's a story. Everything happens within six weeks. It's got a beginning, a middle and an end. And the Jim Gordon biography is so much more than a biography, right? It's this kind of epic journey through this incredible adversity and this tragic ending. Yeah. I would say the most, I can't think of a more tragic ending. Maybe for a musician, there's been some pretty tragic ones. But in the drum community, it is the tragic story. I mean, I think that's fair to say. I think, you know, I'm trying to think of other drummers. Gene Krupa being busted in 1943 for, you know, Smoke and Weed. Or having Sal Minio play him in a movie. Oh my God. I know. There's a full episode with Brooks Tagler about that movie. Which was fun, you know, and then people, we did a show on that movie and a lot of people came out and said, Hey, you know what? That got me started playing the drums. So for people who loved it, I said, you know, whatever, good for you. That's what it's all about. But all right, Joel, this is awesome, man. But I'm going to preemptively ask, because it's going to be a comment on YouTube, where are his drums? Where are his There are the Camcos, yes, yes. Which Camcos historic brand? Yeah. Two sets of Camcos, one of them with the walnut shell. Those were his kits, you know, the four piece kit. And he sometimes put a fifth drum in sort of like a Timbali that's on its own stand. It wasn't really part of the kit. But so they're sold. And they've been sold in pieces. At some point, during his incarceration, Jim empowered a former prisoner who had been released to deal with some of his possessions. And that guy put the drums up for sale on eBay. So you can go out there in your drum bulletin boards looking and there's a lot of discussion and a lot of photographs, this Jim Camcos and there's snare drums that came from this, you know, that are for sale that came from the kit. And you know, who knows what happened to them, right? And if those are real pieces of the of the true set or not. But you know, they don't exist anymore. They're out there in the world. And then they're not Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. That's the sad thing that kind of happens if things get split up. And then they never really kind of fully come back together. Just sold how Blaine's Pearl Kit that he cut all those Spectre records on. Sure. Geez. And then it's out there and it ends up in some millionaires. It's probably Ursa from Indianapolis, you know, but it's just ridiculous that that set isn't in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame or some museum somewhere. I mean, yeah, no, it's in a football owning, you know, millionaire, billionaire's office or something like that. Beautiful drums. That's so sad. There was, I did an episode which you would probably get a kick out of about a recent Gene Krupa, one of his iconic, his drums from the 40s ended up in a basement somewhere, sitting kind of in a pool of water and the auctions were kind of spinning around on the forums and the owner, who's a great guy, actually ended up getting them for about 3,500 bucks. So pretty wild. I had no detailed knowledge of Krupa's role in creating the modern drum set. Oh, yeah. That was fascinating to me. And so it's not enough that the guy showed us how to play it. He designed the kit to play it on. Fascinating. Yes. And how to act and kind of be a gentleman and be a movie star. And he's got, because, you know, people compare him to Buddy, which you kind of add the attitude. But Gene was always kind of the dapper, the dapper dude, who everyone, everyone looks up to and liked. But anyway, that's another story. The Gene Krupa protege that never gets the credit that he deserves is Gary Chester. Oh, yeah, I know Gary Chester. I know the name. I'm sure I've seen many years. Every Bacharach record, every Libran Stolar record, most of the Bert Burns records, just all through New York from like 1960 to 1969, Gary Chester was on those sessions. Interesting. Yep. The cool thing is, as I've done this show, I never, I went into this show five years ago. I mean, I've played the drums my whole life, but I went into this to learn more with people like yourself. And I'm still five, I'm five years in. I'm 230 episodes deep. And I love Gene Krupa. And I love to keep learning things like that. It's, there's still so much more to learn. Do a little research on Gary Chester. You'll be amazed. I will. Yes. Some of his famous tricks was he had a tambourine on his hi-hat. Oh yeah. And which later Bonham used in some capacity. Oh, no. There's the Gary Chester thing. Tambourine on the hi-hat. As T-Bone Burnett says, I don't like hi-hats. I don't want that rigid distinction of time on my records. And the other thing was he used to put, you know, remember sand ashtrays? Ashtrays with little bags of sand underneath them? Yeah, I think so. You throw that on his snare drum. Oh, wow. Which now there's all kinds of little... Yes, yes, yes. Now that's a whole industry of little tiny things to put on your snare. But all right, Joel. Well, I appreciate you coming on here and sharing your story, man. Everyone can check out Joel's website, Joel Selvin, s-e-l-v-i-n dot com smart ass. The music journalism of Joel Selvin is the headline. I think you're a nice guy. I don't think you're a smart ass to me at least, which I, which I appreciate. Well, we're talking about Jim. Why don't you tell people where they can get the book now that it's out again? If you're interested in buying the book, you should definitely buy it at your local independent bookseller. It is, of course, available at all online booksellers such as Barnes and Nobles and the other guys. But, you know, help your bookstore. Yeah, I hear you loud and clear. Yeah, support the small ones. All right, Joel. Well, thank you very much, my friend. It's been a pleasure. I want to also thank Ben Merlis for helping and coordinating us. He and I have talked a lot and he's listened to the show before and has heard it before. Yes, so I appreciate that to Ben. So Joel, thank you for being here. My pleasure and good luck with the progeny.